Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

• When they can understand the political power structure of the buying committee and what part each person will play in the decision-making process.

• When they can effectively read accounts, devise and communicate a winning strategy, and lead a sales team to victory.

• When they can contribute knowledge to the client beyond their product — industry trends, best practices, innovations, contacts, ideas, benchmarks, and an outside expert’s assessment of their own company.

References — A Treasury of Transferred Trust

Because trust is generally low in the early parts of an evaluation, you will need to provide proof statements of your capabilities. This is where references play an active part in your sales process. If you have a capability and your client doesn’t, you should encourage thorough reference checking in your client’s evaluation process.

References need to be developed and rewarded, and their time needs to be treated respectfully. They deserve notice that they will be called, what the issues may be, and — whereas a reference should not be bought or bribed — they should be rewarded for the time required by extra service, responsiveness, or other acknowledgments.

One caution about giving references before the prospect has “earned” the right to talk to your best customers: Most salespeople don’t understand that when you ask a client to be a reference for a particular prospect, you have used up a reference call whether the prospect calls or not. You also have to be careful that you don’t give references so early that the prospect calls without enough knowledge to ask the right questions, and your reference is put in the position of being the salesperson.

By the way, calling and debriefing your references after they have been contacted by your prospect is an excellent way to get a perspective on where you are in the sale. The prospect will tell them things that he or she won’t tell you. Another way to provide trust in a competitive evaluation is through unsolicited references. If you can get your references to call your prospects and give unsolicited references, that may be even better than simply providing them with a list.

Keep ’Em Honest

Also, never give a list of references to just one person on the buying committee. I’ve seen an excellent list of references given to somebody on a buying committee and the deal lost to bad references. How does that happen? The person calling probably had negative preference for you and biased the questions or the answers. And since he or she was the only one calling, the result went unchallenged until after the sale.

Give lists to everyone on the buying committee. This will keep the checkers honest because they know they aren’t the only ones calling. If you think evaluations are conducted fairly and without bias, you can skip this step. But you had better be independently wealthy.

As preference is built among individuals on the buying team, people start to move beyond neutral to where they really want your solution. These people can become good sources of information about your competitive position, hidden agendas, or competitive tactics.

Without good inside informants, you are flying through mountains in a fog. If no one is helping you or telling you that you’re winning, ask yourself what your real chances are in this deal. Again, if you’re not getting signals that you’re winning, you’re probably not. Good salespeople listen for what their prospects don’t say.

The Pronoun Shift

One way to tell if you are winning is that as preference grows, people start changing their pronouns and questions from if they buy to when they buy and from whom to how. If you’ve given your presentation and your prospects aren’t asking questions about implementation, risk management, contract issues and support, then you are in trouble. If they are not talking about how to do business with you, they are probably not planning to do business with you. This is when you are in that dreadful zone of, “You’re not winning, and they aren’t telling you.”

This is always when salespeople get a terrible amount of misinformation. Not because buyers are mean — although in some cases they are — but they may tell you what they think is true and might not know for sure. Or they might like you personally but not prefer your company or product. Or they may want to keep you in the game as a safety net in case they can’t reach terms with the other vendor.

By the time you get to the presentation or proposal, you need more than inside informants — you need power sponsors at high levels. As prospects reach the decision-making phase, politics erupt, and the process can change dramatically. As they approach the crucible of decision, multimillion dollar deals can change in as little as 24 hours. At this point, you need people who really want you to win — people who will give you the information you need, introduce you to the people you need to meet, and go to bat for you with procurement and the decision committee.

Account Management—From Preference to Trust

Many companies define account management objectives in different ways. Some want caretakers, whereas others want to dominate the account by making it so that the customer never has a reason to call a competitor.

To build company-to-company trust, you have to make the first people who choose you look good for doing so. If you overpromise or underdeliver, you make repeat business — where true opportunity lies — an uphill battle. And you end up with a customer base of largely unhappy people.

The purpose of account management is to build company-to-company trust. The gateway is performance and quality on the first sale. If you don’t exceed expectations on the first sale, you may have inoculated the client against future business.

You have to do more than deliver and perform on the first business — you also have to document your value. The customer will not always do this. If you want to build from rapport to preference to trust, you have to go in and document and publicize what you’ve done for the client and why it was a good decision to choose you or keep you. Rarely will the client go to much effort to dispute these claims if they are reasonable, but it gives ammunition to your supporters.

If you have built trust with powerful individuals in an organization, you then can borrow that trust for access to other people you need to meet. This is called sponsorship, and it allows you to radiate successfully to the rest of the organization or industry. The last step of an implementation process is to proactively ask your sponsor who else you can be doing this for in the company, in the industry, and in the network. Then you need to ask those people to help you gain access to the people you need to meet.