I recently re-read“Hope is not a Strategy – The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale” by Rick Page. The book is great and below are some excerptswhich I found valuable.
“If business painor political power for sponsorship is missing from the evaluation, it will siton your forecast forever. Picking theright battles is the key to resource allocation. Most salespeople in the complex sale work atmost, ten to twenty opportunities in a year.”
“Proposals don’tsell, people do. The win rate ofresponses to unsolicited proposals is very low. The veterans know that if you didn’t help refine the requirements, someoneelse probably did.”
“The key toconsultative selling is to determine the client’s needs first. It is even better if you help them determinewhat their needs are. If you first learnof an opportunity when the requirements definition lands on your desk, you havealready missed the first step in the sales cycle. You are to some degree already out ofcontrol, especially if someone else helped write the requirements.”
“Why is it sodifficult for salespeople to get an accurate understanding of where theprospect is in the complex sale? The reason is that it’s to the customer’sadvantage to keep you in the dark. Aslong as they can do that, they have control. And if you knew where you really stood in these sales, you might goaway, and they don’t want that to happen – yet. Rarely does a client say to a vendor ‘you really don’t have a chance atwinning this business. You need to trysomewhere else.’ It’s to their advantageto keep at least three vendors in the hunt. Why? i) They need to showthey studied the leading vendors in the marketplace. In case the project fails, they don’t want tobe accused of not having made a studied decision; ii) After the vendor is selected, the acquisition phase starts, andthey will need multiple vendors at that point to drive the price down; iii) If they can’t come to legal termsand conditions on their first choice, they will need a backup.”
“The salespersonwho discusses the competition too early or too aggressively will be perceivedas unprofessional or defensive. But onewho doesn’t differentiate or control the issues will be in constant reactionmode.”
“The best salespeople have high listen-to-talk ratios. They used the classic tools of probing – who, what, where, when, why aswell as reflexive probes such as “oh tell me more” to keep the client talking.”
“The first step isto find a latent business problem and create a vision of what life could belike if they solve it. They also createa vision of what bad things could happen if it’s not solved because theirbiggest competitor is ‘no action’. Thiscreates a gap between where the client is and where the client could be. The next step is to quantify the gap anddefine the financial return on investment. Then they must find a sponsor with enough power to whom this gap ispolitically painful and emotional because again, pain doesn’t come from theproblem, it comes from the political embarrassment or the chance for glory.”
“Competitiveadvantage falls into three categories: you’re either the low price vendor,value differentiated, or focused on a niche market.”
“IBM rarely had thebest product the soonest. But it didn’tmatter. They put the big blue label onit and drowned the client in enough service engineers to provide a technical solution. Clients paid a premium for low political riskbecause no one ever got fired for selecting IBM. They may not have had the best product atthat time, but they had the best solution.”
“Concentration offorce is the first principal strategy. Spreading yourself too thin means not concentrating resources on thesales you could win because you are spreading time on lower quality prospects. Doing 90% of what it takes to win doesn’tresult in 90% of the revenue, it results in zero. You must pick the battles you can win and winthe battles you pick.”
“This is a criticalpart of the sale when we begin listening and out-caring the competition, thusbuilding the bonds of rapport that will eventually lead to trust. Even if we know what the pains are, it’s notenough. The client needs to confess them.”
“A greaterunderstanding of the requirements and how they were developed allowed us to 1)disconnect a requirement that we couldn’t meet from the real business problem;2) refocus the buyer on the strategic problem; and 3) establish linkage betweenour capabilities and the bigger problem. Actually the first step was to gain access to executives above theproject team.”
“Nobody asked forthe VCR. Nobody put out a request forWindows. But customers knew they wantedit when they saw it. These were dormantpains.”
“One of our clientssaid this about a large defense contractor with multiple subsidiaries: ‘havingbusiness at one business unit not only doesn’t help me at the next one, itactually hurt me. They hate each otherso much that if one business unit is for me, the other ones are againstme. But they are all united in onevalue: they hate corporate. So the potentialfor working my way to the corporate offices and coming down as their worldwidestandard is impossible in an account like this.”
“Pain doesn’t comefrom the business problem, it comes from the political embarrassment of thebusiness problem. If the pain or lostopportunity is not visible, then it’s not embarrassing and it will not drivebusiness buying activity to a close.”
“When evaluationsstall or fail, one of two things is usually missing: either there is not a realbusiness problem of great enough magnitude or the project lacks the properpolitical sponsorship.”
“having establishedthis channel of communication, never give it up. Always have a good reason to call thisexecutive back. “Do you mind if I keep you appraised of how the project isgoing? And by the way, when we do the needs assessment, we’d like to spend sometime with you to understand what the strategic objectives are for thisproject.”
“Mr Prospect, we’veannounced a 6% price increase. We’d hate to see you buy the same proposal laterat a higher price, so we really need to get this business in by the end of thequarter to secure this price. – Not only is this technique predictable, butafter months of building value for your solution, you have now commoditizedyourself. You have turned it from valueto price on order to close business at the end of the quarter. Once you have offered a discount, you haveannounced what kind of vendor you are and the only question now is the price. Let the games begin.”
“The best of plansrequire critical thinking and that is perceived by some people as negative. It is true there is a self-fulfilling effectof positive thinking. However too oftenthis results in assumptions or happy ears for salespeople who are alwaysignoring the facts. The account looksgood, right up until it’s lost.”
“Bad news early isgood news because we can either refine our strategy or withdraw from theaccount. Blind spots late are bad news.”
“Flankingstrategies in sales situations actually mean one of five things:
-Changing the painmeans either finding new issues to link into, linking into higher issues thathaven’t been addressed before, or linking them to issues that are sponsored bymore powerful people.
-Changing the powermeans encouraging your sponsors to exert their power or bring in influencerswho have not been drawn to the evaluation yet.
-Changing theprocess means adding steps or taking out steps that would allow you todemonstrate your strengths and expose competitor’s weaknesses.
-Integration is oneof the benefits that separates a solution from a product. If you can link your solution into a client’sexisting technology, they will benefit from lower risk and the simplicity ofleverage of dealing with fewer vendors.
-Expanding scopemeans broadening the proposal to include products or capabilities the competitioncannot deliver.”
“You must refocusoff the imagined political benefit of a lower price, and on the longer termbenefits of the overall project. “Mr Prospect, how are you measured and whatyou will be remembered for three years from now won’t be the price, it will bethe success of the project. If this goeswell, the cost will be a detail. If theproject goes poorly, no one will say ‘well at least we got a bargain.’”
“Never go intolegal or purchasing alone. Bargain withyour sponsors early when the price issue is not as important for them and askthem to accompany you into negotiations.”
“To a salesperson,project leaders can be gatekeepers. Andthey are often covered in political glue. Once you touch them you’re stuck. One approach is not to touch them at all. They may be nice people and they may beinstrumental to your sale, but they can limit your navigation. Try not to take no from a person who can’tsay yes.”
The book is a greatread and I would recommend it for anyone who navigates complex or longenterprise sales cycles.
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