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Selling to BIG Co

May 14, 2009 at 8:48 pm · Filed under Favorites, Sell it to me ·Tagged , ,

Without a doubt selling your innnovation is CRUNCH time. Not only must the product be right, but have you the savvy and strategy to make the technical success a commercial success.

I came across a resource from those clever people at Xplane some while ago, and thought I’d share my experiences to the series of challenges as portrayed in ‘Selling to Big Co’; so…

Picture1

Welcome to BigCo, land of the complex sale, where each meeting could be your last. Each step in the sales process can move you forward or torpedo the business for good.

All along the way, the people of BigCo will have numerous conversations about your product; with each other, with their leaders and managers, with consultants – even with your competitors.

HOW CAN YOU BE SURE YOUR SOLUTION WILL BE FULLY AND COMPLETELY UNDERSTOOD, EVEN WHEN YOU CAN’T BE THERE YOURSELF?

Here are some of the challenges you will need to be prepared for….

  • Picture2Your well-meaning but bumbling champion miscommunicated your value proposition.

You invested at considerable risk to your business in an idea you all think is a winner. Will the value be so obvious to the customer you wont need to sell it?; ‘if we build it – they will come’. If the answer is no (and it will be!) then why put it into the hands of someone who is not prepared, or does not have a stake in its success? Sound outrageous? Its done every day with distributors and agents, sales people with improper incentives and/or the wrong tools.


  • Picture3Frontline managers and workers couldn’t see how your solution would help them to do their jobs better.

Consider this.. on the whole people don’t like change, especially if they don’t have to, so what would persuade them to change vendor or adopt a supposedly better solution. Whats in it for me!!

In order to address this, sell benefits..not features. How does your offering make your customers job easier, faster, better, cheaper, more productive etc etc? OK then prove it…show me the data, demonstrate it.. here…now!!


  • Picture4A competitor used technical jargon as a ’smokescreen’ to confuse buyers about your solution.

You know who your competitors are (I hope), put yourself in their shoes and think about how they would claim a superior proposition or attempt to expose your weaknesses where they have strengths. Be prepared for such a rebuttal have data, facts and evidence as per the last point.


  • Picture5A consultant who has ties to your competitor recommended against you, and nobody knew enough to disagree.

Technical businesses will work with academics or leaders in their field of chosen work. They often perform private consultancy and therefore have allegiances to companies they have worked with in the past. Who are influencers in your field? Who do they work with? Consider trade association, societies, conference organising commitees, speakers and chairs, researchers. Make sure you get the opportunity to sell the merits of your solution. Work with your own sectoral gurus and develop them into advocates.


  • Picture6The VP of NO, who must approve all purchases over £100k didn’t understand your solution.

A Power player can make the decisions about how dollars are spent. Period. Sometimes referred to as the “VP of No,” they don’t have to ask permission, and they care primarily about results.

By the time you talk to a Power Player, you’d better understand the company and the problem and you’d better have a solution to offer ideally advocated by other organisation members, but mmost importantly demonstrating a results based benefit. Power players make their decisions and move on quickly, so be prepared to move fast if this person says yes.


  • Picture7The gatekeeper didn’t understand how you were different, so you never got to meet the commercial people

And don’t underestimate Gatekeepers like Secretaries, PAs and potentially anyone else meant to be organise and control. Their job is to manage the traffic moving in and out of the organization. They are responsible for keeping the “wrong” people out and letting the “right” people in. A Gatekeeper can be a powerful ally who can put you in front of the buyer — or, if alienated, they can be a powerful foe.


  • Picture8The buyer skimmed your proposal, but didn’t understand the key differentiator you had worked so hard to establish.

By this time, you have hopefully many advocates and developed a tailored argument specific to the benefits your product will bring. However you must be able to communicate all all levels and prevent creating your own smokescreen with jargon. Dont forget the buyer is concerned with Quality, Cost and Delivery. How do you stack up, this might be a differentiator if your competition fails to deliver on-time and has unreliable product; even if they are cheaper.

Know your stuff, know your customer, know your competition and be prepared.

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Stop-Start for ideas

March 14, 2009 at 10:22 pm · Filed under Favorites, Ideas

Stop working.

What? Yes, well kind of. I have always found in my that some of my best ideas, greatest accomplishments, come not from spending more time at work but from time away from work. I was always fortunate I worked in international sales so found myself with time to work outside the business. I maintain a diverse level of interests, both because I love learning but also because it helps me succeed. I often find myself applying what I learn from reading a book on, say, brain science or parenting or underwater basket weaving, directly to my business. There are no new ideas; only old ideas used in new ways. You don’t need to quit your job, of course – you can start by just taking a lunch break. Try it; you may come back more relaxed and with a completely new perspective.

Start asking questions.

When times get bad, we stop asking good questions. The answers seem so obvious and pessimistic that we fall victim to assumptions. But now is the time to be inquisitive and start asking the right type of questions. Your brain is a prediction machine — if you ask the right questions, you will usually get some surprising answers. The best questions are prospective and start with how, why, and what (as opposed to retreating questions like “how did this happen,” “why me,” and “what in the world is going on”). If all seems hopeless, then try asking different questions.

Stop/Start ideas

So next time you invest in yourself and you travel, have a meal… wonder what problems this business has; question the service; could your experience be better? Develop a passion and understanding for anything business related. Ideas will flow in a way you wont be able to contain.

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Getting to Yes

March 11, 2009 at 8:39 pm · Filed under Culture Vultures, Favorites

Someone once said “Innovation isn’t about saying ‘yes’, it’s about saying ‘no’ to everything but the most essential features.”

lets think about that……

Innovation is all about delivering value to a customer.  At the core of this is the notion of saying YES.

  • YES, I can make possible for you what others have not.
  • YES, I can improve your experience and lower the cost to you at the same time.
  • YES, I can not merely meet your basic requirements, but I can also delight you not by exceeding your expectations, but by redefining them.

Of course, it is important to say yes to the right question.  This is why the first step of any innovation initiative must always be to understand your customer, your market, your product, and your capability.  By listening carefully, you can identify the true, unmet need that your customer has and be able to map your innovation goals to filling the job the customer will hire your product to perform.

Having this focus on customer needs and aspirations will allow you to say yes to innovation and not waste time saying no to things that aren’t relevant.

Remember the man from DelMonte?

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Other peoples ideas!

February 28, 2009 at 11:13 pm · Filed under Favorites, Says who? ·Tagged

‘The winner is the chef who takes the same ingredients as everyone else and produces the best results’ - Edward de Bono

Sometimes the best ideas dont have to be your own. You just have to make them work better for you.

Very often your customers know what they want best, even if you dont, just ask them. Starbucks do.

http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/

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Sell benefits.. not features

February 25, 2009 at 8:24 pm · Filed under Favorites, Sell it to me ·Tagged

“Customers buy benefits, not features.”

So goes the refrain, but many sales reps (and almost all marketeers) are challenged when it comes to differentiating between the two.  Actually, it’s easy.  A “feature” is something that the product or service “does”; a “benefit” is a positive change in the customer’s condition.

This is vitally important for us technical product developers who get ‘lost in the weeds’. To give a very basic example,the safety roof on a car is a feature.  That it can save your family from being killed or injured in a wreck is a benefit.

As a general rule, customers remember benefits far longer than they remember features.  However, it’s in your interest to make your benefits as memorable as possible, because the longer they stick in the customer’s mind, the easier it will be for you to close the sale.

How can you make sure that customer benefits are memorable.

  1. Keep them short. Most people can only hold three thoughts in their short-term memory at one time. If you try to have more than three, the customer will start forgetting them.  If you can, get it down to two.
  2. Keep them unique. Make sure that any benefit that you present is unique to you and your firm.  Example: “we’re the only company that guarantees you a productivity increase” is better than “our product increases your productivity.”
  3. Keep them concrete. The vaguer the benefit, the less likely it is that the customer will remember it.  Example: “We decrease average inventory costs by 25 percent” is better than “we radically reduce your inventory costs.”
  4. Keep them simple. Replace technical jargon with everyday language.  Example: “connects you wirelessly almost anywhere” is better than “fully compatible with wideband 802.11.”
  5. Keep them clear. Edit out the meaningless biz-blab.  See the post “Vote: The World’s Worst Biz-Blab” for a list of the worst examples of what to avoid.

If all else fails apply the ‘So-What’ principle. You are the customer bombarded with lots of information…..so what!!

Adpated from an original article in Sales Machine.

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Avoid “me too”

February 23, 2009 at 7:44 pm · Filed under Favorites, Product Beautiful

product_comparisonWant to be a bad product manager, rush an undifferentiated product to market in order to grab market share.

Sure, a competitor may have beat you to the market, but now that they are out there creating demand for an innovative offering, you don’t have time to waste. Your version may not be terribly unique and it may be a bit less than what the competition offers. Still, there may be customers who don’t like what the competitor has so you’ll get their business, or you can skim on advertising and sell yours a bit cheaper to create more demand. Either way, it should be pretty easy to get a successful product out of it, right?

Want to be a good product manager, look to differentiate your product and avoid being a “me too.”

Speed to market is certainly important, though it is almost always better to be later to the market with a better product than slightly quicker with something that does not stand out. Being first is good, though no guarantee. (Amazon.com was not the first online bookseller; the iPod was not the first portable MP3 player; Google was not the first search engine; Dyson was not the first vacuum; etc)

The key ingredient?

Delivering a differentiated product with unique customer benefits and superior value for the user. … Superior products have five times the success rate, over four times the market share, and four times the profitability as products lacking this ingredient. “Truly Superior, Differentiated Products” had an average 98% success rate and 53.5% market share, while “Me-Too” Products averaged an 18.4% success rate and 11.6% market share. Though the desire for quick revenue and immediate return within organizations is often strong, though there is good cause for launching the “right” product. In the end, the extra effort put into figuring out how to differentiate a product will be well worth the effort. Here are “seven ingredients of a unique, superior product with real value for the customer”:

  1. Meets customers’ needs better than competitive products.
  2. Is a better-quality product than competitors’ (however the customer defines quality).
  3. Has unique benefits and features for the customer.
  4. Solves customers’ problems with competitive products.
  5. Reduces the customer’s total in-use costs (better value-in-use).
  6. Has highly visible benefits for users.
  7. Is innovative or novel — the first of its kind on the market.

Most signifcantly: “Product superiority is defined in the eyes of the customer!” While you may believe your product to be superior on one or more of these dimensions, it is ultimately up to the market to decide whether this is the case. Too often the view of product superiority and differentiation is different from those within the company versus those in the market. It may be tempting to launch a follower product to ride the waves of a leader, without showing distinct differences in a product offering, product managers will be facing uphill battles. Look for ways to differentiate, to provide additional value, and to create a product that everyone else will try to copy.

This article originally appeared in ‘How to be a good product manager’

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Low Cost–Me too??…Read this

February 21, 2009 at 9:04 pm · Filed under Disruptive Behaviour, Favorites

 

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When a company talks about trading off pure performance in the name of lower prices, disruptive alarm bells start ringing. After all, companies like Dell Computer, Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart and Nucor have prospered by following this kind of low-cost disruptive strategy.

It’s reasonable to predict that we’ll see an increasing number of similar low-cost strategies as economic woes continue and start-up companies seek to find the opportunity in economic turmoil. Therefore, it’s natural to ask: How can you tell if a low-cost disruptor is going to succeed?

Analysis of companies that have successfully and unsuccessfully followed low-cost disruptive strategies suggest that to succeed, you must be able to answer yes to three key questions:

  1. Does it cross the “good enough” threshold? Stripping out performance to lower costs is not that difficult. But stripping out too much performance can leave a company with a product that actually under-delivers against a customer’s needs. Consider a free, but inaudible, mobile phone, or a $200 laptop computer with 5 minutes of battery life. You must cross acceptable performance thresholds before price even enters into the equation.
  2. Does the company’s product / performance bundle run counter to the market leader’s natural improvement trajectory? Staking out a low cost position isn’t all that meaningful if a powerful competitor quickly crashes your party. If the competition has been quite clear in its desire to lower its price points to appeal to broader market groups and if natural product improvements lead to the introduction of a similarly featured, similarly priced product, you will be in trouble.
  3. Does the company have a sustainable cost advantage? Lower input costs do not immediately translate into market success. Rather, low-cost disruptors have the greatest chance of success when they change the model in a way that makes incumbent success difficult. For example, Nucor didn’t just offer lower priced steel. It used a completely different production technology (minimills) that allowed it to earn attractive profits at low price points. These kinds of production or business model advantages are much more difficult to replicate than particular features or functionality bundles.

Of course, potentially massive markets could support multiple players. But if you dont meet the three conditions detailed above, chances of long-term success are quite low.

 

The orginal article appeared in Scott Anthonys blog on HBR

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How to pitch ideas

February 21, 2009 at 7:43 pm · Filed under Favorites, Sell it to me ·Tagged

Ive borrowed this from Scott Berkuns blog.  See here for the original article.imgres

Coming up with good ideas is hard enough, but convincing others to do something with them is even harder. Before you can begin the pitch, you have to make sure you’re talking to someone that’s interested in change, or has a clear need that your idea can satisfy.

There are some helpful steps…..

Step 1: Create and refine the idea

The classic mistake of would be idea pitchers is to pitch the idea well before it’s ready.  By definition, an interesting idea takes a novel or creative approach to doing something, whereas a good idea is not just creative, but actually improves on a meaningful quality or attribute, in a way that can be practically applied to the world (or the project).

Good ideas include some thinking about execution and delivery. 

If people can dismiss it quickly just by asking 2 or 3 basic questions then it needs work. 

3 critical testing questions:

  1. What problem does this solve? What evidence is there that the problem is real, and important enough to solve (or in the corporate world, solve profitably?)
  2. What are the toughest logistical challenges implied by the idea, and how will (or would) you solve them? Do you have a prototype, sample or demonstration of an implementation of the idea (aka proof of concept)?
  3. Why are you the right person to solve it? Why should this problem be solved now? Why should our organization solve this problem?

Step 2: What is the scope of the idea

The bigger the idea, the more involved the pitch. Big ideas require more change to take place on someone’s part, and all things being equal, this means the pitch must be more thorough (or your approach more bold & risky). As a rough guide, here’s how to assess the scope of an idea, from narrow to grand:

  • Tiny tweak to something already in existence
  • New feature or enhancement to existing product / website / company
  • A major new area of an existing product / website / company
  • An entirely new, but small and simple, project
  • An entirely new, but large and possibly complex, project
  • An organizational, directional, or philosophical, change to an existing organization
  • A new organization

 You’re probably not the first person to pitch something of the scope you’re pitching, so go find out what other people did, and what kind of success they had. Learn from their mistakes. 

Step 3: Who has the power to green light the idea

Make a list of the people that are potential recipients of your pitch. Base this list on two criteria: who has the power needed to implement the idea, and who you might have access to. 

If you have no idea who to pitch your idea to, ask around. There’s no sense developing your pitch if there’s no one to catch. If you don’t have access to the person with the power you need, make a list of who has access to them, working backwards until you can list people you actually know. You may need to work through this network of people, and make several pitches, to achieve the results you want. 

Step 4: Start with their perspective

Perhaps the most important aspect in any sales situation. Know your audience and your value proposition to them. The better your pitch fits into their needs, perspectives, and desires, the greater your odds of being successful. This just means you have to be aware of how your perspective is different from theirs, and improve your ideas, and how you communicate them, based on that awareness. 

Step 5: The structure of the pitch

Always formulate 3 levels of depth to pitching your idea: 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 minutes.

The 5 second version, also known as the elevator pitch, is the most concise single sentence formulation of whatever your idea is. Refine, refine, refine your thinking until you can say something intelligent and interesting in a short sentence. 

 In 30 seconds, there’s enough time to talk about how you’ll achieve what you described in 5 seconds. Provide the next level of detail down, adding in just enough interesting detail that the listener can get a clearer picture of your idea. If you can’t distill down what you’re doing in 5 and 30 second versions, don’t worry too much about the 5 minute version: odds are you won’t get many people to listen to you for that long.

You won’t always have all of your materials with you when pitching ideas and consider how you’d deal with the following different kinds of situations, and with the different asset limitations you’d have in each case.

  • The elevator pitch – you.
  • The slow elevator – you, maybe something to show from your pockets.
  • The lunch – (you , maybe something to show, napkins to draw on, alcohol)
  • The conference room meeting – (laptop / slides / handout)
  • The executive review – (laptop / slides / handout / yes-men / splunge-men)

Step 6: Test the pitch

The longer you spend with an idea, the more vulnerable you are to your own ego. Go find smart people you know to give you feedback.Then go through your pitch, responding to their questions. You won’t always get the feedback you want, but you’ll sharpen both your idea, and the way you talk about it. 

Develop a list of questions you expect to be asked during the pitch, and be prepared to answer them.

Step 7: Deliver

No silver bullets here. Be calm, be direct, state your case, and then listen. Like any kind of public speaking type situation, the more often you do it, the more comfortable it will become. 

Prepare for a positive response. What happens if they say “That’s an interesting idea. What do you want from me?” Do you want money? Other resources? A change in the project plan? A feature added to the feature list? Know what the sequence of steps are after they agree you have a good idea and be ready to ask for them.

Step 8: What to do when the pitch fails

Always leave failed pitches with an understanding of what went wrong. In short, get as much learning out of completed pitches as you can. Recoup your investment in the failed pitch by mining any lessons out of it that you can apply next time.

From a tactical perspective: who else can you give this pitch to? Would any of them be interested? Consider compromising on how much power is needed to make your idea happen, or how to split your idea into smaller ideas. 

Step 9: Do it yourself

Don’t ever allow yourself to believe that there is only one way to make ideas real: if you’re truly creative, you can apply the same talent used to come with your idea, to the problem of how to make your idea real.

 

Further inspiration can be found in he post Selling ideas to BIG company

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