Archive for the ‘Major Account Selling’ Category

From the Buyer’s Perspective: Getting the “Best Deal”

January 20, 2012 by Scott Olsen

Have you ever thought you had a agreement, then ran into a negotiating buzz saw? You probably ran into a strategic purchasing professional or someone they trained. In this economy, more and more organizations are engaging strategic purchasing professionals to:

  1. help evaluate and recommend the best products and services to satisfy their needs
  2. ensure their clients pay as little as possible on each purchase
  3. minimize short and long term risks

Just like the sales person has incentives to hit revenue targets, strategic purchasing professionals are likely to have MBOs for cost savings with bonuses tied to them. How do they create these huge cost savings? Initially, by doing extensive research, cost benefit analysis and networking to determine which vendors they should talk with in the first place. Second, by being the best negotiator in the room. When negotiating, they leverage power where ever possible. Here are a few examples of the types of power they leverage:

  • Creativity
  • Vested Interest (the ability to get you to invest in them and their company)
  • Legal
  • Relationship
  • Endurance
  • Expertise

In addition to leveraging power, strategic purchasing professionals may use tactics to test their counterpart’s (the sales person’s) negotiation skills. Negotiation tactics are defined as games or tricks used to expose weaknesses within the sales person and his/her organization. For example, some of the most common tactics include:

  • competition
  • violins
  • intimidating language or tone of voice
  • foggy memory
  • ultimatum
  • inside information

Strategic purchasing professionals always do their homework. As a business to business salesperson you may walk away from the agreement with your commission and then you’re off to the next opportunity. The strategic purchasing professional has to live with your product for years. They never want to make a mistake.

My advise to business to business sales professionals. Take the time to become a skilled negotiator and prepare for each negotiation. The idea that anyone is a “natural negotiator” is a contradiction in terms. The skilled and prepared negotiator gets the best deals on average. Recently, a sales managers told me “I have a really good sales person, unfortunately he’s a poor negotiator. As a result of the discounts his customers get away with, he has to close twice as many deals as his colleagues.”

I recently interviewed a group of strategic purchasing professionals to get their opinion on two topics: what would they list as fatal flaws for a sales person and what’s a compelling approach a sales person can make to be more effective?

Fatal flaws included:

  1. arrogance
  2. poor presentations/demonstrations that aren’t tailored to the audience
  3. poor follow up
  4. trying to go around the strategic purchasing professional

What approach works with strategic purchasing professions? They need to believe, at the very least, they are paying no more than anyone else for your product or service. By letting the purchaser know that you need to be and are fair to the market you are serving by keeping pricing consistent for like products and service offerings you’re likely to have a smoother and productive negotiation.

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Categories: Differentiating You, Major Account Selling, Negotiation, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Tactical Selling Skills, Uncategorized

Are You Selling Above the Line?

January 4, 2012 by Scott Olsen

Like playing above the rim in basketball, selling above the line is a world of difference. First, let’s explore what it means to sell below the line.

If you are selling below the line, some of things you are probably doing or experience include:

  • engaging in a pricing battle early and often
  • demonstrating and presenting each and every product feature without regard to what your customer really cares about
  • engaging valuable internal resources on “opportunities” that haven’t been qualified
  • hoping your deals close by the end of the quarter without any reason or logic behind your assumption
  • going it alone
  • giving into negotiating tactics

How do you know if you are selling above the line? Here’s a list of some of the things you are probably doing:

  • creating a valuable and tailored customer experience throughout the entire sales process
  • asking thoughtful questions that help your customer evaluate what they are doing verses what they could be doing and the potential impact
  • moving the sale forward each step of the way with skin in the game from the customer
  • establishing trust and credibility before diving into sensitive but essential topics
  • engaging all decision makers and influencers
  • uncovering all decision makers and influencer critical success factors
  • connecting the dots with and for your customers so they understand how you solution uniquely satisfies there most important needs
  • uncovering and leveraging your customer’s critical events to determine and guide the close date
  • leaving no resource (internal or external) untapped if it will help you close a deal
  • countering win/lose tactics
  • negotiating balanced or win/win agreements

What else do you do to ensure you’re selling above the line?

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Categories: Executive Selling, Major Account Selling, Sales Management, Uncategorized, negotiation skills, selling

Just the Right Amount of Customer Contact

May 13, 2010 by Scott Olsen

I’m often asked about the best ways to follow up with prospects and customers. I find most sales people are concerned about following up too much and coming across as aggressive, while sales managers have a fear that their sales people may be too passive and not following up quick enough or on a consistent basis.

Based on a McKinsey Quarterly article, The basics of business-to-business sales success, there is good reason to pay attention to how you do follow up. This article is based on a study that shows the “most destructive” sales activity in the eyes of the decision maker is “too much contact (in person, by phone, or via email)”.

I’ve found the best way to ensure the appropriate amount/timing of follow up is to take the guess work out by asking the prospect. At the end of each conversation, agree together how you can best track with and support the customer’s decision making process and when you should talk next. This simple idea saves sales people a tremendous amount of wondering, grief and head ache as to when to follow up. Some of my clients have tripled their weekly productivity by becoming better at closing each phone call with an agreed upon clear next action step with their customer.

“When” you follow up is important, but perhaps the bigger question is, “are you adding value every time you make contact with your prospect or customer?” Here are some simple common sense ways that may help ensure your conversations are relevant and meaningful to your prospect:

  1. be brief and to the point
  2. open with a quick summary of relevant info from your previous conversation
  3. confirm/establish the objectives, then the agenda of the meeting
  4. summarize the key take aways from the conversation
  5. confirm next action steps and who is responsible for what, including the date/time/objectives of the next conversation

Running effective meetings or facilitating effective conversations is more science than art. One of my clients, an SVP of a very large technology company, shared with me that the most valuable training he had ever participated in was a week long course on how to run effective meetings.

Please share your approach to ensuring the right timing and ways you facilitate relevant and meaningful conversations with your prospects and customers.

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Categories: Closing Skills, Engaging Your Customers, Executive Selling, Major Account Selling, Prospecting, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Tactical Selling Skills, Uncategorized, sell, selling

Selling is a Profession

June 29, 2009 by Scott Olsen

Selling is a profession. Therefore the skills involved in this profession can be identified, learned, reinforced and improved. To become successful and stay competitive, sales professional must utilize the right approach at the right time with the right customer and present the right product. In the present competitive environment nobody sells alone. Understanding how to utilize internal company resources and various teams to achieve desired results certainly must be considered a significant priority in the overall generation of revenue and profits . Additionally, each selling organization has unique training requirements that cannot be satisfied in total by standardized shelf courses.

To generate the most repeat sales in a competitive marketplace, leading organizations take a customized approach to sales skills that begins where sales professionals need assistance, builds on strengths, always reinforces previous training, establishes habits of successful selling and generates more business again and again. Sales training becomes a process not a series of discontinuous events.

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Categories: Major Account Selling, Presentation Skills, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Selling Strategies

Don’t Give Up!

March 18, 2009 by gviggiano

You have a solid sales process that used to produce lots of money per sales rep, but now is producing next to nothing. What went wrong?
The answer is that the clients started answering your questions with vague answers.  When the person asked for clarification, the client would stall the sales rep with things like we have a few things to check, budget, time lines, etc. The truth: they just were too scared to be honest with us!
Salespeople are numb to the fact that people are not buying.  When you make your follow up calls, they tell you that it’s tied up in budget…but to check back again.  So you wait to follow up, with answers to their questions, but you get stalled again. It’s not until you dig further that you are made aware of the true problem: they aren’t buying and have no idea when that will change.  So as any good salesperson, you dive into your list and start the process again. But the changes are apparent at all companies…there just not telling you!

So we present our sales leaders with some difficult choices. What do we do? Do we just give up? Offer them free terms?

You just need to ask tougher questions. Instead of asking questions about budget, ask questions about their intent to buy. Do you intend to buy this? What will cause this situation to change? Why are they looking to make a change? Where else are they looking? If they have to decide today, will we win or lose? Why? Is anything going on in the company that we need to know about? If you get the answers to these questions, at least you’ll know the status of the deals and now your pipeline becomes real.

Just try it today and let me know if it works.

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Categories: Executive Selling, Major Account Selling, Questioning Skills, Sales Skills, Sales Stories, Tactical Selling Skills

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