Revolutionary Marketing and Sales Strategies

Consultative Selling? Please

So you employ a consultative selling approach? Uh huh. I don't mean to sound overly sarcastic, but the term consultative selling has been randomly thrown around by sales people and sales managers who want to seem better-intended than they really are. The question is ... are we really fooling anyone? Sorry, but no. Here's a simple acid test that sales managers can apply to their team, or sales people can apply to themselves individually:

• Can you intelligently discuss your client's latest industry trends, specific to their vertical and their role in that vertical?
• Can you talk in language unique to the client's vertical market and their role? Do you understand what the executive's role in within his/her company? Overall responsibilities?
• What are the top 10 issues this role is currently dealing with? What keeps them awake at night? What are their hot buttons?
• How is this person measured? What gets them promoted/fired/ bonuses?
• What other roles in the client's organization are impacted by the above issues and how?
• Can you build value for your solution that solves a current issue that executive is dealing with? If not, are you helping them find a solution that will address their issues ... even if the solution is not your company's?
• How often do you start your selling efforts at the executive level?
• Do you have overwhelming credibility early in the sales cycle?

If you cannot answer these questions, then sorry to say, you're not employing a consultative selling approach. A consultative selling approach requires you to be able to relate to the executive that you're interacting with ... almost on a personal level. Your client does not need a professional friend ... they need someone who gets them and can add value. Otherwise, you're simply a quota-carrying sales person to them.

The University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler business school conducted a study to determine why executives grant access to sales people. The #1 reason is:

Ability of the salesperson to understand their issues

For my sales manager friends take the above acid test for your sales team collectively. How would they fare as a group? Here are the two responses I get:

• Our top performers would probably do pretty well
• We would not do very good at all

The most common answer is the first ... that the top performers would do pretty well. Why is that? Because there is an absolute, definitive correlation. Let's move up the ladder and execute on the term that we all love to use ... "Consultative Selling". Selling is more fun truly employing this method anyway. Go have some fun.

Customer-Centric AND Profitable Marketing & Sales Alignment

As boring as it sounds this article's full attention will focus on breaking down the title of this article ... it's meaning, implications and application.

"Customer-Centric AND Profitable Marketing & Sales Alignment"

Customer-Centric:

Many marketing and sales organizations tout that they have fully adopted a customer-centric (versus a product- centric) focus and/or a consultative sales approach.  That's great, as happy customers are the lifeblood of any business.  If our organization is not focused on solving issues that our clients are currently experiencing then, quite honestly, there's not much of a reason to waste a lot more time. 

This leads into the definition of customer.  Let's face it, Company A never sold anything to Company B.  It's Bob selling to Suzy based on Suzy's perception of Bob (competency, knowledge, honesty and most importantly, Bob's ability to solve Suzy's issues).   The customer is the person(s) you interact with ... not their company.  Novel concept, huh?

Profitable:

What?  You mean we have to somehow make them happy that we're making a profit off of them?  The answer can be either "yes" and/or "no".  This is a quote from Peter Drucker from 1954, "The true business of every company is getting and keeping customers".

While this is great and timeless wisdom, Michael King, of Grizzard Performance Group (GPG), says that we must add the following to the end of that quote, "... who are providing us with an acceptable level of profit margin."  Here is a link to a white paper by Michael that will shed greater clarity on this issue:

                          Grizzard 2004 Customer Based Marketing Survey

Marketing & Sales Alignment (Throw Product Development/Mgmt in there too)

I love networking and learning.  It's my primary vehicle for creating demand and, frankly, staying sane.  Over the past few months I've attended tons of meetings related to the Marketing, Sales and Technology areas.  This concept of alignment seems to be an issue that all companies are struggling with, none of which have been overly successful at closing the gap.  At a recent AIMA (Atlanta Interactive Marketing Assn) event they had a panel discussion on exactly this alignment issue.  The panel members were John Neeson of Sirius Decisions, Rory Holland of Holland Interactive and Colleen Crafton of MAPICS.  Here is a link to notes I took at this meeting: AIMA Jan05 Meeting Notes

Let's put it all together in a vision statement that we live:

"We build tremendous value for our stakeholders as we are acutely targeted in on better serving the needs of our most profitable customers.  We accomplish this by:

• Utilizing Customer Profitability Management (CPM) methods and tools to ensure that we are in constant touch of who our best customers are
• Alignment of Marketing, Sales and Product Development/Mgmt on solving vertical-specific and role-specific issues the individuals within our client organizations are currently experiencing.
• Becoming an organization of "Trusted Advisors" to our best customers
• Focusing the majority of our resources, budget and efforts on retaining our best customers"