The Solution Selling Empire Strikes Back

I had a quick trip out to Las Vegas this week for a fun ½ day whiteboard class with a new client, and decided to use the air time to clear out some of my backlog of business books. It was either that or dive into Book 5 of “Game Of Thrones”.

So I picked “The Collaborative Sale” and here is my review and my thoughts – in a longer version than the website or the August newsletter – and written from the Sales Engineering viewpoint.

Classic “Solution Selling” has come under fire and criticism since the publication of The Challenger Sale and the July 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled “The End Of Solution Sales”. The Collaborative Sale by Eades and Sullivan is basically a somewhat artificial and heavy 210 page defense of Solution Selling. Updated and modernized, it pushes the concept of collaborating with your customer to end up with the correct “solution”. You do this, as a seller, by adopting one of three personas – the Micro Marketer, the Visualizer and the Value Driver.

My issues (or pains) with this book is that:

#1 – It is extremely salesrep focused, to the point of placing the rep at the top of the pyramid and everyone else subservient to him/her. I may be biased based upon my target audience of Sales Engineers, but this book seemed worse than most in assuming that no-one else really matters and that the rep solely sets strategy. We all know that doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) happen and that on many occasions the old-hand SE has to introduce the new rep to the politics and history of the account and then continually course correct.

#2 – The basic strategy of artificially adopting and shifting persona seems like you are not being true to yourself or the customer. It’s hard to become the “Trusted Partner” if you aren’t being honest with the customer – they’ll see through it. The personas need to become learned and natural behavior rather than forced tasks and interactions.

#3 It is fixated upon Buyer 2.0 and that’s already last year’s model. Much of the statements about Buyer 1.0 and implicitly Seller 1.0 are straw men designed to make a case, rather than be rooted in reality. The market, the competition and the buyer are constantly adapting, and you need to do that as well.

#4 The coaching strategy is based upon weaknesses and gaps rather than building strengths. Any manager who approaches account reviews with their reps in terms of “what did you do wrong” isn’t going to get too far. Imagine if your manager started with “let me tell you the 10 things you did wrong in that demo”.

#5 I feel (and this is just a feeling and is never explicitly stated) that the importance of Discovery in the Collaborative Sale is diminished on the basis that the customer is already 50-60% of the way through a deal and you are always in catch-up mode. My take is that Discovery is becoming even more important rather than less for the SE community. Sales should take it that way as well.

 As an SE I don’t feel there is much to gain from this book versus good old The New Solution Selling (which I do recommend) unless your company is actually adopting this process. There are changes in promoting customer alignment rather than control and the sections on technology you can use to create a self-brand are interesting, but that’s about it.

I do know that SPI (the folks who own Solution Selling) run great classes with role plays and practical examples that have to be far more on target than this book which focuses on the what, but never on the “how do I do that?”.

This isn’t a book for the SE library. The Challenger Sale is more applicable and on point than the Collaborative Sale.

The Third Edition Is Available!

The Third Edition of Mastering Technical Sales was sent out to bookstores on July 1st. Allowing for the US July 4th holiday the books should be available from Amazon and (my publisher) Artech House during the week of July 7th. The Kindle ebook version will take another week or two.

Since the 2nd edition was published in 2008, a lot has happened, both in our knowledge and the technical SE field in general. We added 4 new chapters around Business Value Discovery, WhiteBoarding, The Trusted Advisor and Building ROI Cases and we also updated practically every other chapter with revised content reflecting our international and non-software experiences over the past six years.

I'm thrilled to announce that the book has received a number of large pre-orders from technical SE teams and that I'll be doing several internal video interviews for various clients. As a little bit of blatant self-promotion - if you are interested in a large bulk order or making the book part of your onboarding program (which dozens of companies have already done) please contact me and I can link you up with my publisher. I am also working on getting a Chinese version available later this year.

What's next? Work is already underway on The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer. That's an eBook intended as an extension to MTS that deals with the often fuzzy topic of what it takes to be a T/A. It's written from an SE point of view, and includes some unique measurement capabilities for Trust - so you can judge how well you are doing!

Thanks for reading and please be sure to give me any feedback about the Third Edition that we can include in the Fourth!!

The MTS Sydney Edition

Welcome to the Australian version of the blog, live from Sydney. This is an exciting couple of weeks as I'll be down under conducting a number of dinner speeches, meetings and training workshops. That also means that the May newsletter was delayed a day because of time zone issues - it should be out 8am on Wednesday 7th May East US Time.

This months lead article is The Challenger Sales Engineer - where I give six great reasons why the Sales Engineer is the perfect person in the sales team to execute on the Challenger premise. It's something that every good SE has known for a long time, but often a lack of courage, permission and corporate culture gets in the way.

Article #2 is an update to "The Stress Free Demo" and examines a dozen things the SE can do to reduce the possibility of things going wrong in 'the big demo". It's amazing how much relates to planning and preparation!

Book Of The Month is Gerry Weinberg's Becoming A Technical Leader. It's written more from an It-problem solving point of view, but has some great insights in dealing with and motivating the "techie". And there is a varying percentage of techie in every Sales Engineer.

Also - a reminder about The SE Manager Pocket Guide if you didn't download it during April, and also that I finally released my video series "The Consultative Sales Engineer".

Good Selling!

Technical Trials and Tribulations

So this has been an interesting 10 days in that a strange bug effectively killed our website. I learnt a couple of things:

1. It's an important part of the business.
2. It badly needs to be updated and modernized.
3. Yahoo (my hosting service) has terrible technical support as I spent hours on hold and they hung up on my several times.
4. The bug was ultimately the results of some poor code from Amazon which was mis-interpreted by Yahoo Site Builder.

But enough of my problems. We are back up, and the new content has finally been posted. You'll be able to read about The Sales Engineer Advantage - why we SE's should be rock stars when in front of the customer (but aren't). There is also an interesting article on The Five SE Manager Basics (which are actually good for everyone else as well!).

The MTS Book Of The Month for SE's is Marshall Goldsmith's "What Got You There Won't Get You Here".  It's been one of my favorite books for years, and I recently had the opportunity to re-read it as part of preparation for a workshop I ran. Well worth your time to pick up a copy and learn about the 20 bad habits that may be keeping you back.

I challenge anyone to read the book and NOT see themselves in there somewhere. You really do feel like you are putting the training wheels back on your career.

More to come. The 3rd Edition of Mastering Technical Sales is nearing completion and is slated for a early July publication, and The Trusted Advisor Sales Engineer in now underway as a planned eBook for later in the ear.

Plus I'm going to be in Australia or a week or two in May running some seminars and giving a couple of speeches.

Good Selling!

 

It's Not A Problem Until The Customer Says It Is A Problem, Unless ...

I had a very interesting experience this morning, listening in to a sales call initiated by one of my customers with one of their customers. My role was to quietly observe, and provide feedback on the entire process. I always enjoy these type of engagements as I get to learn about a new piece of technology, see buyer and seller behavior in action - plus it is great research and consulting material.

This call had a twist. After a little prompting the customer (a Senior IT Director) readily volunteered a couple of business issues that she had, the economic and political pain they were facing, and why they had to do something. In essence, she gave the sales team everything they needed to hear for some great Business Value Discovery.
 
"Not a problem", said the eager salesperson, "we can fix that for you".
 
(Now that surprised both me and the Sales Engineer on the call as neither of the problems were really in the sweet spot of the vendor. AND the IT Director knew that was the case.)
 
 Before the SE could jump in and qualify that response the customer replied:
 
"Wow. That is fantastic. Just to be sure, can you describe my problems to me in your own words?"
 
She was actually trying to help him, which was more than I would have done as a former CIO.  The rep didn't get the hint and plowed ahead with DESCRIBING HIS SOLUTION. Some amazing cloud-driven big-data social thingamabob technology.

She answered, "Yes, but what exactly is my problem?"

Common sense prevailed, I heard the SE typing a message in the background to the rep which said something along the lines of "Be Quiet!".

The SE took over, and gave a really nice paraphrase of the customers problems. You could hear the customer smiling on the other end of the phone. Things went much better.

The moral of the story? There are two.

1. "No problem" is a dangerous phrase and probably not one the customer wants to hear from you. At least not immediately.

2. It is a great exercise to paraphrase the key business issues back to the customer so that they know that you know.

 

Objections And Questions And Answers .. And Sales Engineers

I've always had a problem with the skill of "Objection Handling". Let me clarify that - not with personally handling whatever a client may ask me, but in the actual labelling of the task. Here's why.

I think "Objection Handling" is a salesperson activity. As in "I just gave a great pitch, and if I can hammer through these last few objections I'll get the deal!" It sets up the entire activity as something that is a little confrontational, maybe defensive and certainly becoming "us" (vendor) against "them" (client with money).

Sales Engineers Don't Handle Objections, They Answer Questions

What I've come to realize over the years, based on listening in to thousands of sales calls plus my own experiences in selling MTS services, is nearly 90% of the issues a customer may raise are ...  simply raised because they want an answer to a question. In fact you can turn any objection into an implicit question. Even the classic your solution costs too much (nicely handled in this Visualize Blog Post) can be reframed as "help me to understand the value of your solution and why I should care?"

I feel this approach has a few benefits.

1. It ensures that in the customer conversation you listen to understand, instead of listening to respond. A crucial part of active listening.
2. It reminds you that you have to understand why a customer is asking the question. And if you don't know - bounce it back and find out!
3. It positions you as the customers advocate and a step closer to that "Trusted Advisor" status.
4. You'd be amazed at what you can learn about a person and the company based on the questions they ask. (Hmm - think about that during your next Discovery call.)

There are some warnings too.

1. See point #2 above. If you don't know why a question is being asked - that is a danger signal in itself.
2. Make sure that you share just enough to answer the question. For many technical SE's it is viewed as an opportunity to show how smart you are. Not the purpose of the meeting! It really isn't.
3. Don't stray into other areas. Stay away from sales-type responses (for example, the standard SE response for pricing is "I Know Nothing")

So give it a try. Think "Answering Questions" (with Short Amazing Answers) instead of "Handling Objections" and see the difference it can make.
 

Micro-Resolutions And The February Newsletter

 

So much for the good intentions about blogging more in 2014. So .. I decided to follow the advice of the latest business book I read and reviewed .. Small Move, Big Change By Christine Arnold. She says that New Year Resolutions (or any kind of resolutions) are mostly destined to fail and proposes an alternate approach in which the resolutions are made on a smaller and more measurable scale. So instead of saying "I will do a better job of blogging in 2014" I instead created a micro-resolution which states "I will blog the day before the monthly newsletter comes out and two weeks after that."

Its measurable, very achievable, and may well turn into a habit. I like it!

The February Newsletter - which will now go out to almost 20,000 SE's across the globe, features two interesting articles. The first "Why Do Bad Sales Calls Happen" looks at poor sales calls from the SE point of view. You'll discover that although the effect is very measurable, your view of success is different from that of the salespersons. The good news is that if you decide to take action, instead of complaining, there is a lot you can do to lower the percentage of bad calls to participate it. It's not that hard!

Maybe to get those calls fixed you need to improve your email communications. That is what "BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front - for Email" examines. You'll get seven practical tips for improving email and shortening your reading and processing time. This months "Ask John" deals with the problem of reps scheduling sales calls during presales training - and how to lessen the impact.

All good stuff - thanks for reading. And we will see how my micro-resolution turns out!