We are honored to be featured in TrainingIndustry, Inc.’s Top 20 lists for Leadership Training and Sales Training companies for consecutive years.

The most humbling and gratifying part of being nominated, though, is that we were named, in part, due to the strength of our clients.

One such client is Fifth Third Bank.  Like many financial institutions after the 2008 meltdown, Fifth Third faced an uphill battle – customer mistrust, commoditized market, lines of business operating as silos, and a shrinking share of wallet.

Join us tomorrow at 2pm EST, as Christine Nester, Fifth Third’s VP, Director of Performance Consulting, will join us to share the specific tactics and strategies they employed to overcome these challenges.  In line with a new “One Bank” strategy, Christine and her team worked with Forum to align and equip their sales force to execute on a customer-focused sales strategy with impressive results.

Register here.  Regardless of your industry, you are sure to take something away that you’ll be able to put into practice right away.

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Hong Kong, Germany, the U.S., and India: these are the four diverse countries in which we beta-tested our new program, Point of View Selling.

We expected to see some differences, by region, in salespeople’s’ reaction to this new method of selling.

Instead, we saw completely uniform responses in two important respects. In all cases, on all continents, the sponsoring executives (senior sales leaders) immediately saw the value of this approach to selling and how it was especially suited to executing their selling strategy. In fact, these executives were quite eager to have Forum “transform” their salespeople with this new method.

In contrast to the sales leaders’ enthusiasm, many of the senior salespeople who participated in Point of View Selling were highly skeptical. In every group on every continent we encountered initial resistance: salespeople said things like, “How can I call on a senior decision maker without a relationship? I certainly can’t provoke or challenge these senior-level customers!” “I don’t have the time it takes to prepare for this level of discussion.” Yada, yada, yada …

What do Senior Buyers Look For in a Supplier?

This resistance, and its underlying fears, come from understandable but erroneous beliefs regarding what senior-level decision makers care about and how they make buying decisions. The resistance also hints at people’s doubts about their ability to master significantly more advanced selling skills., When we recently asked 231 senior-level decision makers around the globe to rank the criteria they use in deciding whether to meet with a supplier , “knows me” came in dead last. “Knows my business” and “knows my industry” topped the list. These findings completely contradict the widespread belief that a salesperson must have a relationship with an executive before she can initiate a provocative business discussion.

Selling in 2012

At the end of our 2-day program in each of the four countries, nearly all participants demonstrated increased skill levels and a shift in beliefs about their customers.  The participants “got it,” they knew instinctively that senior-level decision makers expect more from salespeople today.  Buyers expect insight about how to achieve their objectives. The executives who invited us to test our new sales program with their teams understand this well—because they are themselves senior-level decision makers. Are your sales teams prepared to call higher in your customers’ organizations?

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Here in India, there is a truism amongst all sales professionals:  selling is becoming more and more complex with every passing day.

There is the “emergence of hyper-competition,” the “pervasiveness of technological change,” “smarter customers with increasing expectations,” “pricing pressure that demonstrates clear tangible value,” and the “need for innovative solutions” and “out of the box thinking” to solve existing customer issues.   These and others are forming the sales lexicon of 2011.

• What Customers Demand:  Over the last 20 years, the one single and constant cry from customers to sales organizations has been, “please understand my business.”  In 2011, the value proposition of a salesperson is, “I appear before you with expertise in your market place. I understand what your customers are demanding of you and what your competitors are doing to respond. I understand your marketplace trends and the shifting sands you have to navigate to succeed.”    Without this understanding, sales people are unable to proceed to the higher ground of demonstrating tangible business value and provide innovative solutions to existing customer problems.

• What Sales Organizations Demand: With the slowdown /recession of 2009-10, sales organizations are under pressure to be more effective. Sales leaders are looking at their sales makers to increase their productivity by reducing sales cycle times (faster), increasing sales results (more), with less available resources to use (cheaper).

• The Paradox: This pressure to deliver ‘more’ and ‘faster’ and ‘cheaper’ is often a direct contradiction to what customers are demanding – an understanding of their business, with expertise in their marketplace.  Sales makers are being squeezed and stretched at the same time.

• How are sales organizations responding to this paradox? We are seeing a renewed interest and focus on strategic account management and senior level selling skills.  One of the emerging senior level selling skills sits around the concept of “ideas-based selling” –  provoking the customer by challenging their thinking about their own business, thereby creating a new level of sales maker-customer intimacy.

We just pilot tested this concept here in India in August with senior sales makers in a two-day workshop. We learned three key things:

1. Senior sales makers intellectually embraced “ideas-based selling” as the way of the future in B2B sales situations without question. Demand and value creation by the sales maker has to be the way ahead in a hyper-competition environment.
2. The challenge that emerged was the salespeople’s readiness to adopt this, i.e., developing the skill and the courage to provoke a customer’s thinking about their own business. Provoking a customer is almost contradictory for most sales makers who have grown up in a relationship management ‘keep-the-customer-happy-at-all-costs’ world.
3. Equally challenging, it seems, was mobilizing the sales person’s own organization to deliver on this provocative value creation idea they have just proposed to their customer.

For more on “Ideas-Based Selling,” listen to a replay of our webinar.

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“No.”

“Well … maybe.”

Which would you rather hear?  There is a well worn adage that a salesperson can handle many, many “no’s” from prospective customers, but too many “maybe’s” will grind the salesperson’s productivity into the ground.  Prospective customers who can’t or won’t make a buying decision, and worse, won’t let a salesperson help them with their decision challenges are becoming all too common in today’s volatile, risk-adverse environment.

In the B2B sales process we commonly see salespeople first understanding and confirming their prospective customer’s need, then submitting a proposal to address that need, and concluding (or closing) by convincing the customer of the superior merits of their proposal.  Increasingly, buyers are shutting salespeople out of the final step, in which they consider the merits of one or more supplier proposals, especially those involving complex or high-stakes solutions.  Many sales proposals get hung up at this decision step, often indefinitely.  The salesperson gets no information as to why communication has dropped off or how to help the customer move forward.   The root of the problem is frequently traced to submitting a proposal too soon.

In fact, Forum research and client experience reveal the benefits of “flipping” the traditional selling process from propose-decide to decide-propose.  Ideas-Based Selling is a distinctive approach that applies this reversal of the selling sequence and avoids the risk to the salesperson of getting shut out of the buyer’s decision process.  Both the seller and the buyer benefit from postponing a proposal until they have jointly clarified three key areas:

1. The relative significance of the issue or need to the business.
2. The viability of and expected return on possible solutions.
3. The important decision criteria and a decision process for selecting an eventual solution.

Customers often need expertise to fully clarify these three areas; they will value the sales professional who can assist them.  Since suppliers are often more knowledgeable than their customers about specific business issues, salespeople should resist a natural tendency to jump to proposing and pitching solutions.  Instead, they should leverage their firm’s knowledge and capabilities to the fullest to guide a customer through a complex decision.   The rewards are fewer “no decisions,” a higher ratio of closed sales, and more satisfied customers.

My Forum colleague Michael Collins described how the Ideas-Based Selling process works in a recent series of blog posts.  Also, Michael and I hosted a webinar in which we shared Forum’s latest research into this innovative selling method and ways you can use Ideas-Based Selling to mobilize your prospects to buy.

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Not sure whether leading with ideas works in the real world? Just ask IBM and GE Healthcare.

In Part 2 of this series, we looked at the customer decision process that drives the leading with ideas sales approach. “Rainmakers” in management consulting firms understand the customer decision process—and they use their understanding to craft an approach to starting high-level conversations with senior executives. And now high-performing solution sellers in many industries sell this way. Let’s take a look at a couple of companies that have put this approach into practice.

In the 1990s, IBM transformed its go-to-market approach from selling hardware to selling services that “pulled through” hardware over the course of the customer engagement. The sales transformation, which began during the tenure of Lou Gerstner, turned around IBM’s performance as well as the perception of the company in the marketplace: once thought of as a money-losing “dinosaur,” it came to be known as the world’s largest provider of computer software, services, and hardware. (1)

An example of IBM’s ideas-led selling approach is seen in its go-to-market approach to solutions based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. Rather than leading sales conversations with a description of features and benefits of RFID, IBM’s Global Business Services group starts with a customer problem or opportunity. For example, in Europe, Global Business Services cites the challenges and costs of counterfeit shipping containers for wholesale distributors. These problems contribute to lost revenue and excessive maintenance costs; an RFID-based solution is one approach to solving them. (2) Now that is a story that a distributor company’s COO might be interested in exploring—rather than discussing the RFID technology itself.

Interestingly, the level of hardware sales per IBM rep today is twice the level of the early 1990s, when hardware was the company’s primary offering to the market.

In 2001, GE Healthcare created its Performance Solutions group to sell consulting services wrapped around its traditional hardware offerings, such as MRI equipment. The company took this action to increase margins in the face of price pressure from the government as well as managed health-care organizations. (3) GE Healthcare’s Performance Solutions group takes an ideas-led approach to starting new customer conversations.

Some of GE Healthcare’s customers, COOs of newly built hospitals in the United Arab Emirates, wrestle with the problem of low bed-utilization rates—rates as low as 20 percent. The typical approach to combating this problem is to throw money at it by making brick-and-mortar and technology investments. GE Healthcare’s Performance Solutions team instead led with a new idea: that poor utilization rates stemmed from insufficient focus on underlying clinical and administrative processes that deliver outstanding care. To address this issue, GE Healthcare often starts out by delivering process improvement solutions (using Six Sigma or other methodologies), and then addresses core hospital technology solutions. Hospitals such as Sheikh Khalifa Medical Centre in Abu Dhabi are now reporting improvements in room utilization and productivity, as a result of their taking GE Healthcare’s approach. (4)

In the cases of both IBM and GE Healthcare, solving business performance issues for customers ultimately pulled through hardware and services sales.

IBM and GE Healthcare are examples of companies that broadly transformed their business and their sales model to support their new strategy. In Part 4 of this series, we will look at various “levers” of the sales model and how to address them in order move an organization to taking a leading with ideas sales approach. In the fifth and final part of the series, we will zero in on the skills and capabilities sales managers and producers need, if they are to succeed in a leading with ideas selling environment.

Notes:
(1) Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround (HarperCollins, 2002)
(2) “Container Centralen: Fighting counterfeiting—and transforming an industry in the process” (IBM case study)
(3) Gulati, Ranjay, “Silo Busting: How to Execute on the Promise of Customer Focus” (Harvard Business Review, May 2007)
(4) “Performance Solutions: Sheikh Khalifa Medical Centre in Abu Dhabi, UAE” (GE Healthcare customer testimonial)

Further Reading:
“Thought Leadership Is the New Sales Pitch,” The Basis Group

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So you think selling complex solutions is difficult? Try buying one.

One way to think about leading with ideas is to focus on the customer’s decision process in making a purchase.  Dean McMann, co-founder and CEO of McMann & Ransford, has a particularly elegant framework for understanding the executive decision process.  Generally, McMann says, an executive will move through three sequential decisions when evaluating a new idea and determining whether to buy:

1. Why Would I Take Action? Why is this issue important? Is this a big enough opportunity – in terms of dollar impact and other strategic objectives– to warrant my attention as a senior leader?  Also, are the potential solutions realistic, or are they “pie in the sky”?
2. How Might I Take Action? What are my choices of ways to solve this problem or take advantage of this opportunity?  For each of my choices, what are the estimated investment, risk, and ROI?
3. With Whom Should I Take Action? Can I solve this problem using in-house resources? If not, which vendor should I engage on this initiative?

A customer engagement approach that guides the executive through making these decisions will allow the solutions provider to build customer intimacy and win a higher percentage of sales.  When executed properly, it also allows the seller to get paid for some of the business development effort.

According to McMann, many solution providers make the mistake of jumping to the third decision first.  They focus on trying to convince the customer to “choose me” before the customer has decided that the problem is worth solving.  We see this in technology solution firms in “demo hell,” as they keep responding to requests to demonstrate their product to customers who cannot seem to make up their mind.  (In many cases, that’s because the customers themselves haven’t thought through the first two decisions.)

We also see this occurring when solution providers propose primarily (or only) in response to RFPs they had no input in creating.  An RFP is a signal that the customer is making the third decision:  “With Whom to Act?”  It assumes the first two decisions have already been made.  Experience shows that the solution provider who helps guide the customer in making the first two decisions stands a much greater chance of being selected at the time of the third decision.

Notes and further reading:

“Customer Intimacy as a Business Model” by Dean McMann — http://www.deanmcmann.com/

“Thought Leadership is the New Sales Pitch” by The Basis Group

“In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers” by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore.  Harvard Business Review, March 2009

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Senior executives value ideas and impact.  Focus on the hole—not the drill.

The business challenges faced by executives today are more varied and complex than ever before.  As they emerge from the economic downturn, many companies are looking for top-line revenue growth without taking on fixed costs.  How can we build and expand hospitals that deliver world-class health care at a reasonable cost?  How can we cut product launch time to get new products on shelves faster?  How can we integrate our field, web, and telesales channels to increase charge card adoption and usage?

Often, there’s no clear-cut answer for the executive. The best solution for these complex challenges could involve a myriad of action paths:  process change, outsourcing, technology, new marketing campaigns, people development and training, and so on.  Each of these would require an investment in time, money, and resources.  Wanting to avoid making “big bets” and costly mistakes, the customer executive needs proof that one course of action makes the most sense before proceeding with it.

In markets and selling environments such as today’s, the solutions provider has a tremendous opportunity to serve the customer by leading with ideas and providing thought leadership throughout the selling process.  A customer values an idea that a solutions provider brings to the table to the extent that the idea addresses a significant opportunity or problem that the customer faces.  As you move higher in the customer organization, the importance of compelling ideas becomes even greater.

However, the challenge for sellers is significant.  Senior executives are looking for more than just “your answer.”  They are focused on the impact that a solution provider can bring, not the features and functions of the solution.  In carpentry terms, customers are interested in “the hole—not the drill.”

In addition, the busy executive may not want to spend meeting time simply answering questions about her business.  Calendars are tight; why should she spend her time educating you?

Increasingly, solutions providers have modified the selling process by leading with ideas in their sales process.  This approach differs significantly from other traditional selling methods; two dimensions of it are differentiators:  the impact of the idea on the customer’s business, and the complexity of the solution that is ultimately delivered to fulfill the idea.

In Part 2, we’ll take a closer look at the customer decision process, and the steps that a solutions provider can take to lead with ideas in guiding the customer.

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