At a client workshop yesterday in New York I wrote three words on the whiteboard that served as a great backdrop and challenge for the day:
Qualified?
Necessary?
Vital?
Think of this as a hierarchy or scale. As you reach out to or meet with customers, what exactly do you think you’re establishing with your claims and charts and numbers and diagrams? I’d posit that the vast majority of sellers spend an overwhelming share of their time and energy on qualification.
Our audience matches your target consumer.
Our reach is really big.
Our technology really works.
We measure things the way you do.
Past customers have had success with us. Just look at our case studies!
I call this “credentialing” and it only tells the customer we’re another qualified option for you to consider. But customers today aren't looking for more qualified options. This is probably why they don't return your emails and ghost you after that chummy lunch-and-learn.
Set aside for a moment the possibility of establishing why your company or technology is vital; This would imply you are truly a must-buy … that the customer will literally fail without you. It may be true situationally, but it’s rare. Let’s focus the rest of this post instead on a more answerable but often-overlooked question:
Are you necessary?
To establish necessity means that you fill a very specific need in completing or enhancing the customer’s current plan. That you address a very clear gap in their technology or strategy, a gap that is costing them time, money, competitive advantage or all three. That by paying $2 to add your services to the mix they will see a return of $20 – and that you’ll be able to show the math on how you plan to deliver on that promise.
To be necessary means stating all this very specifically and very early. In our training work we focus on a concept called the Diagnosis by asking the question, why does this customer truly need the help of your company right now? No bullshit, no spin, no posturing. Just real reflection and business empathy. You write out the problem that you are prepared to help solve, the gap you are prepared to help fill. You make it the second slide of your presentation. You make it the subject and opening lines of your email. It’s the unsolved problem from which you work backward.
Everything begins with the asking and answering of this question. Everything that matters.
To do less is to simply keep showing up as another qualified option. And there’s no future in that.
Original artwork by Eric Sands.
Most of us show up for our hard-to-book C-Suite interactions with an agenda that’s far too junior and tactical, and we get swiftly delegated or – worse – ignored. It's because we don’t fully realize what the C in C-Suite stands for.
Too many of us plan meticulously for much of the meeting, but fail to do any planning for how it will end. Too much time is spent early on exposition and data, and too little is left for the disciplined closing process that could actually lead to a sale. Another mad, disorganized packing job ensues. And the probability and next actions we post in our CRM are little more than educated guesses. It doesn’t have to be this way.
As sellers and executives, we’re both sporadically connected to our colleagues and yet consistently alone in our work, accompanied by only our numbers, hopes and doubts. At Upstream Group, we are asking – humbly and curiously – what our role should be in this Season of Both. Why do our customers and community truly need us now? We are finding answers and developing strategies based on a handful of questions… questions I’d like to share with you today.
We spend an overwhelming share of our time building stories and presentations and proposals – our sandcastles – and almost no time on the closing and qualification strategies that would help them withstand the rising tide of the customer’s conflicting agendas and the waves of our competitors’ subsequent proposals and ideas.
We all get to decide how we show up. Leaning into these decisions won’t necessarily change the numbers or the circumstances, but they will change the narrative from one of anxiety and randomness to a story of perseverance, growth and personal victory. They may not change your Q3 number, but they will change YOU.
The world of work we shut down in March 2020 is gone. Thinking we can just go back to it by getting on the train and turning on the lights is unrealistic to the point of delusion. Attracting, hiring and retaining valuable employees has never been trickier. What you could solve in 2012 with more money and a bigger title requires much more thoughtful answers today. Your competitive future depends on them.
You are shooting yourself in the foot and it’s clouding your vision, mucking up your forecasts and making your sales cycle longer and more unstable. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are three self-inflicted wounds that can be fatal to your win-rate, but that are also easily corrected.
This afternoon in San Francisco a man named John Durham died after many years of serious health problems. Those are the facts, but not the story. To those of us who knew and loved him so much, he was THE DURHAM: a life force, a gentle soul, a fantastic dresser and a terrible speller. In short, he was THE DURHAM. To his friends, no explanation is necessary. To those who were never touched by him, no explanation is possible.
I wrote this post about the value of attention a few years ago, pre-pandemic and pre-Zoom. Lightly-edited, it seems even more relevant now. Making others feel fully-attended earns us their attention in return. Read on.
Last week I used this space to share several of the leading themes from Write this Down: Memes and Metaphors for a Better Life in Sales, a book that I've begun working on. This week, a few more, including some challenging advice for both managers, individual contributors and their fellow humans from many walks of life.
I've been outlining a book that will be called Write this Down: Memes and Metaphors for a Better Life in Sales. Since fleshing out the book will take a while longer, I've decided to share many of the aforementioned Memes and Metaphors across the next few posts of The Drift. Read on, comment, share, push back and apply them to your own life in sales.
Five years ago, P&G CMO Marc Pritchard called bullshit on the digital supply chain and challenged us to get our house in order. I’ll make it even simpler. Tell the truth. Sell real stuff. Clean up after yourself. Leave the place a little better than how you found it. Create confidence. Now Google and Apple have done us all a favor. They not only locked the door to the digital funhouse; they pretty much burned the place down. What we build now is up to us. I hope we build back better.