CustomerCentric Selling

The definition of CustomerCentric Selling depends on what your job is. We teach CEOs how to own and shape their customers' experience; we teach sales executives how to define and manage their revenue engines, we teach marketing executives how to own and manage sales ready messaging, we teach first line sales managers how to assess and develop the talent of their salespeople, manage to a sales process and build quality pipeline; and we teach salespeople customer-centric selling behavior. The primary focus of our business is to help individuals and organizations migrate from traditional to customer-centric selling behavior and to show how our methodology— CustomerCentric Selling—can help sales organizations become more customer-centric.

Selling Behavior Traditional Customer-centric* Make Presentations Converse Situationally Offer Opinions Ask relevant questions. Relationship focused Solution focused Gravitate toward users Target business people Rely on product Relate product usage Need to be managed Manage their managers Attempt to sell by Convincing/Persuading Handling objections Overcoming resistance Empower buyers to Achieve goals solve problems satisfy needs “Without process, they can’t do it on purpose

1. Making Presentations Versus Having Situational Conversations Traditional salespeople rely on making presentations and embrace applications like PowerPoint. It enables them to lower the lights and add "excitement" in the form of emphasis and animation. We believe it is possible to converse with audiences using PowerPoint (rather than present to them) but it is more difficult. When senior executives see salespeople enter their offices with a laptop under their arm, many roll their eyes and look at their watch. Here is the issue - in order to converse rather than present, a salesperson must be able to relate his or her offering to the buyer in a way that will allow the buyer to visualize using it to achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need. Only a small percentage of salespeople are able to effectively converse with decision makers. Presentation software can disable even those talented few. CustomerCentric Selling can help the rest of us engage in relevant, situation specific conversations with decision makers without having to resort to pre-ordered slide presentations. 2. Offering Opinions Versus Asking Relevant Questions Traditional salespeople tend to offer their opinions to their buyers while CustomerCentric salespeople have the ability to ask relevant questions. What's the big deal? Most people, when in the role of a buyer, resent being controlled or pressured by a seller. Most sellers come to a vision of a solution to their buyer's problem before their buyer. When a traditional seller "sees" the solution, they often project that "vision" onto the buyer with statements or opinions such as, in order to deal with that problem you will need our seamlessly integrated software solution. Do we now? Most people don't even like their loved ones telling them what they need, much less a salesperson! We have found top performing salespeople leverage their expertise with questions rather than offering opinions. Another advantage of questions versus opinions - as long as a buyer is being asked intelligent questions she is capable of answering she does not feel like she is being sold. People love to buy, but hate feeling sold. 3. Relationship Focused Versus Solution Focused Traditional sellers are relationship focused and customer-centric sellers are solution focused. Why? If you think about it, it is impossible to be solution focused if the seller does not understand how the buyer will use his offering to achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need. Most sales organizations commission their product marketing department to teach salespeople about their products. Product marketing is famous for being able to tell you all about their products, but typically are unable to tell you how their products are used, particularly how their use is viewed by decision makers and decision influencers. The rare product marketers who do understand the usage of their products do so at the user level, not the decision maker level. Salespeople who are not trained to converse with decision makers about product usage quickly gravitate to focusing on their relationship with their buyers as a survival technique. Many traditional salespeople have convinced themselves the seller with the strongest relationship will win. In selling situations where the seller is selling a commodity product to a repeat buyer, we agree. In selling situations where the buyer is attempting to achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need, we disagree. 4. Gravitate Toward Users Versus Target Business People Traditional salespeople gravitate toward the users of their products while customer-centric salespeople target business decision makers. The strength of traditional salespeople lies in talking about their offerings, and users are the most likely group to be interested in this approach. In order for a salesperson to have the confidence to approach a conversation with business people, they must be prepared to engage in business conversations. A business conversation includes why the product is needed, how it would be used to achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need, and the cost versus the benefit of using it. Because most organizations are giving salespeople "noun" oriented product training - all about the product but little about how it is used situationally - traditional sellers have no choice but to gravitate to the people who are able to understand the product as they have been trained to relate it - trained users. As you will see throughout this book, CustomerCentric Selling maps out how marketing departments can transition from product training to product usage training for the sales force by creating sales ready messaging for targeted conversations. This will enable and empower traditional sellers to target business people and engage in customer-centric conversations. 5. Rely On Product Versus Relate Product Usage Customer-centric conversations occur when sellers are able to relate conversationally with their buyers about product usage. Traditional salespeople working for traditional organizations using traditional product marketing approaches have no choice but to rely on their product to create interest and educate their buyers in the hope the buyer will figure out for herself how she would use the product. Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm first highlighted the difficulty technology companies face when they run out of Innovators and Early Adopters. How many technology companies have been seduced by early market buyers who were sufficiently smart and innovative to figure out their own product usage from a traditional product presentation? Seduced in the sense that as early sales came readily, they began believing they were superior sellers and marketers. A common strategy for companies inventing disruptive technologies is to find a "guru" to endorse the technology, write a "white paper", hire a good PR firm and hit a couple of technology trade shows. "Sales" take off! Do you really think there was much selling (helping the potential customer visualize how he can achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need by using the new technology) going on, or were the innovators and early adopters at the trade show smart enough to figure usage out on their own? We frequently are hired by companies who have fallen into the "chasm". They have run out of innovators and early adopters, and now they have to figure out how to get prospects who don't know they need their offering and don't have a vision of how they would use it, to buy. This is where sellers who are customer-centric succeed. For organizations who don't have enough naturally customer-centric salespeople on their payroll, this book will help you become CustomerCentric. It will give you a framework for creating Sales Ready Messaging™ (aka product usage messaging) that will enable your traditional salespeople to evolve to CustomerCentric Selling 6. Need To Be Managed versus Manage Their Managers We believe most traditional salespeople need to be managed because they work for traditional sales managers. Traditional sales managers monitor activity rather than progress. Why? Most don't have "progress" defined in their sales process. Most don't have a way to evenly grade opportunities across multiple people and offices. And, most don't have a defined sales process. Most sales managers were promoted to the position not because of their management aptitude, but because they sold the most. Sales mangers who relate to this situation are forced to manage activity. They "manage" things like cold calls, letters, demonstrations and proposals - activity rather than progress. They monitor quantity of activity with limited or no ability to influence the quality of activity. Customer-centric salespeople are able to converse situationally and ask relevant questions to empower business decision makers to achieve their goals, solve their problems or satisfy their needs. Their managers simply need to monitor and report their progress. Customer-centric salespeople call on their managers when they need company resources to help them make a sale. They might need an executive sales call, a headquarters visit, a pre-sales technical consultant, extra administrative support, etc. Customer-centric salespeople are able to get the support they need from their managers when they need it because they are able to demonstrate via correspondence with their prospects they have earned the right to finite company resources. 7. Attempts To Sell versus Empower Buyers For years we have asked salespeople in our workshops to take out a blank sheet of paper, pretend they are the author of their own dictionary, and define selling. It never ceases to amaze us the perception "professional" salespeople have of their own profession! They invariably define selling as convincing, persuading, getting someone else to do what you want, handling or overcoming objections, taking at least 5 "NO's" before giving up, negotiating to get what YOU want, and of course, the big one - closing. ABC - always be closing, close early and close often. Is it any wonder most people, even salespeople, do not like being approached by salespeople? Most buyers, when asked to describe salespeople come back with adjectives like aggressive, insincere, pushy, manipulative, over-familiar, prone to exaggerate, poor listeners, etc. When asked to net it down to one word, the number one negative response we get from buyers when we ask them to think about the salespeople in their lives, the word we get is pressure. They feel pushed, manipulated, pressured into doing things they end up wishing they hadn't. We have taught thousands of "non salespeople" how to sell. By non-salespeople, we mean people who do not want to think of themselves as salespeople - engineers, accountants, lawyers, consultants, scientists. The key to helping non-salespeople learn to sell is the same for helping professional salespeople improve their skills and success. We have to help them reframe their concept of selling. Customer-centric selling is empowering the buyer to achieve their goals, solve their problems or satisfy their needs. Think about the engineer non-salesperson. Engineers love to help people solve problems! Engineers do not want to be traditional salespeople, but they love to be customer-centric salespeople. We believe a seller's objective, going into a new relationship with a buyer, should be to help the buyer achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need and she should be willing to leave if she doesn't believe she can do so. Think about how much different the tone of the first meeting will be compared to a first call by a traditional salesperson! Natural Salespeople Over our careers we have heard about (and met a few) truly gifted, talented "natural" salespeople. They make it look easy. They achieve 200+% of quota, despite the fact that most cannot define what makes them successful . They actually don't sell "on purpose." If you look back at the seven comparisons we have just made, these natural salespeople will be strong in the first six. Even the naturals seem to believe however, that selling is convincing, persuading etc. We believe even the most gifted sellers can become more customer-centric! CustomerCentric™ selling is designed to help all sellers assess where they are and give them a specific methodology to help them become more customer-centric.