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Special Feature - Part 1 We are very fortunate to have a best selling author and leading sales strategist right here in the Cleveland area. Marc Miller is the founder and president of Sogistics Corporation, a sales productivity improvement firm dedicated to providing organizations with ideas, products, and services that help transform salespeople into businesspeople who sell.
Mark has agreed to share with us an excerpt from his new book A Seat at the Table. Marc will also be speaking at the November 10th 2009 Chapter Meeting, you won't want to miss that meeting! Click here to visit Sogistics online, and click here to purchase Marc's first book Selling is Dead.
A Seat at the Table Chapter One: Game Change “Connecting to customer strategy is a game-changer. This is not selling as usual. In fact, it’s the opposite. When done properly, the client no longer sees you as a salesperson. You are now a businessperson focused exclusively on helping the customer achieve their strategic goals. And when that shift occurs, everything – and I mean everything – changes.”
John McVeigh Let’s be frank – selling has an ugly connotation, even consultative selling. New research indicates that senior executives do not see salespeople as consultative at all—at least not consultants who can drive or grow their businesses. Instead, they see a group with blinders on—myopically focused on making the short-term sale that adds little value to the mission of their customer’s enterprise. Candidly, how do you feel about those stockbrokers cold-calling you in the middle of the day? Do you really believe those people are worthy of your time, or have your best interest at heart? Unfortunately—justifiably or not—these are the people you are compared to when reaching out to new executives and prospects that you could help, given the chance. This voice-of-customer research delivers both good and bad news for salespeople. The bad news is that business executives and corporate customers feel that far too many salespeople are tactical product-pushers disengaged from the real meaning and purpose of their organizations. These salespeople may have a genuine desire to help, but the help is in the wrong areas. This makes them a well-intentioned group, but misaligned and disconnected from what the customer really cares about. Now, here’s the good news. There is new evidence to suggest that salespeople can transcend their current “brand” as product peddlers to achieve record levels of productivity. But, to do this, they must accept one simple truth: The only thing a customer cares about is value. The last page of this book states this in large print. Copy it and give it to everyone who talks to customers. It is the most important principle you’ll read in these pages. Based on this truism, there is only one foolproof strategy to drastically improve sales productivity. To achieve radically better sales results, you must become radically more valuable to customers—strategically valuable. This growth strategy trumps all others. The game has changed, and new research suggests customers are pleading for a new and different type of value from salespeople and account managers. And, when this new value is created, captured, and delivered, customers no longer view salespeople as salespeople at all. They now see “businesspeople who sell”—those worthy of a seat at their table. Earning a Seat at the Table Customers today are looking for value in the form of help— specifically, strategic help. Corporations are under duress as never before—business failure and executive turnover are at an all time high, and business models need adjusting not once every year, but seemingly every week. And executives—people not unlike you and I—often get lost in this rapid pace of change. They need to focus on the future, but the day to day of running a business is like gravity, a force that continuously drags them down into the daily muck, battling the fires necessary to drive short-term results. As a result, senior executives often get off track, becoming disconnected from the real purpose of their organizations—to sustain profitable growth. And this is where you come in. You have an opportunity to play a new role, and that new role has two distinct parts. First, you have to help executives reconnect to their strategies. When you help customers reconnect to what’s important, you connect to them. It’s that simple. Second, you need to devise solutions that will help them achieve or expand their master strategic plan. When you suggest solutions that add value to critical customer strategies, you leave competitors in the dust. Since your competition is myopically focused on selling products and services that add little value to the bigger picture strategy of the customer, these traditional competitors will no longer even be on your radar of competition. To help you prepare yourself for this new role, I’m going to teach you how to quit talking about expenses (products and services) and start having discussions about investments (productivity and differentiation). From the perspective of the executives you will be calling, these are polar opposites. I’m also going to show you how easy it is to comprehend your customer’s strategies and connect your products and services to them. And this is how you will earn a seat at the table—that lofty position that executives reserve for those special businesspeople who add strategic value, who make a profound impact on their results, their enterprises, and their people. When you have a seat, you are seen as an investment, not an expense. You become the type of person customer executives seek for advice before making the big-bet decisions that forever shape the future of their enterprises. When you sit at the table of strategy, you are always welcome. Most important, when you gain a seat at the table, sales productivity will rise significantly because of your ability to do the following: 1. Protect the core: Customer executives who consider you to be strategically valuable will not let their internal procurement people reduce the relationship to the lowest common denominator—that is, a cheaper price! Ensuring that senior executives view your solutions as mission critical to their strategies will fortify your relationship with them. That will protect the consistent sales of your core products that you and your company rely on—and that are facing tougher competition in our globalized, transparent, and commoditized economy. 2. Gain access: When you have earned a seat at the table, you will be able to connect with more senior executives—the ones who can make big bet, discretionary, risk/reward decisions that affect your offerings. Executives will not refer salespeople to their colleagues inside or outside of their companies, but they will gladly introduce “strategic advisors” to other executives. It’s that simple. 3. Create demand: Creating demand for new products and solutions is the platinum competence of the very best sellers. This often requires building a case for change with multiple executives and decision makers. When you show executives that you not only understand their strategy, but also can add significant value to it, you’re halfway to constructing a rock-solid foundation for change. And this will help protect you from the ubiquitous “no decision” loss of a sale that we all face in long sales cycles. 4. Get the best of both worlds: When you successfully add value to the strategies of executives, you are able to both protect your core and sell the new, without having to sacrifice one opportunity for the other. In other words, commodity products are protected and new solutions are sold. This happens in lockstep, because you are creating a valuable relationship with the client, and the client doesn’t want to lose you. How will you accomplish these things? That’s what I intend to teach you—in specific detail, not broad generalities and philosophical bromides. Everyone knows they should be calling on more senior executives, but few know exactly how to do it. That is the mission of this book.
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Copyright 2009 STLE Cleveland Section |
