by Tom Fedro
A less expensive way to push your mind and stay current in your methodology is to invest in books such as this one. A fine-tuned text with vital information can open the way for you to new tactics and improved techniques. They can shape your thinking into fresh avenues. I recommend Consultative Selling by Mack Hanan, Competing on Value by Mack Hanan and Peter Karp, The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, The New Strategic Selling by Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Heiman and Tad Tuleja, as well as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Each of these classics is a valuable addition to the library of those salespeople who are committed to being the best they can be.
Other ideas, beyond spending money to attend boot camps and build your library, include doing some role-playing with other reps or management. Create situations where you’re across the desk and talking about real-life questions so you improve your ability to think on your feet. Getting practice in facing and overcoming objections in this manner could give you the boost you both need to level up your sales interactions.
Using a combination of training scenarios is ideal. Read books that take you through specific situations to build your bag of tricks and plan your techniques. Engage in classroom training in which you watch other people, discuss what worked and what didn’t, and participate in role-playing to learn how to handle deftly various situations that will come up in your sales career. Practice role-playing with your colleagues in between to keep you nimble.
We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people.
Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.
– George S. Patton
You should also find a mentor — somebody who has been in your industry for a long time. Let them know you admire what they’ve accomplished and would appreciate the chance to learn from them. For newer salespeople who have the instinct but not the experience, mentoring is essentially a requirement to pick up the language and nuances of a particular industry. Shadowing an experienced and successful rep is also a terrific way to shorten the learning curve. Shadowing is merely following a colleague on their daily activities for a while to see how things are done. For new people coming on, and even for experienced reps moving into a new company or a new product line, shadowing somebody successful is undeniably beneficial for driving sales tactics home. It is especially vital for junior reps. They should be assigned to a senior rep right away.
As part of continuing education, there are several ways a salesperson can stay up on all the latest relevant details, innovations and strategies in the industry. Join industry trade associations and groups to stay in the know. You’ll gain insights into relevant topics in each of the monthly or quarterly meetings. Subscribe to all the important news feeds in your industry to get pertinent reports, and stay on top of the latest information coming into the marketplace. Make time to read press releases for customers, prospects, and their competitors, as well as yours. What’s being talked about? What is the press writing about? What companies are making noise? What are your competitors saying in the industry press?
Go to industry-specific trade shows and conferences, and pay attention to where the speakers are focused. What are the themes in the booths? Where are people spending their time? Attend social events and do some online social networking. Follow the luminaries in your particular industry to hear what they’re saying. Try to interact, and get on their radar as somebody interested in the space. With persistence, you can build some relationships online with the industry experts, creating more value for your career and your clients.
Case Study: Comcast Mobile (now Xfinity)
Dominoes — Let’s Do This
Comcast is a telecommunications conglomerate with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Offering a complete range of entertainment and connectivity services, the company is a high-ranking triple threat. Comcast is the second-largest broadcasting company in the United States, the largest home Internet service provider and the third-largest home telephone service provider. Xfinity is one of Comcast’s brands, and is used to market their consumer services in cable television, wireless services and more.
The company’s pain manifested as a growing number of cloned phones that were accessing their network illegally and racking up expensive airtime with no one paying for it. They needed a system to find these fraudulent users quickly and shut them down.
Comcast’s technical team had been building some of their own tools to address the pain, but understood that their timeline for completion was becoming an issue for management. Working collaboratively, we were able to show them how they could customize our system to incorporate several of their own ideas into our platform. This process helped eliminate the potential ‘not invented here’ syndrome that can often stall or derail software deals.
The authority to make a decision on the deal fell to the CFO and their revenue assurance officer — along with the technical evaluators we collaborated with, who would be working with our products and making a recommendation. Our success was assured by aligning closely with these key technical team members, delivering on their vision using our platform while providing the ROI that met the needs of the CFO.
We had the money confirmed through the revenue assurance officer that the budget was earmarked and ready to be spent mitigating and hopefully eliminating the revenue hit those fraudulent users were causing, not to mention the customer support issues the illegal phones were directly responsible for causing.
Lessons learned
Flexibility and customization can be critical assets at this sales level. We secured our victory by working closely with their technical team to prove our solution was flexible enough to include their in-house ideas. Even better, Comcast was our multimillion-dollar domino in the wireless space, allowing us to move quickly to dominate the fraud-detection market for years to come.
The different types of salesperson
relationship builder
reactive problem solver
hard worker
lone wolf
challenger
maverick
The different roles of the salesperson
exploring pain
trusted advisor
proposal
implementation
growth and renewal
education
CHAPTER 5
THE DOMINO EFFECT
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
– Thomas Jefferson
Are you ready to knock down all the major players in your market, turning them all into customers with one key win? Let’s talk about the Domino Effect.
Researching any market, you’ll notice that smaller competing companies tend to follow industry leaders when making decisions. That means one of your primary tactics in sales should be to close a deal with a key player in your target market. Once your transaction is completed and publicized, you can use that win to prove the credibility of your solution in the market, and look at closing new business from your customer’s industry peers.
Approach the top dogs of your ICP, reach decision makers and key influencers, and close a deal. You should especially pursue the top players in your ICP database that show leadership and innovation in the space. When they purchase your solution, that sale becomes a massive advertisement for you with the other players in the industry. That one client has become your first domino, and you’ve knocked it down!
Zero in on those companies first, and strive to make your product central to their operations. Then widen the field to knock over the other key dominoes. Ideally, those smaller companies will line up to buy from you just as their industry leaders do. The cascade of dominoes has begun, and you’ll find it shortens your sales cycle when your customer’s competitors know that the top dog has chosen your solution over others.
Pick that first domino carefully. Make sure they have influence and a leadership role in their industry, then do what it takes to bring them across the line as a win and a happy client. Leverage that to their peers and r
un with it. Once the Domino Effect kicks in, you can take out a whole market in very little time.
To identify the critical dominoes in your market, define the cream of the crop in your ICP database — the most well-known and respected businesses in your industry. Once you’ve identified them, it’s a simple matter of engaging each of the prospects you identify. That crucial first domino has to love your company, your product and your value proposition in order to become an advocate and reference for you.
For example, consider where particular prospects stand in your specific industry.
Are they a leader or a follower?
Are they seen as innovative?
Are they a visible contributor to the trends in the space?
Is their CEO or CTO quoted often in the industry rags?
When going after your dominoes, you’ve got to go big or go home. Go hard after the top dominoes that you recognize as the principal industry influencers and leaders that could use your product. Prioritize the Top 5 domino prospects in your target market and start at the top.
As you strive to jumpstart the Domino Effect, always ask up front if your prospective customer will act as a reference for you. In some cases — especially if it’s your first domino — you may create an opportunity for yourself by offering a better deal if they will agree to endorse your product, allow you to do a press release, and use them as a reference. If they can’t or won’t agree to publicize your deal, make sure the industry hears about your success. Instead of naming the specific company, name a top player in the industry without mentioning their name. Go with whatever you can to make it known to the rest of the dominoes that you’re in the market!
When you reach out and present the value proposition of your product, demonstrate through your questions and industry knowledge that you clearly understand the day-to-day issues faced by the prospect — and that you’ve already solved their competitor’s pain. Qualify that there is pain in the account as you move through the discovery process. Deliver clear statements on how your solution is proven to close the gap between the current pain they’re experiencing in their environment and the ideal reality that they seek.
Use your key dominoes to demonstrate in a credible way the value in pain elimination you provide. Put those reference customers using your product front and center, demonstrating that your product helped eradicate their pain.
The domino principle has been critical to our success in the past couple of companies where we have employed this strategy. That first domino deal allowed us to move very quickly into a leadership position and the other folks in the space respected that opinion so much that they signed on very quickly. I’ve used it several times in my career and highly encourage the use of it by folks looking to dominate their space.
Case study: Cisco Systems
Start with Cisco
Cisco Systems is a California-based multinational technology conglomerate that develops and manufactures networking hardware, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology products and services. Their specialties lie in areas such as domain security and energy management, and they also offer software services through their many subsidiaries, including Jabber, Jasper, OpenDNS and WebEx.
As they’ve been around since 1984, it’s often said that Cisco pioneered the local area network. When we got in touch with them, we were working with their router group for Wi-Fi. They built a router device, and the consumers buying the routers wanted to attach storage devices to them. This would enable them to have one spot on their network at home to use as a repository for things such as photos, presentations or documents. Their customers desired a centralized storage facility at home. The pain was that the router used a Linux operating system and the storage file systems were formatted for Microsoft or Apple operating systems.
What was required was a software ‘traffic cop’ to sit between the two different environments of the router and storage device and make sure everything worked flawlessly. They wanted the customer to be able to plug in, and it would work with no hassles. At the time, this was a real pain that needed a creative technical solution.
The authority came down to the VP of product management, the person in charge of the features that were going to be in the router. In addition to the VP was a legion of evaluators and influencers — the people testing the product — as well as procurement which had to sign the order. The authority had many faces in this case!
The money was confirmed and budgeted as the solution needed to be in place for their latest router line to be successful.
Once the pain, authority and money were established, we dove in with overwhelming resources to support their intense testing efforts. Their testing scenarios included many different types of storage devices and environments to mimic the incredibly complex potential situations that would be found in the millions of homes where their routers would eventually land.
The plan was to show that our solution was going to work regardless of the type of disk drive platform, file system or environment in use. We made our engineering team available 24/7 to showcase our responsiveness, and show the evaluators precisely what they could expect from us once the deal was done. We tested in all different types of environments; if any issue or problem popped up, it was immediately addressed through our engineering and support team in real time and promptly resolved. We handily proved that we could work in any environment and that they could safely launch their product line.
Lessons learned
The launch was more successful than anyone anticipated and led to a great relationship that proved to be a domino for us in the router space. All the major vendors came on board as customers in less than 12 months following the Cisco deal. This was a major win that provided a substantial seven-figure payday for our company and solidified our position as the de facto supplier of this type of technology, allowing us to dominate the market for years.
Smaller competing companies tend to follow industry leaders when making decisions; therefore, one of your primary tactics in sales should be to close a deal with a key player in your target market. Once your transaction is completed and publicized, you use that win to prove the credibility of your solution in the market, and look for business from your customer’s industry peers. What is desired is a domino effect.
To identify the critical dominoes in your market, define the cream of the crop in your ICP database — the most well-known and respected businesses in your industry. That crucial first domino has to love your company, your product and your value proposition in order to become an advocate and reference for you.
CHAPTER 6
OTHER INFRASTRUCTURE
If football taught me anything about business, it is that you win the game one play at a time.
– Fran Tarkenton
Aside from your sales team, your company must have the additional infrastructure necessary to support big sales in a business.
The role of tech support
In a million-dollar sales-oriented company, tech support is a critical component to landing the larger deals. These types of pre-sales engineers tend to be technical yet comfortable in social situations. Their role in the sale process can be crucial as they can articulate the solutions, features and value of your offering as they relate to the industry issues your prospect is facing. Tech support resources provide some of the most potent credibility to keep a business prospect moving through the PAM sales engagement process.
The sales rep can be viewed much differently than a technical pre-sales support resource. Salespeople are paid by a commission in most cases — and prospects listening to the pitch are undoubtedly aware of this, and that can lead to concerns on their part about whether what is being said is entirely accurate. It’s ideal to have a technical resource accompany a salesperson on a call to provide detailed descriptions, demonstrations and specifications. Their presence can help eliminate any sales rep concerns in the prospect’s mind. It will educate the prospect and help to draw them to a positive conclusion on what
’s being presented. For example, I’ve been in meetings where a salesperson says something, and the prospect looks to the technical engineer for the nod of agreement.
The dynamic is powerful when there’s a highly-competent sales support person in the room with buyers or key influencers who are determining which solution they’re going to choose. Sometimes, it comes down to how much the prospect trusts your support and technical resources over those of your competitors. The technical support piece is a critical role in any million-dollar type of license or sales opportunity at that level.
People skills are essential. These people must be technical, but also able to communicate critical product details and the value they provide in layman’s terms. Many times when courting a prospect, you’ll be speaking to a mixed audience that includes highly-technical people as well as operations people who may not have much technical expertise. An influential sales-oriented engineer will be able to address both parties with equal effectiveness.
A world-class, sales-oriented engineering team tends to be full of straight arrows — honest team members who ooze credibility and are also passionate product advocates. They’re experts on their solutions, and are familiar with virtually every situation a customer may find themselves in when using the product. One of their top priorities is ensuring a salesperson doesn’t oversell what the tech support engineers are going to end up supporting. If the salesperson is in danger of overselling, the engineer can help correct this course of action by having a good dynamic with the salesperson. With regard to the role-playing I discussed earlier, this is one scenario the team should practice beforehand. If the sales rep starts to exaggerate or misrepresent the product in any way, the tech can step in gracefully and say, “What Charlie means to communicate is X, Y and Z.”