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Are you strictly transactional?

March 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

With the end of the first quarter approaching, there’s a bit of blog verbiage going around focusing on giving your client base a good Spring cleaning. While I couldn’t agree more, and have written about it myself, let’s change things up, shall we?

Perhaps the best Spring cleaning should start with YOU. Regarding the types of customers you want to acquire.

If your customer base seems a bit stagnant, problematic, risk averse, tight on their money and liberal on their criticism, even unchallenging and downright boring, perhaps they are not the type of kids you should be playing with anyway.

Have you ever asked yourself why are you so attracted to these types of customers in the first place?  Do some of these scenarios sound familiar? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , ,

Charles H. Green’s Defining Moment

June 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It was a sales call early in my career, where a lot was at stake (for me). After a pleasant meeting, the potential client looked me straight in the face and asked me, “Tell me, Mr. Green, how much experience do you have doing marketing studies for industrial consumables?”  (The job was a marketing study for a sandpaper company).

 Gulping, I realized that most likely we’d never done any marketing work in such a narrow vertical as that (not to mention I couldn’t think what else besides sandpaper would even constitute “industrial consumables”), and I began to formulate an answer full of MBA-speak that began with, “Not exactly, but we’ve done a lot of similar work…” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

Mike Weinberg’s Defining Moment in Business Development

May 29, 2012 By 2 Comments

Twelve years ago I had a painful and embarrassing experience that not only provided an invaluable lesson, but also helped define the future of my career.

I had just walked away from a company where I was the top performing salesperson on a team of 15. The owners sold the business to a gigantic public company and within days, the new senior management pretty much wrecked everything I loved about the organization. I resigned to join a just-past-start-up learning management system company that sold to Fortune 500 clients through a channel partner. I was assured that this partner had a comprehensive learning offering, a professional sales organization, and entrenched relationships with many companies that were our ideal target accounts. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Losing an Order Led To Sales Success

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A Sales Aerobics for Engineers® Defining Moment Guest Post by Gary S. Hart

Getting the sale was my priority until I realized that priority was holding me back from real success. When author Howell Raines coined the phrase “defining moment” as a reporter for the N.Y. Times in 1983, he had no idea it would become part of our lexicon. And that is how defining moments are. We do not predict them or expect them, but when they happen our lives are forever different. And so it was for me when I found a better way to sell. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

Throwing Sales and Marketing Spaghetti Against The Wall?

April 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Or better yet, is your sales strategy resembling Ready-Fire-Aim… again?

A lot of technical companies are gingerly getting back on firm financial ground after the little economic roller coaster we’ve all been on (and are still riding on). These companies need their hard-won capital for resources and assets. Certainly not for marketing or sales efforts. Guess you will wait to craft these strategies for later.

Later when? Hello. Hate to tell you, but it is later. That later you are awaiting is now.

Nobody really remembers who you were, before you fell out of the public eye, or downsized to the point of being unrecognizable to your former clients. And I say former clients because some of these folks are no longer in business. And others have had to morph and adapt in order to survive.  Just like you have.

The sales paradigm has changed since The Fall of Fall 2008. You can see it in your business model. You can feel it in your corporate culture. And you are leery about taking the risk to market and sell your services, aggressively, again.

Good selling in the digital millennium is a combination of leveraging communication with excellent business development dynamics. In other words, it’s time to retool.

Going back out there and selling like you did in 2007 will not work anymore.

The internet affords you a means of doing extensive background homework on your customer base: the one you already have as well as the one you have targeted. There’s no better time to start a sales campaign than now, by focusing on who you intend to sell your products and services to. Hint: it may not be the same boys and girls you’ve been doing business with.

The internet also affords your potential customers and prospects an excellent means of checking out your company, before they make a buying decision. You may have been in the running, and eliminated from the final cut, without your ever having known anything about it. Unless you were tracking website activity.

And your website: does it initiate a conversation with a potential customer or is it written for you and the folks inside your company? Look at yourself from the outside looking in: your website may make you look dated, out of touch, or not interested in doing business with anyone due to non-intuitive navigation and a lot of gobbly-gook meaningless lingo which basically boils down to “call for more information.” Who has time to call? I’m interested in vetting your company, online, and making my buying decision independent of a vendor beauty parade… at least for the first cut.

  • Does your sales initiative involve having reps out there rustling bushes and identifying leads? Sort of like bounty hunters. And once they hand over the bounty into your siloed infrastructure, there’s no more contact. Silos.
  • Is everyone selling for your company all on the same strategy page? Are their messages and approaches consistent? Do they feel connected and vested to the success of your company? (note: how can those bush rustling bounty hunters feel part of the whole?).
  • Is your corporate culture and infrastructure so exquisitely compartmentalized that no one really understands or cares about what everyone else is doing? Nor do they understand how important their input and throughput is to the individuals receiving it. Yikes.

Perhaps it’s time to hit your corporate “Reset” button. The last time I checked, the marketing and sales functions fell under the business development umbrella. Which is the front end of the cash flow cycle.

And yes, you can tell me that you can’t market and sell if there are no products to market and sell.

But then I’d probably have to ask you whether or not you created those products and services with a customer in mind? Or threw your product-and-service spaghetti against the wall and hoped it stuck.

That’s a subject for another blog post.

 

Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU will be on Amazon.com soon! Click on the link to learn more about the book and sign up to receive newsletters and downloads.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , , ,

Do You Develop Your Customers?

March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Now that’s something to ponder. Since so many of us go forth each day to thrash about the bushes searching for prospects for our products and solutions.

What would happen if the target of our desires wasn’t product or solution placement as much as it was  developing prospects into becoming our customers. Our loyal and retained customers. How does that happen?

  1. It starts with customer conversations. About them, not you, your product, your service or your invention. About who they are and what goes on inside their heads. Not that deep-discovery stuff about why your solution is, well, the only solution they would ever need. Maybe you’re convinced. But your customers remain skeptical.
  2. Your customers don’t want your products, services or invention. At least not yet. Because they haven’t heard themselves articulate how your “stuff”  fills some void in their “intangibles”: behavior, lifestyle, job, you name it. Even if your customers and prospects are currently using your competitors’ products. It’s not a decision they can make. Yet. Because it’s not a discussion they’ve had, yet, even with themselves.
  3. Your market should be based on who your best customers are. Best customers may not be the folks who currently buy your product. Your best customers are the folks for whom your product or service is designed, based on your knowledge of (you guessed it) customer conversations, early adopters, validation and vetting, design and redesign. Even if you are a mature company.
  4. You business is about modeling what you do to align with the folks you do it for: again, your customers.

The best companies, entrepreneurial or not, start the customer conversation and never end it. Ever. Even if the conversation isn’t pretty. Those are the best kinds of discussions. They are honest. If a customer is telling you exactly what they think – because you’ve asked them to, in partnership and in dialogue rather than as a frustrated rant – you’ve earned that honesty. Congratulations. There’s an opportunity to make your product or service better.

The best customer conversations may talk about products and services outside of your industry segment, and how their attributes successfully fill the void in those customer “intangibles.” Listen, instead of jumping to problem solve. You may pivot towards an even better concept than you started out with. Yes, you’re the expert. But your customer is expert at being the customer. Listen to them. Be open to what they are telling you.

The best business model incorporates customer mindset throughout. All of the customers that are involved from winning the order to receiving payment.  The dialogue involves your internal customers as well as your external ones. Talk to them, constantly. Make them part of your journey. They are the target, as well as the vehicle, of achieving your objectives.

Think what a loyal and retained customer base means to your business model. It starts by working with your customers and teaching them what it means to be part of your business. And they, in turn, will teach you what it means to be their supplier.

It all starts with that first, not-to-be-avoided, customer conversation.

What are you waiting for?

Learn more about customer development. Do YOU Mean Business? Technical/Non-Technical Collaboration, Business Development and YOU is available on Amazon.com, April 2012. Click on the book title and enjoy!

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

Do you provide simple solutions for your clients?

July 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

You know the saying as it relates to engineering. Some variation of: “Don’t ask Jack/Jill what time it is. He/she will build you a clock.”

 

You probably engineer some pretty awesome clocks. But how do you get from the conceptual clock (e.g., what the client wants) to the outcome (e.g., what the client needs)?

It all depends on how simple and how RELEVANT you keep the process, including your explanation of the pathways towards the solution.

Ask yourself these questions:

 

  1. When my customers ask me for an answer, I provide one answer encompassing all the possible ramifications of a solution that I can think of.And I may call them back with even more solutions once I really start to think about things.
  2. When my customers ask me for information on a project, I provide them with the full breadth and depth of data available that support the project.
  3. When my customers ask me for a timeline, I provide multiple dates related to the multiple possible ramifications of the proposed solutions based on the full breadth and depth of data available that support the project. Whew!

If you answered YES to any one of these questions, let alone more than one, no one will ever accuse you of providing a simple, relevant solution for your client.Ever.In fact, your customers may perceive that working with you is the equivalent of trying to clean out their garage. Too complicated and too overwhelming.

Regardless of whether you are talking to a peer or a decision-maker, keeping things simple – and relevant – is the goal. Who has time anymore to ponder the logic and profound nature of all the glorious information you are providing to them?

I’m not proposing that you dumb-down your responses or omit important information. However, why choke your clients on information overload when you can feed them bite-sized chunks? And probably get your point across a whole lot better since you aren’t cluttering their minds with information perhaps only you feel is important – or relevant.

Question #1: When customers ask you for an answer, provide a simple answer that addresses the issues that are most important to them. Make it easy to work with you. Your customers may be The Company Decision Maker or the Lead Engineer or the Technical Support Person or the Summer Co-op. Determine to whom you are talking and what types of issues are important to them. Find out what’s relevant and what’s not. Give them the answer that addresses the scope of their responsibilities and the context of their query. And then ask one more critical question: is there anyone else you need to be discussing this issue with? In other words, to whom are they handing-off the information you provided them? Because things will get lost in translation.

Question #2: When customers ask you for project information, provide succinct responses.In order for you to be responsive and succinct, you need to determine what the real issues are behind their questions. Establishing the context – and the relevancy – of their question and your response may uncover unaddressed needs, additional project opportunities and gaps in the current scope of the project. But you will never find out this information if you are providing a broad-based doctoral thesis defense type of response to their query for project information. It’s not about you and what you know. It’s about them and what they need.Make it easy to work with you. Make it understandable to work with you. That’s how clients learn and become loyal, repeat customers.

Question #3: When clients ask for a timeline, provide a simple answer with a caveat that covers your – and their – ability to meet the proposed timeline. Having an extensive “if-then” type of timeline is perceived as waffling. If they propose an unrealistic timeline, find out the reasons behind this timeline. “Their” timeline may have nothing to do with the project as much as it has to do with other issues they have to deal with, outside the context of your project. You’re not an order-taker. Arrive at a set of deliverables, collaboratively.

Building a clock and providing your client with straight-forward, succinct, simple, relevant information along the way is a powerful tool for customer retention.

Don’t forget to keep things simple and relevant any and every time you have a chance. It’s a great way to gradually change how you communicate with your peers, colleagues and, most importantly, your customers.

Think about it.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , ,

It’s always about the customer. Precisely because we are not stupid.

March 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

How well do you know your customers? And I am not talking about going to the same country club that they belong to (like we can all afford that one, right?). It’s not about finding out when their birthday is, so you can send them a card (so much for Client Relationship Management software). It’s not about being their pal or buddy or influencing their decision by wining and dining them.As though your customers owe you something.

It’s about the ANTHROPOLOGY of your approach to business development.

Because our customers are not disposable. You can’t just run out and get another one just like that. Vendors – no matter how much value we provide for our customers – can always be sacrificed.Depending on the anthropology of the decision that needs to be made.

Whether you are an engineer or in sales, do you develop business with an anthropological perspective? Hints:

  1. It’s not about digging around to find the vulnerable chink in the proverbial armor that will force your hand in the customer’s decision to spec your company’s services, your recommended solution or your specific skill set.
  2. It’s not about manipulating the customer’s thought processes during the presentation so they have no decision to make other than specifying – yup, you guessed it – your company’s services, your recommended solution or your specific skill set.
  3. It’s not about reading one more book on sales technique to employ that silver bullet strategy that closes the deal. As though everything you’ve been doing in the past has been ineffective.
  4. It’s not about all of your certifications, all of your degrees, the number of professional organizations with which you are associated or your publications in professional journals. For some reason, that stuff simply isn’t impressing your customers.

It’s about taking the time to discover the context of the decision that needs to be made. Do you know how to be an anthropologist?

Because that’s what business development is all about: how well you know your customers, their mindset and context under which they make decisions. Whether you are approaching this function from the sales or from the engineering perspective.

Just because you are talking to another engineer doesn’t mean he/she has the same agenda that you do. The decision maker has a context which directly impacts how and why a decision will be made. And sometimes the decision that is made is to make no decision at all! I know you’ve encountered that scenario. We all have.

Just because you are talking to another business development/sales executive doesn’t translate into your thinking along any of the same lines. They may not even understand their own internal customers. Don’t fall into a false sense of self at any point during – or after – the business development process.While you may be impressed with yourself, your customer may not. The process may stall out.

The CONTEXT surrounding decision making governs the decision that is eventually made.I recommend spending more time understanding context of the decision and less time trying to dazzle customers with your expertise and deliverables.

Hint: this is something that they not only didn’t teach you in engineering school but they didn’t teach any of us in any school whatsoever.This is an acquired skill.It’s not people skills. It’s not engineering acumen. It’s not sales skills.

It’s authenticity. It’s being inquisitive, presumptive and just plain curious. It’s knowing your stuff yet deciding to not depend on your superior technical savvy or sales skills as the fulcrum for business development.

Your customers know why – and why not- they make decisions. Let them teach you… by asking them to define the context of their mindset.Dig deeper with each question you ask.Understand the root causality of factors impacting their decisions. It comes in layers. Like an anthropological dig. Because there is never just one decision maker. Context provides a company-wide perspective to root causality and incorporates corporate culture, attitudes towards risk and innovation and ability to run their business successfully.

If every conversation you have with someone is simply about being genuinely interested in who they are and what the context of their business decision is all about – from their perspective and their team‘s -– think about what you will learn.

  • You may decide not to waste your time pursuing their business – at all.
  • You may decide to keep in touch with them, provide information and, when their (not your) timing is more favorable, pursue your solution once again.
  • You may decide they are a viable candidate for your solution, but your sales cycle will not be short
  • You may decide the customer doesn’t need your solution at all.
  • You may need to teach them how to work with their internal resources to approach their problem. Which may or may not end up involving your solution.

It’s really not about your solution at all – or anyone’s for that matter.It’s about the customer. And why they make decisions. Why they have to make a decision.And how compromised they are feeling about making that decision. Before you even walk through their door.

Do you know your customers that well?

Now that’s something to think about.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Note to Self: Rock My Own Boat in 2010

January 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

After the roller coaster ride of sales and technical business development in 2009, I’ve taken the time to examine what’s important to me in terms of how I approach my client relationships. I’ve also taken the time to re-examine how I process information – sales and technical – and how well I communicate what I need to know to the folks I need to know it from. I figure if I can ask better questions, my customers and prospects can give me better answers.

2009 was such a non-traditional business year. Yes, an understatement. It profoundly affected how I now view the entire business development process. So I don’t view 2010 as being a return to the status quo or whatever things were like in 2008, either.Since 2009 rocked my boat – in fact, it rocked everyone’s boat, didn’t it? – I decided to continue rocking my boat. I liked how it felt. Go figure.

Boat rocking keeps me on my toes. I don’t take anything for granted. I don’t make any assumptions. I don’t forget to do my homework when developing new business relationships. I don’t lump my customers and prospects together in terms of a “one approach fits all” business development strategy.

In fact, I go about developing business as though the boat might capsize tomorrow.

Rocking my own boat helps me develop a sense of balance in terms of which customers are just kicking the proverbial tires and which customers are serious in terms of doing business with me. Rocking my own boat keeps my conversation fresh and engaged in what my clients and prospects are saying to me. Rocking my own boat keeps me searching for new ways to identify the factors impacting their decision to buy.

Now, let me clarify myself here. I’m not looking for new ways to manipulate folks into buying what I am selling. I’m looking for questions I need to be asking to assist people in identifying the offline factors impacting the decisions they make daily.

Your customers aren’t going to decide to buy what you are selling until you stop forcing the conversation towards your solution – as their only solution I might add. Your clients and prospects are expecting you to “sell” them. They want you to “pitch” them. So they can commoditize you, quite frankly, as a “typical sales rep” or “typical sales engineer.” However, they just might not be ready to make a decision, even if you are driven to “sell” your solution to them. Even if your solution is right for them.

So I’m learning how to rock my boat and keep it upright. I’m reading a lot of books. Taking training courses.Communicating with clients. Asking questions of peers. Asking a lot better questions of my customers and prospects that impacts how they put information together towards solving their own problems.

Because, like the Wizard of Oz, there’s always somebody (or lots of “somebodies”) behind the curtain pulling lots of strings and jerking chains that are impacting my Client’s decision to purchase a solution or product, from me or anyone. And I figure if I can get a handle on identifying these factors, and ask good questions up front that allow that individual or team to understand the ducks they need to have in a row, I bring value to our relationship.

Making a decision is the hardest thing we ask our customers and prospects to do.I need to understand the decision making process better. This decision making process is not selling, or closing the sale. It’s everything that precedes the actual sales process.It’s why folks decide to place a solution in the first place. It’s why folks decide to put making that decision on hold.

After all, my customers and prospects are the ones with the answers, not me. They best understand how their internal systems work. And I need to understand how to understand their internal systems. Because it impacts their decision making processes and my business development cycle.

A bit complex, yes.

That’s how I am rocking my own boat in 2010.

What are you doing to rock yours?

 

 

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