Market forecasts- how I would get them wrong – 2

Assumptions, B2B, Marketing, Product Management, Sales

In yesterday’s post I wrote about how your plans and forecasts go wrong, if the product on which you have based your service model itself doesn’t succeed or the OEM loses focus.

Today we will look at other aspects where because we didn’t see the obstacles in advance, we couldn’t meet our forecasts. This is again from a B2B perspective where we were involved in direct sales to customers.

One big gap which generally arises when we the product managers, do forecasts, is discounting the human factor. We are so focused on the positives of our product or services that we forget that our product has to be sold by someone. I have tried giving targets and I have tried to get sales people to create their own targets and I have failed in both situations.

The key reasons I think, are because we believe that human beings will work consistently like a machine. We lose focus quite fast. If you have to ensure that your forecasts don’t fail then you need to incorporate the factors which can get your persons de-focused.

So think in terms of what all obstacles may come up that you will need to face and what will be your plan. This doesn’t mean that other things can’t go wrong. Its about figuring out what all you can think of in terms of the obstacles. Also understand that I am not looking at moves your competition will make.

As an example one project execution has not gone as per schedule….and your sales person has to hand-hold the customer. How will he make the sales calls then. What happens if half your sales force leaves together or spread across the year and you are not able to hire the right kind of sales people on time. In B2B sales where the lead times are high getting the new person fully operational is a very big challenge. Same could happen on your delivery side.

The more assumptions about your plan that you can call out in advance, the better you can work your forecasts.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to handle – the B2B sales person’s dilemma – 3

B2B, education, education, Marketing, Sales

This is the last part of the series of posts on this topic. We started with how to identify the various stake holders and then figuring out the players who are in competition. I shared possible conversations which you can mould to your sales situation. You can read some very good books on B2B sales like The Challenger Sale, or Strategic Selling by Miller, Hiemann etc. which you can use to direct your effort better.

While these are tactics, I shared, on how to become a more mature and professional sales person, you will not adapt these till you resolve the root cause of why you are afraid to ask these questions inspite of the fact you know them. While I am preaching this too you, I too was in the same boat. I read a lot of books to figure out better methods for sales but I could not solve the core problem.2B

The root cause is the fact that you don’t have enough options in terms of prospects. Since you don’t know if you will have another prospect, if you lose this one, you are scared of losing this. Professional buyers can actually sense this. They deal with sellers all day long.

If they realise that you don’t have other prospects on whom you can bank for sales they will keep negotiating with you till “they can’t wring the towel anymore” and then still not give you the order.

If you are in a hyper competitive industry like IT , where the barriers to entry are non-existent, then I can’t blame you because the targets for you and your competitors are very high and there are only so many deals happening.

But within these industries, intelligent sales people figure out ways to prioritise the accounts where they see a better match. Whether it’s their personal branding or the way they understand their prospect’s pain better, these folks can outrun the competition. Most of the times, it’s about asking better questions to the prospect and challenging her thinking and be willing to walk out if there’s no match instead of wasting time.

As I have mentioned earlier – for the sales guy, time is her rarest asset. If she can invest that time well she can earn massive returns.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to handle – the B2B sales person’s dilemma – 2

B2B, Sales

In yesterday’s post I had written about how some of the dialogues you can use to identify other stake holders involved in a B2B sale. Just to reiterate – no B2B sale (until its a relatively low value item) can happen with a team of people taking a decision together. The sooner you can figure that out the lesser time you will waste on the wrong accounts.

Since a sales person’s income is based on the amount of income she can generate through incentives, if she wastes time on the accounts where the chance of making a sale are low, she will not be able to get incentives.

Now coming to the other issue of identifying the competition.

The reason I took, identifying people as the first step, is because, the more people you can pick information from, the more is the chance that you will have a clearer picture of both the challenges in the account as well as the competition.

Once you have mapped the people the most simple way to find out competition is to ask ” your compliance process may not allow you to only look at my solution -what other options are you considering”. By asking a question in this fashion the prospect has little room to wriggle out. If they say they don’t have to bother about compliances, you have a red flag – any public listed or venture capital / private equity backed company will have to have strong compliances in place. So they will have to tell you if they have already identified the competition or they are still looking for someone, but you will be able to get info. Now based on your experience you can position your relative strengths.

Its also important to know if they are considering other ways to solve the problem – consider Porter’s competing forces framework – you could buy printers to take printouts or you could take a service without spending capital in buying printers and get the same printouts. Only the method of procuring changes from one time to ongoing, the outcome is the same for the customer, but if you are selling printers then you lose this order.

The last item which I would definitely advice all sales people is to not be a “know it all”. Be hungry to pick up inputs from all your prospects. They can train you more than, all you internal trainings , on what the competition is offering in the market. Being willing to listen is a very big advantage in sales.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to handle – the B2B sales person’s dilemma

B2B, ideal customer, Sales

In my post yesterday I wrote about how weak sales people – and there was a time I was one of them – avoid asking the customers on what other options they are considering during the sale. Since they are weak sales people their prospect base is generally way behind their target so they are hoping against hope that the customer will not consider any other option and only buy from them.

A mature sales person knows that time is her most precious commodity, so she doesn’t want to waste time on unnecessary accounts. She matches the accounts which she thinks are the ideal customers for her service offerings. She doesn’t try to waste time on accounts where the match is difficult, if not impossible.

A B2B sale will generally always have multiple rounds of interactions. Today most prospects do their research before meeting with the sales people of companies they want to meet. So as a sales person your responsibility is to understand what’s in their mind and also to challenge it subtly with what you think will benefit the customer more.

You also need to map out the various departments involved in the procurement process. You can ask this upfront with the prospect – “do you’ll have a committee which gets involved in doing the buying” or another way “do you’ll go via a tender based process or is it an open bid” or another could be “does the purchase department need to be looped in during our communication” if the answer is yes, the add on question would be “who else do I need to keep in loop – what’s their name, designation….”.

A lot of times if the person tells you that “she’s the only person involved in the decision” that’s the biggest Red Flag you need to be bothered about. As I have been mentioning, in multiple posts through the years, in B2B procurement, its very rare that you will have only one person taking the decision. The higher the value, more the number of people involved. This kind of statement can have two implications – the person is extremely egoistic and doesn’t want you talking to others OR it can mean that she is trying to gain knowledge from you. Either situation is dangerous, so you need to find a way around.

Once you figure out the various stake holders involved you can start piecing together a story of the actual situation for buying. Inspite of these efforts you can still get into situations which turn out to be unproductive, but they will be lesser.

In the next post we will consider how you can find out who is your competition.

Till then

Carpe Diem!!!