Insight-Led Selling (eBook)

Introduction

“Bring me something fresh from the outside—something I don’t know. Show me that you’ve not only identified one of my problems, but you have a fresh solution that you’ve implemented somewhere else that will work for me too.”

—Steve Clancey, CIO, Georgia Pacific

The sales profession is not for the faint of heart. But you know that. Here’s something you may not know:

According to Forbes, in 2017 a whopping 57 percent of sellers missed their quota.1

We wanted to know why. Why do smart, well-trained people who work hard continue to come up short on their sales goals? Like all good salespeople, we started by looking at the problem from the customer’s point of view:

Seventy-seven percent of buyers say that sellers do not understand their business.2

This, we believe, is the key, and it’s what this whole book is about: Helping sellers to see their products and services from the buyer’s point of view. Teaching them how to walk in the customer’s shoes and speak their language. Ultimately, showing sellers how to determine the impact their solution has on their customers’ business and how to communicate that information in a way the customer hears and understands.

Vendors making a significant impact on a buyer’s business get a 31 percent higher share of wallet than other vendors.3

A 31 percent higher share of wallet could go a long way toward closing that gap for the 57 percent of salespeople who miss their quota. For the other 43 percent, it could blow their quota out of the water. This isn’t a sales trick. It’s not a sales process. It’s how to build credibility and confidence, and how to be more impactful early on. And despite what you might believe, it’s 100 percent possible.

What’s Going on with Sales Teams?

When’s the last time you told your Sales leadership, “You know, I really think you need to raise my quota—it’s just too darn low”?

Probably never. Every salesperson thinks their quota is too high. That thought gets in your head, and the more you believe it, the harder it is for you to sell. And when you consistently struggle to make your number and don’t see a clear path for making it, you tend to get discouraged. Some salespeople get so frustrated that they believe the only solution is moving to another company. But then, you have to learn a whole new line of products, and it probably isn’t any better—or easier to sell—than the line of products at your last company.

It’s hard on you and it’s hard on your customers. You would like to build a better relationship with them over time and get to know their business. They’d like to work with a salesperson who sticks around long enough to learn their business and help them reach their operational goals, financial goals, and expected business outcomes.

What’s Going on with Executives?

All this leads to slower sales, missed quotas, and lost revenue. Sales leaders would love to explain all this to the CFO, the CEO, and everyone else who’s looking at them to deliver that big number, but ultimately, Sales leadership is still accountable, and it’s their problem.

Executives have shareholders or investors to satisfy, salaries to pay, and projects to fund. They have a number hanging over their heads, too, and Sales leaders and sellers are likely the biggest part of that number.

Publicly traded companies in particular have aggregated quotas close to their budgets. They’re not building in a 50 percent fudge factor. When your company plans against a certain budget but doesn’t generate enough sales, there are tradeoffs like underfunded or canceled projects—even layoffs. And the margin between hitting and not hitting the number is slim.

When the 2020 coronavirus pandemic hit, a lot of companies stopped giving earnings-per-share (EPS) guidance due to the uncertainty. If you look at what they were putting out there before that time, you’d see the spread might be just 10 cents. They’d announce they were planning to make between $3.00 and $3.10, and some spreads were even tighter. If they were off by a penny, investors would punish them for a long time, which is why a lot of companies did crazy things such as cut back on research and development (R&D), avoid nonessential travel, and even lay off their salesforces—the revenue-generating engines. There’s a lot of pressure on executives to make shareholders happy.

When it comes to hitting sales quotas, executives aren’t going to budge. The answer, then, has to come from Sales and what they can do differently to better connect with their customers and give them what they want.

Sales and Sales leadership are accountable, but it’s not an easy problem to solve. Sales leaders want their people to succeed. They want their sellers to feel enriched and find meaning in their work. But when you aren’t making quota, you feel your angst and your management’s angst too. Being part of a sales team that isn’t doing well is stressful, and the only solution is to figure out how to sell better. Yet, you’ve been in training for years, even decades. It didn’t seem to be this hard in the past, so what’s changed? Why isn’t what you always did in the past working anymore?

The Solution

“The salesperson should be more interested in learning about my business, instead of telling me about theirs. Unless they care about what matters to me right now and are forward-thinking enough to find out what’s going to be important to me in the future, I am not going to care about what they can do and will care even less about the details of their solution.

“What’s sad is how many sellers don’t do it right. Even senior-level sellers have forgotten how to be ‘external’—customer focused. Most are just dumping data, and no one wants to be data dumped.”

—Dean Z. Myers, President, DZM Consulting and former VP Global Supply Chain, Operations and Business Development, 
The Coca-Cola Company. DeanZMyersConsulting.com

The good news is, there is a solution, and it’s not as complicated or difficult as you might think. The key is getting to know your customer better—their business, their industry, and the various stakeholders involved in the buying decision process. It’s making the effort to learn how they measure success. If you’re going to ask them to spend money with you, you need to be able to show how your solution can help them achieve their goals, implement their strategies, and ultimately deliver their desired business outcomes.

This is what Insight-Led Selling is all about. It empowers you to address the goals that are most critical to executives with business benefits such as enhanced customer experience and financial benefits such as improved revenue. These add up to what executives are really looking for, which is a best-case business outcome.

Once you have these insights, you can use that skill forever. It will not become obsolete. It’s always relevant, in every industry, across the board. We are here to give you a repeatable, scalable framework, and once you understand the fundamentals, you can implement it with every customer, in any industry. Once you start having conversations based on this framework, you will see a positive revenue impact.

The buyer pie is only so big in a given year. Someone’s getting the share, and it might as well be you. Following this framework will help you transform buyer perceptions. Customers will see that you’re different—that you do understand them. In turn, you’ll net a higher percentage of wallet share and eliminate the competition. Because the majority of your competition is getting it all wrong. Put yourself in the high-performing minority, win the mindshare of the customer, and you’ll win the wallet share. Once you have buyer allegiance, they’ll want to keep talking to you, not take a cold call from the seller who shows no insight into their business and its needs.

By the end of this book, you’ll know how to have more business-focused conversations with buyers by having greater customer insights. You’ll be able to do your homework regarding their goals and strategies and how they’re performing financially, and you’ll understand their industry headwinds and tailwinds and how your solutions deliver business outcomes, allowing you to tailor your conversations more effectively. You can visit www.InsightLedSelling.com for resources that will help you more quickly apply what you learn in this book. Use the code INSIGHTSELLER to access the site.

To build a positive relationship and become the go-to seller, you need specific, concrete insights around the buyer’s goals and strategies. For instance, you might find out they are trying to reduce operating expense to invest more in the business and fuel top-line growth. Then the question becomes, what do you do? Our framework will help you map your solutions to a customer’s goals and strategies. Similarly, you’ll learn to identify your customer’s top three Areas of Financial Performance. We’ll help you come up with a...