The B2B sales person’s dilemma

Over the years while directly being involved in sales myself or leading a sales team, I have realized, it’s always difficult for the sales guy to ask who else is in competition in the account where he’sselling.

Most weak sales people live in this LA LA Land . I still get sales people telling me that the “customer is only talking to me”. It’s actually a dilemma because the earlier you realize that you may not get the order you are scared because you don’t know what you will put in your prospect sheet.

When I was in my early years in sales, I did not have a large enough prospect base most of the time. Now because of that I always had the feeling that I did not have the luxury to lose an order. Due to this I would try to please the customer in every which way hoping that he will not call my competitors to discuss the requirements.

Some of the smart prospects actually used to give me the assurance that they would not discuss with any other company. But when we were called for negotiations, I would realize there were so many players and I didn’t stand a chance.

These failures taught me a few lessons- the first being – never believe that only one person’s decision will be important in a B2B sale. There will Always Always be multiple people involved in a B2B sale.

The second fact is that, there can never be only one company with whom they are discussing for the solution. Due to the success of your marketing you may be the first people they call for a discussion, but be sure they will call others, if only to get you to bring your price down.

The only time when the above may not strictly hold true is when you are building something for them at your cost…..which may be rare because of compliance issues.

Which then means that you should make it a point in every meeting to check out who else is in competition. There are various ways to do it and we can have a separate post on that.

Its better to be clear about your competition in advance and plan your sales accordingly, rather being thrown a curve ball, at the order you had committed was 100% probable and blaming the prospect for underhand dealings or sudden relative of the CFO appearing.

Sales is a very methodical process and you can’t wing it. The people on the other side of the table are seasoned buyers who deal with sales people all day. They also appreciate a professional preparation.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Working backward from the customer result – B2B scenarios

B2B, Marketing, messaging, Product Management, single target market

I wrote a few posts on how you start with the customer result – what will delight the customer so much that they will become “raving fans”.

Lets now look at how this could possibly work in a B2B scenario where you have a multiple people involved in making the decision.

So if you start with a result that will delight the customer – define that customer in as much detail , with who that customer WILL be and who WILL NOT BE. I keep emphasising on this point in all my product management and marketing posts. It is always more important to define whom you will not like to serve. That portion of the market is always larger than the market which you can serve.

Once you have defined the boundaries of your service or product to delight, then look at how you will reach her and get her attention. In a B2B scenario this is a very big challenge.

Many people are wanting to get attention of our person. These are primarily 3 sets of stakeholders who are vying for her attention. First is her seniors, then her peers and more than anyone her reportees.

Now within all this chaos there are hundreds of messages which are also vying for her attention from all these stakeholders as well as vendors like us. In addition there are the pressures of her personal life which could also be occupying the same attention span.

So who gets priority
Not your message for sure….until and unless it is something that catches her attention.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market – getting down to the person in B2B

B2B, Business, Customers, ideal customer, Marketing, single target market

When you are looking at the B2B space, you have to keep one thing in mind always – you are dealing with multiple people not one person. In the consumer space you could look at the consumer and maybe the influencers like the wife / husband or children who can influence, but generally it’s a small set of one or one plus.

In the case of B2B sales however its always by default Many Buyer Persons getting involved even though at the company level this may be your Ideal Customer Profile.. Its very very rare to identify a single person who can take all the decisions. This however may happen if the buying value is very low.

Now if there are going to encounter multiple people that you have to influence towards your product or service then your first exercise should be to identify all the people involved. So before you talk to thousand clients in the single target market – you first need to analyse just one customer and how will the process move.

Recently in one of the cases that my team was fighting we got blindsided by the procurement team of the customer. We did all the evaluation exercises , the technical team was coordinating with us and we were supposedly rated the best. But suddenly we got to know that the order was handed over to someone else.

Our challenge was that we had not analysed the hidden agendas that were getting played out. This happens a lot when you are in the B2B space. Its called getting zigged when you should have zagged.

Once you have analysed the niche and got down to the usage, you then need to start mapping who all could be involved in the decision making in ONE customer. Once you have analysed what happens with ONE, then you can replicate the process across the whole segment that you have identified. You may still get zigged, but if you have put the identification in your process, then the chances of being zigged will get reduced.

Till next time then…..to your success in the market.

Carpe Diem!!!

Mapping all the steps to acquiring a customer

B2B, Marketing, Sales

Depending on the how you have structured your sales and marketing, these could be two independent functions and chances are that they both work independent of each other, often blaming the other for the non-performance.

However a customer does not see this as two functions. She is a seeing every single touch point as the company and you make an impression – good or bad based on that.

However if you can think of the whole journey a customer takes from the first touch point to the way the sales order comes in , you can iron out a lot of glitches.

By mapping this journey, you will also be able to identify the gaps between, how you think a customer should come versus how your systems are working for the customer to actually come.

During one of our marketing launches we covered multiple steps as to how the campaigns will flow, what will be the sequence of mails that the team will send out, how will the follow-up happen, till we get the prospect to come for a presentation. since we did not map the whole process backwards, we failed when a prospect asked us to share some content before coming for a presentation and in another case asked us for a justification document after we had given a demo. Now in both these cases we had not anticipated that a customer could need these because they were looking at a new technology.

If you go to sites like Gartner, they have a very nice item for their conferences, “documents to justify to your management” which are all the reasons why attending any of the conferences would help the company. This way they are helping the manager who wants to attend, get documents easily, instead of expecting him to justify by himself, in which case he could fail to justify properly and therefore not get the approval to attend. Which would be a loss to Gartner. So they have thought through the possible steps which could stop the sale from happening and put the data in place to help.

In B2b sales , where multiple levels of approval and justifications are needed, mapping the complete journey can help iron out the creases in both your marketing and sales plans.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!