Selling – Products versus Services

B2B, Sales

When I was younger and people would ask me what I did for a living – my typical answer would be – I get out of the house on my rounds and sell whatever I have been asked to sell that day – some times its potato chips, sometimes its computers. That was in a lighter vein but over the years I have been involved in selling so many different products and services that I don’t actually see too many differences.

I fundamentally believe that selling is selling. Irrespective of what you are selling and to whom you are selling. Whether you are selling a product or a service, at the end of the day, the customer is buying a result that the purchase will give her/him. So you need to figure out the result that the customer is looking for and how you can get them the result. However there’s a lot of academic discussions which talk about why they are different.

My two cents on this topic are as follow

Every thing that you sell has a nuance to it. Even within products – different products would have different kind of audiences , different price points, different results, same would be the case with different kinds of services
The orientation of the consumer sale would be different from the business sale, in terms of the complexity involved in the business to business sale (i.e. number of people and steps) and the time involved.
The way you showcase the result could be different – in consumer products you use advertising, while in B2B you might use a direct sales team.
The way you solicit the business may vary – but some consumer products are also sold to businesses and what was once considered a business product (like computers) could soon become a consumer product.

Inspite of all the above points – one distinct difference is that , generally, products have well defined boundaries while it is tougher to put boundaries on what is constituted as a service because humans are involved in the delivery. So standardisation is much tougher.

In most cases today, the product and service get intertwined – do you go to a restaurant because the food is good or because the ambience and service is excellent or all of them.

Till next time then – it doesn’t matter what you are selling as long as you know the result you get for the customer – rest of the things can be managed.

Carpe Diem!!!

Market forecasts – how I would get them wrong – 3

Assumptions, B2B, Marketing, Product Management

So in my last 2 posts I wrote about couple of areas, on how as a product manager, I would get my forecasts wrong.

In this one, we will talk about competition. Whenever there’s a good market, you will have competition come in, sooner rather than later. The more the competition, the more the challenges because you have to estimate in advance how competition would react to your offering.

The advantage of the B2B market is that generally, the competition is defined. Until a rank outsider comes in with a revolutionary product, generally the B2B space is defined and the products/services are also known.

In the market – perception is the reality. So if your competition creates a perception of a superior product/service or a cheaper service or a more flexible service, then all your forecasts can go haywire, if the market believes that your product is inferior in any way / more expensive / less flexible.

When you are working with a specific software tool or you are a partner for only a specific kind of equipment, then your options for differentiation decrease. It limits you to primarily two things – experience that you have and the kind of technical expertise that you have created.

If its your own product/service you can leverage on other things like the kind of packaging that you do, or the software code that you have built.

From a competition perspective the other thing that you need to note is the number of sales people in the market from your competitors versus yourself. If you have 3 sales people while you have competition with 7 sales people each, then its not practical for your team to outrun the competition. Your competition will always have more people covering more accounts. Which means your chance of losing a deal is always higher. Planning without this aspect clearly articulated in your assumptions is a grave mistake.

But marketing – especially in B2 is very interesting because of these factors.

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!!!