Next Level Selling

by Tom Fedro

  All looked to be on track, and so it came down to us working with their evaluators. We gave them everything they needed to test our solution with all the different types of storage products that they were going to be working with. We placed our engineers on site with theirs to ensure that we had an immediate response to anything that happened outside of the norm so that we could immediately handle any issues or bugs that came up during their marathon testing sessions. Being on site allowed us to make sure that the tool would work as we said it would work.

  Lessons learned

  Having such great visibility within their group by having our people on site allowed us to show that our tool worked flawlessly with their new products. They were able to launch on time and create a real success for their company by including our solution with their systems. This win allowed our code to be included on the tens of millions of products that are shipped annually, delivering revenue in the mid-seven-figure range to our bottom line.

  The most common major mistakes made by companies when pursuing high-dollar deals

  talking too much

  not asking enough of the right questions

  not selling as a team

  ignoring influencers

  offering free trials

  not asking for business

  failing to find PAM

  lack of preparation

  not paying attention to competitors

  not knowing how to overcome objections

  not having a strategic response to objections

  CHAPTER 9

  KEEPING UP WITH THE COMPETITION

  The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. – Henry Ford

  Why is it important to keep up with the competition? It’s not a simple case of knowing what they’re doing in the market; they can also drive a great sense of inspiration within your organization. Your competitors can be a great place to research concepts for the future. They can give you insight into new product ideas, and provide new awareness into the industry to combine with what you learned from your customers in your own research. Your competitor can provide a wealth of information, so know who you’re up against in the marketplace. Be sufficiently familiar with them so you can determine the best way to differentiate yourself while understanding their products, new offerings and innovations.

  When you compile information about your competitors, I recommend that you keep a profile in your company’s records. The competitive landscape is a massive part of the marketing side of your business. I suggest that you closely monitor your five main competitors for changes and updates. The data should be collated, and made available to the sales and marketing teams.

  Some information you should know about your competition includes answers to these questions.

  What do they have coming out in your market?

  Are they growing or shrinking?

  How do you gauge their position?

  What’s their price point?

  When compared, are you priced too high or too low?

  When compared, are you selling the right model?

  Are their offerings subscription-based or a perpetual license?

  Understanding who your competitors are and what they’re up to can help you better position your solution in the market to win business. How can you gauge how well your competition is doing? Get out in the marketplace and ask questions. Observe everything you can, and talk to people who have used your competitor’s product. Ask what they like and dislike about your competition. Gather all the data available from every credible source you can.

  What you can learn from your competitor’s customers

  Go to the source and gather data directly from your prospects. Ask who else they are considering for this business or who they have used in the past. When you get into a competitive situation where your prospect is using your competitor’s product, in many cases they’ll be happy to let you know what works and what doesn’t. They may be satisfied with one piece, but feel your competition is coming up short in another area.

  What you can learn from your competitor’s press releases

  How many press releases has your competition released over the past year? What’s the coverage about — are they discussing bland product information, or are they highlighting happy customers enthusiastically using their product? Are they releasing more or fewer releases than they have in the past? Who are their most vocal clients? What logos are circulating on their websites?

  What you can learn from your competitor’s website and social media sites

  Scour their website for news and information about their latest releases. You can use internal resources by asking a team member to mine your competitor’s public pages. Have your marketing or technical people do some educated digging. Get all hands on deck and do the spadework; dig for data!

  What you can learn from the analyst community

  Asking the analyst community in your particular industry is another great way to find out what your competition is doing. They’re responsible for understanding the vendor landscape, so if you’re talking to the right analysts in your space, they’re going to know your competition very well. They can share where your competition excels, where they fail, what customers are saying, and how their weaknesses can be exploited for your benefit. If you can afford it, having a relationship with an analyst is an excellent use of funds.

  Use your internal resources.

  In an ideal world, you have the budget to sign up for a Gartner or IDC membership ($20,000 to $40,000 or more, depending on services), and to get on an analyst call every month to improve your understanding of the marketplace, but many companies can’t spend that kind of money on research. If you can’t afford to hire an analyst, look at the white papers and research documents of the top analysts that are publicly available to drive your research.

  Of course, your salespeople are asking a set of competitive information-gathering questions on every sales call to identify and confirm what the competition is up to, what’s working and what’s not. Never forget to draw on that collective information.

  I don’t recommend anything like going undercover to get information. I tell people I don’t want to learn something that they shouldn’t tell me. I do, however, enjoy speaking to the competition so that I can develop a sense of camaraderie along with my understanding of their struggles. Trying to steal information surreptitiously is going to come back to haunt you, so my advice is to keep it clean.

  From time to time, it makes sense to hire somebody from a competitor who can bring a wealth of information to your team, as long as it’s not customer lists and or something illegal. It can be risky, depending on their state of residence. They may have signed non-compete agreements or NDAs with their previous employees, but if you can get past the legal problems, these employees can be a goldmine of information.

  Use online research tools.

  SpyFu is an excellent resource to research what keywords and ad-words competitors are buying. You can examine their focus with Google Trends, as it will show you what they’re using for their keywords. Use your Google Alerts function for all your competitors’ names so that whatever they do is going to ping in your inbox. These tools will help you stay ahead of the game.

  A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  Case study: Top 2 disk drive manufacturer

  Should we use it in everything? Yes!

  This major storage technology provider, based in the United States, engages in development, production and distribution of data storage products and electronic data storage solutions. Founded in 1978, for many years they have been building hard disk drives, solid-state drives and hybrid drives. They ship disk drives to consumers and businesses in large volumes (tens of millions are delivered annually). The drives end up in various environments, and the manufacturer cannot predict where
a particular drive is going to be utilized.

  As their customer base and the number of environments they needed to support grew, their pain developed into the necessity of ensuring that their drive would work no matter where it landed. This result was critical to a happy customer base. They needed to have a plug-and-play solution and they had to ensure that customer support phone lines weren’t burning up with frustrated end users.

  To solve the prospect’s pain, software was required to be shipped with the disk drive that would act as the catalyst for platform independence. Regardless of whether the drive was put in an Intel machine running a Windows operating system, an Apple product running a Mac operating system or a tablet running a Linux environment, it had to work. Our customer’s pain was a complex problem that required an elegant solution.

  The authority to make this critical investment decision to eliminate this pain came down to the VP of product management and their technical team which was responsible for rigorous testing that would ensure the technology worked in every conceivable configuration and operating environment.

  The money was confirmed with procurement as this initiative had top priority and was fully funded. Without a software solution on the disk drive, users would have to find specific software drivers and handle other esoteric issues to ensure everything would work properly. That situation could lead to a support nightmare and massive refunds.

  Our technical team worked shoulder to shoulder with theirs to make sure that whatever consumer or business platform they could imagine and test was supported. Our technical team was available 24/7, standing by to handle any glitch or problem that arose. We made sure that everything worked. Ultimately, after intense testing, our software solution was cleared for deployment, and it became the standard across all their lines of drives, shipping tens of millions of drives annually with our software.

  Lessons learned

  This deal came down to a sales approach that uncovered the pain early in the process. We were then able to set the table to close a deal for more than a million dollars. That deal hinged on repeatable successful demonstrations of our innovative technology and equally innovative engineering and support infrastructure. This manufacturer was very comfortable with our long-term viability as a partner. Another major seven-figure win for the team!

  Case study: major network attached storage manufacturer

  We squeeze to the fourth decimal point.

  This customer is ranked as one of the Top 3 in the world that designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services. They were dealing with a storage device called a network-attached storage (NAS) box, and they had the same issues as some of our other clients. Wherever these products landed within a business or a consumer, they had to work without fail.

  With a NAS box, they needed a software tool that would manage the interactions between the NAS box itself and another storage device attached to it. Understandably, this involved significant pain as there are so many different types of attached storage devices they needed to be supported around the world. This pain had to be fixed before they could launch their NAS box line worldwide so that it would work regardless of the environment where it was used.

  The authority was the Senior VP of software services and their product management team. The VP had the power to sign off on the deal, but they relied heavily on the technical feedback of the product management team assigned to evaluate the software. These were the same people who would be supporting our solution once it was out in the field. Naturally, they wanted to make sure that our software would do the job. The money was confirmed as new NAS SKUs couldn’t ship without this solution included. Otherwise, they would not work in certain environments, and that was unacceptable.

  Once again, having our engineering team on site was what won the day. Proving that we could immediately respond to issues that came up, develop bug fixes on the fly, and make sure they were thoroughly tested and ready for production in days — not weeks or months — gave us the win. The customer saw that we could do the job for them and that we were the best partner for the long term. We won the deal!

  Lessons learned

  When a customer looks at their purchases down to the fourth decimal point (i.e. a 10,000th of a cent), you must clearly show your value in effective ways. Keep your engineers close to theirs, drive immediate resolution to any problems as they arise, and provide an instant response.

  The last two case studies personify the Domino Effect that was discussed in Chapter 5. These two companies are well-known competitors, and they respect each other’s engineering teams. It’s a close industry, and our second prospect already knew that we were working with the first. Once we closed the first deal, the next one happened almost overnight. While you have to be very respectful of non-disclosure agreements and business ethics when working with competitors, companies tend to respect the fact that you are a vendor to their competitor and will undoubtedly move quickly if you can show them the value proposition clearly. These two disk drive manufacturers became dominoes for us in the storage space allowing us to dominate the market quickly.

  There is always room at the top. – Daniel Webster

  Your competitors can be a great place to research concepts for the future. Be sufficiently familiar with them so you can determine the best way to differentiate yourself while understanding their products, new offerings and innovations.

  Information you should know about your rivals

  their next offerings in your market

  growth / decline in your market

  their price point

  how your price compares to theirs

  how your offering compares to theirs

  subscription-based or perpetual license

  CONCLUSION

  I suggest that you become obsessed about the things you want; otherwise, you are going to spend a lifetime being obsessed with making up excuses as to why you didn’t get the life you wanted.

  – Grant Cardone

  In selling, as we have seen throughout this book, establishing the presence of PAM at your prospect’s table is essential to making high-value sales.

  Why?

  Because there is no sale without pain, authority and money.

  How do I know?

  Crystallizing and codifying the idea of PAM about 20 years ago was a career changer for me in every way. The method works.

  What’s my proof?

  PAM has been the lynchpin delivering hundreds of millions in revenue to our stakeholders!

  There is no way my team and I would have successfully sold more than 200 million software licenses worldwide without the PAM sales process.

  When you’re hunting billion-dollar companies, this is a small prospect base, so the competition to win their business is particularly fierce. This is especially true when you’re dealing with high-dollar deals, and you have to stay in front of them and relevant at all times. If a prospect is under contract with your competition, you know they’re already spending money in your space. You need to prove that you will eliminate any pain they are feeling with your drop-in solution to replace the current supplier at a much better value.

  Are you up to the task?

  You never know what’s going to happen in your industry. People move around. Companies sell. An executive could leave the company and take with them the biases that have kept you on the outside looking in. Perhaps the new manager doesn’t like your competitor’s solution, and is open to trying something new.

  The world of sales is always one of relationship building and staying in front of your prospects. They may not have the pain if they’re happy with their current solution, but part of your job is to maintain contact with them so that if and when the pain arrives — you’re there with PAM by your side.

  The PAM framework for closing deals is both a science and an art. When closing seven-figure deals, you have to be ready for the inevitable curve balls flying at your face. Be prepared to catch
those balls, or hit them out of the park.

  You must find PAM.

  As you may recall, there are eight steps to finding PAM, and together they make up the million-dollar framework.

  Identify the ideal customer profile.

  Engage the prospect.

  Ask quality questions to establish the pain.

  Establish the authority.

  Ensure the cash is there.

  Create a compelling proposal.

  Implementation

  Growth and Renewal

  No matter what you’re selling, it’s not about your offering; it’s about solving the pain. To reiterate our core concept, you must identify and interrogate your prospect’s pain. It doesn’t matter if it’s hardware you can touch, software or a service. It’s about understanding the customer and asking the right questions to discover their pain and then delivering the solution.

  You’re selling the dream. You’re selling the vision of where the customer wants to be. It matters what you can provide to help your customer bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be. The process is always, however, going to be the same. You identify the pain, locate the authority, and confirm the money is there.

  It all comes down to finding PAM.

  Did you know PAM also happens to be a great tool if you’re looking for a new sales role in a new company? Consider taking a potential sales role down the PAM route, asking these questions.

  What’s the pain for your potential employer that you can alleviate?

  Who’s the person that would hire you (who is the authority)?

  Do they have the money available to pay you what you’re worth?

  Are they growing or shrinking?

  Are they actively looking for your skills?

  My last two C-level jobs came from reaching out directly to the authority (the CEO or chairman) who had the pain that I could eliminate. I negotiated an appropriate compensation package closing for a start date. PAM works not only for sealing million-dollar deals but also for landing million-dollar positions.