Selling skills are those that allow the successful execution of specific selling activities, including but not limited to stimulating interest, qualifying opportunities, determining needs, diagnosing problems, presenting, negotiating, and closing, to cite some common examples. The skills required for these selling activities—often called sales competencies—can be developed to higher levels of mastery and proficiency with training, practice, and coaching. Sellers who commit themselves to continuous learning and improvement of these skills are better equipped to engage effectively with Buyer 2.0.
Collaborative Attitude
Collaborating with Buyer 2.0 requires more than just skills and knowledge; it also requires the right attitude. Sellers must be willing to work with buyers in a spirit of openness and transparency. Collaborative sellers share and explain the reasons for their methods and approaches openly with buyers, and they consistently demonstrate that they are acting with the buyer's interests in mind first.
This attitude represents a much different outlook for most sellers. A product-focused seller considers success to be a sale, even if that means a less than optimal outcome for the buyer. A collaborative seller starts with a mind-set that the buyer's interests are of paramount importance, even if that means qualifying out of a sale. The key is to always act in the best interests of the buyer, even if that means a smaller sale or no sale at all. Buyer 2.0 values sellers who do the right thing, especially if the buyer knows the actions a seller takes are not in the seller's sole interest, but in the buyer's own best interests. In the long run, these are the sellers that earn lasting trust, loyalty, and repeat business from buyers.
The five components of situational fluency—situational knowledge, capability knowledge, people skills, selling skills, and collaborative attitude—are all required when selling to Buyer 2.0.
Hiring for Situational Fluency
As we mentioned earlier, sales managers tend to hire sellers who exhibit good people and selling skills, before any other considerations. They generally seek people who show they are strong closers of business, with good track records of achieving or exceeding their assigned sales goals.
Although past success can be a useful indicator of future performance, it is no guarantee, especially when selling to Buyer 2.0, who wants consultative sellers who add value to the buying process, insightfully diagnose buyers' situations, and prescribe the specific capabilities that will help them reach or exceed their goals. Sales managers should therefore look for people who exhibit all five aspects of situational fluency, or who demonstrate a willingness to develop the required components of situational fluency quickly. If a sales manager ignores any of the five components of situational fluency in evaluating candidates for sales positions, it will likely result in hiring people who cannot collaborate with and sell to Buyer 2.0.
We suggest that companies conduct and or use assessment vehicles to assist them during the hiring process to determine the candidate's situational fluency. We describe these kinds of assessments in more detail in Chapter 9.
Developing Situational Fluency
An important question for sales executives is: can situational fluency be developed quickly, or is it learned only through time and direct experience? In working with clients, we have discovered that it can be developed to high levels of proficiency quickly with a combination of training, reinforcement, and coaching.
If your company provides only product training for sellers, don't be surprised when sellers fail. When the emphasis of training is on details of products and services to be sold instead of about the problems and opportunities they address within a customer's business or situation, it is almost impossible for sellers to develop sufficient situational fluency. There must be a balance of training and development for situational knowledge and capability knowledge, with practice and coaching for selling skills and people skills. We have also found that when sellers are suitably equipped with the right knowledge and skills, they tend to develop the right collaborative attitude as well, especially when it is reinforced with consistent messaging from their managers.
Training for Situational Fluency
SiriusDecisions is an industry research firm that examines best practices in sales and marketing. It conducts in-depth research studies on what makes sellers effective. Jim Ninivaggi, Service Director of Sales Enablement Strategies at SiriusDecisions, shared some of its recent findings on training and onboarding of sales professionals with us:
“At our client forums and roundtable discussions, sales managers confessed that they had lost their focus on the importance of the human trust factor for the past few years when they designed their sales training and onboarding programs. Most of them basically give salespeople a week of training—sitting through presentation after presentation—and then the salespeople are thrown out into the field, and their managers are told that they have to develop them. This produces a vicious cycle of lost productivity, not to mention frustrated new reps and sales managers.
“I say: don't make new hires practice their skills on buyers first! Everything should be taught, practiced, and coached, from the way they open calls to the insights they share, the case studies they highlight, and how they make suggestions to buyers. Salespeople are clamoring for this kind of training, and smart companies are getting back to these basics.
“We see that buyers are inundated with data, so they want sellers to make it easy to do business with them. Properly trained salespeople make it easy for buyers to understand how their solutions are differentiated and how those resources can be leveraged for success.”7
Technology's Role in Situational Fluency
For many sellers, situational knowledge is more difficult to develop than capability knowledge. Fortunately, technology now provides opportunities for sellers to develop situational knowledge more quickly. Tracking relevant industry trends and events is much easier today using tools like Google Alerts, InsideView, web content aggregation sites, Twitter Search, LinkedIn discussion groups, OneSource iSell trigger event monitoring, and many other applications.
These sales enablement tools can help sellers to follow key accounts' website changes, tweets from buyers, and related blogs. They can help to identify key players and individuals to target, connect with, and join in online discussions. They can make it easier to follow industry analysts and monitor relevant business trends of interest to buyers. By tracking job postings, keeping up with financial trends, and setting up automated keyword tracking agents on targeted companies, sellers can identify business issues worthy of further investigation and possible development into a sales opportunity. Finally, automated tools can help sellers to monitor the activities of direct competitors and to learn more about their capabilities.
Automated monitoring of customers' businesses and relevant industry trends takes some time to set up, but once in place, it can provide a well-tuned stream of relevant information that will help sellers to develop proficiency in understanding their customer situations and how to address them. This can help sellers to develop higher levels of situational fluency faster.
Developing Situational Fluency at PNC Bank
PNC Bank, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offers a wide range of banking services for customers, from individuals and small businesses to corporations and government entities. Getting to know the bankers at PNC Bank has been a pleasure, and we are very impressed with their commitment to their customers and their employees.
PNC Bank teaches commercial relationship bankers, who manage portfolios of diverse industries, to integrate research into their precall planning in order to develop their situational fluency. We recently sat down with Senior Vice President and Market Leader Robert “Bobby” Chesney from Charlotte, North Carolina, and asked him about the importance of developing situational fluency.
“Our goal is to provide the customers with the value they would normally receive from us in the second call or second conversation but accomplish this in our first call or meeting with them. I
n order for this to happen, we've paid for industry data that a relationship manager has access to and can easily grasp before calling on a customer.
“For example, a banker calling on a manufacturer can become familiar with innovative processing equipment that has just been introduced to the market. Armed with research, he might say, for example, ‘There are 27 manufacturing companies in our region. I'd like to share with you what similar manufacturers of your size are doing.’
“The banker will go on to talk about the value and ROI [return on investment] on the new equipment that could help the company compete. The bankers' research and planning process helps develop their situational fluency and prepares them for this conversation in advance. We know that our bankers add value because they have done their research beforehand.”8
1 Paul Bishop, “Conclusion: The Development of the Personality,” Chapter 5 in Analytical Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics: Goethe, Schiller and Jung (London: Routledge, 2008), 157–158.
2 Howard Stevens, “How to Select a Sales Force That Sells,” Executive Briefs, Chally Group, July 2012. Accessed December 1, 2013, at http://chally.com/executive-briefings/.
3 Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936; rev. ed. 1981).
4 “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, August 12, 2013. Accessed December 1, 2013, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People.
5 Harriet Rifkin, “Invest in People Skills to Boost Bottom Line,” Portland Business Journal, June 2, 2002. Accessed December 1, 2013, at www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2002/06/03/focus6.html.
6 “People Skills,” definition by Macmillan Dictionary (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2009). Accessed December 1, 2013, at www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/people-skills.
7 SPI telephone interview with Jim Ninivaggi, SiriusDecisions, October 17, 2013.
8 SPI personal interview with Robert Chesney, PNC Bank, October 23, 2013.
Part II
Three Personae of the Collaborative Sale
Chapter 4
The Micro-Marketer Persona
Numerous studies cited previously in this book show that buyers may complete over half of their purchase evaluation process before contacting a potential seller. (See Figure 4.1.) Since buyers now prefer to conduct initial research and needs evaluation on their own before contacting potential solution providers, should sellers attempt to engage with buyers early in their buying process? And if so, can sellers do so without annoying or alienating them?
Figure 4.1 Buyer 1.0 versus Buyer 2.0 Engagement of Sellers
Our research and experience with clients shows that even though Buyer 2.0 now waits longer to invite sellers to participate, there are still effective ways that sellers can engage with early-stage buyers—either before or just as buyers are beginning to think about a possible purchase. Better yet, sellers can engage early in ways that Buyer 2.0 finds both valuable and appreciated. In fact, our clients report that when their sellers engage first with a buyer, they win business over five times more often than other sellers who wait for buyers to engage them.
There is a right way to gain access to and influence early-stage buyers, but it means significant changes in how most sellers conduct business development. To find new opportunities with Buyer 2.0, sellers must embrace and master a new persona—the Micro-Marketer.
The Micro-Marketer persona enables a seller to connect with and converse with early-stage buyers, demonstrate the credibility and value of a personal brand, and influence buyers' understanding about potential solutions to problems or about potential opportunities for improved results.
Why Be a Micro-Marketer?
Historically, it has been the marketing department's job to influence market perceptions, demonstrate thought leadership, stimulate buyer interest, and generate leads. The sales department was responsible for turning those leads into closed business. This traditional division of labor, and the mutual understanding of the interdepartmental hand-off, was clear.
However, when we poll our clients, they tell us that they cannot depend solely on their marketing departments to provide all the leads they need to achieve their assigned goals. The reason is because most marketing departments, which tend to look at markets strategically, do not know the specifics of individual buyers, accounts, and territories as well as sellers who are serving those assignments.
A 2012 research study by CSO Insights1 corroborates our findings. That study showed that marketing departments provide a little more than one-third of qualified sales leads pursued by sellers. This means that most new prospects had to be discovered through sellers' own efforts, which is probably why the same study showed that about 60 percent of marketing organizations rated themselves as “needing improvement” in providing the right quality and quantity of leads to their sales teams.
For a seller, the Micro-Marketer persona means becoming a “marketing department of one” for engaging with early-stage buyers and stimulating the interest of prospects in a targeted territory or in an account, or who are individual buyers. It means developing a mind-set where sellers take personal responsibility for generating their own potential business.
The kind of business development activities that effective sellers perform is changing. Sellers need to engage in an effective mix of targeted marketing activities, which may include telephone canvassing, e-mail distributions, online and in-person seminars, direct mail, trade shows, industry associations, and related events to find prospects. In addition, sellers also need to find where their buyers are having online conversations, and participate in them.
In the world of the social web, the new buyers can participate easily in online conversations about their goals and aspirations with like-minded people. It is simple for them to find others with whom they share much in common by joining topic-specific interest groups such as those found on LinkedIn, or through other social media sites and industry forums. By joining these online resources, they can talk with peers who understand their challenges and who can exchange useful ideas.
Therefore, sellers must recognize that Buyer 2.0 is having conversations all the time about the kinds of capabilities that sellers can provide. Sellers must also understand they cannot simply insert themselves into the middle of those conversations using traditional broadcast marketing techniques. They must know how to engage effectively in online social discussions.
Micro-Marketers Demonstrate Situational Fluency—With Constraint
Let us be perfectly clear. The Micro-Marketer persona is not about a seller broadcasting generalized messages. It is about collaborating with deliberately selected buyers about specific issues that are of importance to them.
Sellers who master the persona of Micro-Marketer act differently than the usual salesperson. They do not try to sell overtly when first interacting with Buyer 2.0 in online conversations and during business development activities early in the buying process. Instead, they focus on contributing relevant insights to those conversations. They share pertinent ideas and observations from their own expertise and experience. By providing useful information and answering questions that may arise, Micro-Marketers have the opportunity to position themselves as useful thought leaders, or experts in their field of specialization.
Sellers must be very careful in how they communicate with Buyer 2.0 early in a potential buying cycle. If the buyers get any hint of a seller being pushy or aggressive, they will ignore or even block the seller from the conversation. If they think that a seller is pressing ahead with an idea or agenda that is not in their interests or is not relevant to their situation, they may shut out the seller from the conversation. In fact, if Buyer 2.0 perceives that the seller is just trying to sell something, instead of contributing expertise and informed perspectives to the conversation, the buyers will almost always stop participation in further discussion with that seller.
Dave Stein, founder and C
EO of ES Research Group, and who wrote the Foreword to this book, observed that it is counterintuitive for most sellers to restrain themselves in early engagement with buyers. “They'd rather do mass market appeals, hoping something sticks that they can drive to a sale,” he says. He believes that the early part of the sale is “where a seller can be a worthy collaborator to a knowledgeable buyer, and showing knowledge and thought leadership is foundational to that collaboration.”2
Many sellers are reluctant to position themselves as experts, especially if they are new to their positions. They lack the confidence in their own knowledge to consider themselves an authority. However, many of these sellers are shortchanging themselves—they are more knowledgeable than they think. They simply don't yet realize how they can provide specific expertise in a useful way to Buyer 2.0.
As we explained in the previous chapter, the most important competency for the Micro-Marketer is situational fluency. In order to become confident about their own expertise, sellers must cultivate relevant knowledge about customers' situations, industry trends, best practices, and business drivers. In addition, they must be able to articulate their understanding clearly and in a compelling way. Most of all, they must be able to provide a perspective that helps Buyer 2.0 to visualize their world in a new way.
Micro-Marketers Create Their Own Personal Brand
The best Micro-Marketers not only represent their organization's capabilities, but they are also able to provide their own unique, individual brand to customers. They work continuously to develop their expertise and to diligently convey their value to buyers as a personal brand.
The Collaborative Sale Page 6