Selling: My challenge - How can I make prospecting more palatable?
Many of us have or had multi-faceted jobs some parts of which are inside our comfort zone, and others outside but must be done. This article will focus on what options are open to a manager who has operational and sales responsibilities, but for whom the operational side is what he or she knows best. Sound familiar?
We all have our natural tendencies and comfort zones, so there is no point fighting it. However, to identify what they are and how they can affect the way we work is very much within our control.
Let’s take a fictional VP who is responsible for not only delivering existing contracts successfully, but also for landing future work. Annette was an Engineering Manager in her past, and coming from a technical background, it is clear that the operational and service delivery side of her role is where she is most comfortable. So how can she continue to grow her business when the idea of prospecting and cold calls frankly sends shivers down her spine. She is definitely NOT a door-opener.
Being an engineer, she is organized, and likes structure, so how did she apply this to her task of prospecting?
Firstly, she looked at just how many good opportunities she would need to chase down in order to build her business. In her case she only needed to land 5 new contracts to keep growing her business, so needed no more than 15 commercially viable opportunities.
As she started out, she had the feeling that she was going backwards until she got on top of the challenge. Top of her list “what constituted a good opportunity? “ She could go and knock on doors of her existing clients, but this just seemed wrong to her. Instead, she took an engineering approach just as she would have done if she was developing a new product.
As part of a technology conceptual plan you must identify what needs your technology will satisfy, otherwise you won’t know what your technology has to do. Annette took the same approach and looked at the challenges her customers were facing, and looked at how well her own services could address them. Even if she didn’t call it this; she was undertaking a needs-based segmentation exercise.
From her engineering past she realized that she couldn’t build a tool that covered every variation of the need, so had to define a minimum functionality as a priority. Having established the various customer-needs, she identified the top 3 concerns that her offerings could have the biggest impact on.
When establishing technical specifications for a product under development you must decide not only functionality but also the level of specifications that will enable you to use the technology under sufficient conditions to be commercially viable. Annette looked at which environments were in the sweet spot so as that she wouldn’t have to undertake engineering changes.
Finally when she had a prototype she needed to find a suitable client to conduct a pilot test, and who was open to trying new technology and prepared to test her prototype as they saw the longer term benefit. Having identified the needs most suitable to her services, identified the environmental conditions that suited her products, she identified potential customers who were willing to change supplier if need be, but importantly were receptive the potential benefits her services could bring them.
By emulating what she did in her comfort zone she effectively generated the basis of a solid sales strategy, from which she could work.
This was all well and good, but did she still have to knock on doors? Most people hate the idea of cold-calling due to their innate dislike of rejection, which also can feel as if you are street-corner seller. However, talking with her manager, Annette realized that the route to success was by understanding the magnitude of her potential customer’s needs. Before any presentation of her services, she had to confirm her customer’s challenges. This was a much more comfortable situation as she was selling nothing and her operational experience allowed her to ask pertinent questions. Only once she was confident that she had a serious proposal to make, did she talk about how she could help them. Intuitively she had applied classic sales techniques such as SPIN, established the needs, and the constraints, along with the financial implications of not acting before offering a possible solution, which she was also able to quantify in terms of cost savings, and for her services, productivity gains.
Annette’s work was not over. She had managed to gain interest with some of her potential customer team but knew that just as she used to have to justify development funds for her project as engineering manager against other projects; she now had to get the buy-in from the decision-makers in our customer’s organization compared not only to competitors but alternative ways to address the challenges.
It was amazing she realized just how similar closing a deal was to getting her engineering projects all the way through to commercialization. Suddenly the idea of structured prospecting no longer filled her with trepidation, and she eagerly looked forward to the other opportunities she had identified.
So what can we learn from Annette’s journey. Firstly, an organized approach not only helps you focus on opportunities where you have a better chance of success, but it also mirrors many of the steps of a technology development project. Her success was because she:
Identified a market sector where she had potential differentiation.
Identified the profile of potential customers and their possible buying motivations
Segmented her market by these needs, and further refined this by environment and finally by customer.
Used these buying motivations as the entry point into her target customer organization
Held realistic early technical conversations around her customer’s compelling needs not her products.
Applied structured probing techniques to structure her conversations
Validated these needs with business decision-makers, showing them the commercial benefits, her company could bring.
Is prospecting really so far out of your comfort zone?
