DELIVER VALUE AND MAKE IT SIMPLE TO RENEW AND BUY MORE!
E-Book, Englisch, 138 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-5445-3138-0
Verlag: Value Lifestyle
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
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Foreword
Author’s Note: The manuscript for this book was completed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Because of COVID, I toyed with revising references to face-to-face meetings to reflect the nuances of virtual meetings. However, with halting but hopeful progress toward reopening and the eventual resumption of in-person business meetings, I decided to leave the context as is. All that said, whether our meetings are in-person or online, the same principles and concepts apply. Meet Bob. Bob is in a pickle. A sales associate at a successful technology company, Bob’s problem began two months ago when his largest customer, Acme Brands, hired a new chief financial officer (CFO) to help speed up growth and improve financial performance. Bob had noticed that Acme’s stock performance was not what their CEO had been promising Wall Street, but he didn’t think they were in any real trouble, at least not to the extent it would impact him directly. Now he wasn’t so sure. About a year ago, Bob sold Acme a sizable deal as a “pilot” in one of their six divisions. The assumption was that if things went well, he would be offered the remaining five divisions. As a matter of routine, after the initial award, Bob turned the account over to his internal teams to manage implementation and customer retention. He then turned his attention to finding new opportunities at other accounts. Acme, he reasoned, was well taken care of. But while his year had started off strong, heading into the fourth quarter, Bob’s sales numbers were beginning to lag, and he was now pinning his hopes on reaching this year’s quota by winning that follow-on business at Acme’s other five divisions. Last week, however, Acme’s new CFO put all current initiatives on hold pending a thorough review. This put a stop to the new statement of work (SOW) Bob had been developing for the other five divisions with his primary contact, Tara, and her team. This SOW, which represented nearly his entire sales pipeline, was now on hold indefinitely—and there was nothing he could do about it! To make matters worse, today the CFO pulled Tara (who was also Bob’s biggest champion) into a financial review meeting. In the meeting, the CFO pulled out a spreadsheet with the total billings from Bob’s company to date and said to Tara, “We’re spending a lot of money with these guys. What value have we gotten from them for what we’ve spent so far?” Tara’s rushed boilerplate responses of “Everything is going great” and “We’re happy with their performance” didn’t satisfy the CFO, and he gave her one week to come back with a detailed analysis of the real value Bob’s company had delivered to the business. What Bob had believed to be a good relationship (and plan) was now turning decidedly sour as Tara just gave him three days to come up with a value-delivered statement and present it to Acme. Fast forward a couple of days. In a hard scramble, Bob and his team have pulled together the value he believes his firm has delivered. First, the technology has met all their technical specifications as demonstrated in the proof of concept. Second, he gave them a significant discount to help close the deal before quarter end. Third, the solution was performing in production just like it did in the POC. Finally, the solution was delivered on time and on budget. Bob sent the report to Tara this morning, but now it’s late afternoon, and she has yet to respond to his phone calls and emails. What just happened to Bob? You might argue that a new CFO coming on board and subjecting every spend to intense scrutiny was hardly predictable. But what was entirely predictable was Bob’s eventual need to do more than deliver the promised value to his customer. He needed to get credit for his company’s Past Value Delivered (PVD). For the new CFO at Acme, this would both justify the initial purchase and the planned future purchases for the remaining divisions. But it looks like Bob’s team has confused what Acme bought (better outcomes) with what they paid for (his products and services). If you’ve read the four preceding books in this Value LifecycleTM series (or even just a couple of them), you’ll know that Bob’s last-minute hustle to provide critical value messaging to key customer stakeholders is far too common a scenario. We deliver value and then get credit for that value in order to retain customers and win more business (the main objectives of account management). But we also do it to protect the people who awarded us the business in the first place—the key decision makers who are often under the gun and at significant political risk for their decision to bring in a supplier and their solutions. We must help them look like “heroes” in their organizations by documenting and reporting the important outcomes and the value their decisions have brought to their business. We may bemoan how difficult it is to sell large, complex deals, but in turn, we should always remember how difficult it is for the customer to buy—and then demonstrate internally that they made a good business decision. If there is one theme I hope you’ve embraced throughout the Must-Win Deals series, it is this: It’s all about the customer and what’s important to them (outcomes) while minimizing the risk of uncertainty for you and the customer. In this book, we will explore the primary cause of risk and uncertainty: change. With sales cycles of six to nine months (or longer) for complex B2B deals—not to mention the months it can take to deploy a typical solution before the customer can really start to see meaningful results—change, and the disruption it brings, is inevitable. This book, the fifth and final volume in the Must-Win Deals series, explores delivering (and getting credit for) the promised value and how doing so makes renewals simple, referrals enthusiastic, and upselling and cross-selling opportunities much more bountiful. The first book in the series, Must-Win Deals, reveals the four common things we, as sellers, do to make it challenging for customers to award us key deals. It also explores the idea of pursuing not just any deal, but a Great Deal. The Irresistible Value Proposition then reveals how to develop a Value Proposition that gets the customer excited about doing business with us right now. Book three, The Compelling Proposal, showcases the proposal as a strategic tool to reinforce trust and credibility, making it easier for the customer to buy from us (and sell internally), while managing the uncertainty inherent in the real world. Next, The Painless Negotiation shows how to negotiate effectively by first ensuring we are having the “right negotiation” and then negotiating the “right way.” Our goal as sellers should always be to close a great deal—one that is good for us and the customer—with key deal levers that increase the odds that we can work together to deliver the promised value. I hope you have personally derived great value from this journey! To be sure, change can bring both positive and negative outcomes. One decidedly negative outcome, and one that you must proactively manage, is risk to your current engagement (and, thus, to your customer’s key decision makers). On the positive side, and just as important to your long-term success, are new opportunities to sell that change can create. Although we’ve encountered “the ‘o’ word” often in this series, until now we haven’t answered a fundamental question: What generates an opportunity? And if “change” is the answer (or at least one very important answer), then how do you “hunt for” change when you’re selling? In simple terms, you should be hunting for changes in the customer’s business. This is where opportunities tend to “hide in plain sight.” Is the customer changing their go-to-market strategy? Are they launching new products or services? Are they looking to acquire companies to expand their business and their offerings? Are they considering expansion into international markets? Perhaps they are looking to divest low-growth or unprofitable business lines. Or maybe they are entering into new strategic alliances with other firms. What about changes at the top levels of the organization? These are just a few examples of the types of changes that create new opportunities. And they all have one thing in common: the company is typically prepared to commit resources (especially money) to address each of these potential changes! If you’re like me, you’d rather try to sell into situations where you know the company is committing money and resources. That’s where I’ve done my largest deals. Think about it: every customer (current or prospective) does business in a world of change. Perhaps the only businesses or business-like entities that can operate in a static environment are the government (until there is a political change), monopolies supported and protected by the government (until the laws change), and utilities (until regulations change). For everyone else, change is a constant driver of growth and opportunity. From regulatory changes to fast-evolving technology to competitive pressures to novel solutions, companies must adapt to the change(s) they are up against, and that is where our opportunities lie. As simple as this concept seems, salespeople (and their management) desperate for pipeline still gravitate to the same old playbook, calling on the same customer contacts, looking for funded “projects” they can sell into. Another...
