Speakers Platform: "Retooling for E: Thriving as an Enterprise Sales Professional in our E-Business World™"


			You are here: --> Meeting Planners --> Feature Articles "Retooling for E: Thriving as an Enterprise Sales Professional in our E-Business World™" by Dave Stein More Information About the Author: Click Here for the Dave Stein Home Page "Things are changing faster than they ever have. They are moving at Internet speed," they say. You have heard it all before. "Now that they have access to the Internet on their desks, buyers are much more informed than they were in the past." "With all the hype and frenzy, the old rules are out the window. It’s a new ballgame." "How do I differentiate myself? Selling is much, much harder." It’s all true. That is what is going on out there. You may be one of many who is scratching your head wondering why your quota performance has not been at the level it had been in the past. Perhaps you have been successful in your career as a professional salesperson so far, but are concerned about how to sustain that success going forward. Or maybe you are just getting into the game and want to get ramped up as quickly as possible. How can you retool yourself so that you thrive going forward in our e-Business world? Having coached and consulted with the best of the best, I have devised twelve "e-strategies" which, when applied on top of the skills you already possess, will 1) provide you with an alternative sales approach, based upon today’s challenges and 2) provide you with direction regarding where to spend your time to maximize your professional development. Before we get into those strategies, I ask that you have an open mind. You see, some of what I will be suggesting requires change—the kind of change where you decide, right now, that you are going to do something differently from this point on. It was Charles Darwin who said, "It’s not the strongest of the species that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." What you are going to have to do is deliberately expand your thinking and exhibit new behaviors outside your comfort zone. So, you can stay in your comfort zone and be left behind, get pulled out of your comfort zone involuntarily and be somewhat effective some of the time, or you can proactively expand your comfort zone and control your professional destiny. Here are the twelve e-strategies: Strategy #1 — Emphasize the business part of e-Business. The first step in understanding what you have to do to be successful in a world of e-Business is to realize that e-Business is just plain business. The keyword here is "business," not the letter "E." Within a relatively short period of time, the "E" component will have been integrated into all the other processes that keep companies running and hopefully generating profits for their stakeholders. "E" is like other trends have be assimilated into the world of business in the past, like TQM (Total Quality Management), MBO (Management by Objective) and client/server technology. It’s not that what "E" denotes—electrons and light moving through wires and cables, that will go away—just the letter "E." What does it mean to you as a sales professional that the core of e-Business is just business? It provides you with an understanding that, more than ever before, you will need to focus on how your product or service is going to contribute to your customer or client’s ability to achieve their business plan. From a financial point-of-view, you know that you can either contribute to increasing your customer of client’s revenues, decreasing their expenses, or both. If you, as a sales professional, cannot clearly demonstrate how you will do that and by how much, you don’t stand much of a chance of getting and maintaining access to the key executives who make the decisions. I’ve seen companies and the people who sold for them get all tied up in the "E" and lost focus on their business. Beware of that trap. Strategy #2 — Educate yourself. To thrive in our e-Business world, you need to know a lot about three things: Your customer’s business, their industry, and how the Internet is changing the way business is being done in their world. There are a number of ways to find out about your customer or client’s business, especially if they are publicly held. You can start with my favorite portal, http://www.ceoexpress.com. I always recommend familiarizing yourself with your customer’s world—their customers, their competitors, their suppliers, their industry, challenges, opportunities and, even if you are not selling technology, how they the Internet is being used in their marketplace. Do what it takes for you to be able to talk to them about their world in their terms. Strategy #3 — Extend your research tools. The top sales professionals with whom I work understand that most of their research about the industry into which they are selling and their customers and clients has to be done through trade publications, business periodicals and the Internet. Subscribing to (and reading!) trade journals that cover the industries into which you are selling is an extremely worthwhile way to spend some of your time. Also, please strongly consider Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, eCompany, Business 2.0, WSJ on-line (the Wall Street Journal), Red Herring, The Industry Standard, and Fast Company for generic, but extremely relevant business information. You can spend weeks trying to get a meeting with an executive. You can lose credibility instantly if they test you by asking your opinion about something about which you should be familiar and you aren’t. There are some books that are well worth reading. But in general, by the time a book is published, the leading edge concepts that are discussed may very well be dated. You may be wasting your time preparing to deliver yesterday’s news to your prospect. It would have been better to pick up the author’s ideas when he or she wrote the magazine article that prompted the book. Can you talk for ten minutes about what is going on in the industry into which you sell? Can you talk for ten more about your most important prospect’s business? Strategy #4 — Expand your general business knowledge. Develop the skill of zooming-in and zooming-out—looking at your customer and client’s companies from 40,000 feet, diving deeply into relevant details, only to zoom out to the big picture again. You should also consider becoming familiar with the concepts and current practices in such areas as business strategy and planning, E-commerce, E-collaboration, and change management. If you can’t read and interpret key financial statements, to the extent that you can determine the relative health of your prospect as compared to other companies in their market space, you’ve got some work to do. It is not necessary become an expert in any of these areas unless your job specifically requires it, but when you are conversant, you will better understand your customer and how your solution fits into their overall plan. And when you can discuss, in financial terms, what your product or service will contribute to the customers business, you will have earned credibility. Strategy #5 — Elevate your selling efforts. In order to consistently win business—when you forecast it, and for the value you forecast—you have to be selling to the decision makers in your accounts. You’ve likely heard that before. And you know that it is harder now then ever before to provide your prospects with information they can’t get somewhere else. The Internet has created a big challenge for us here. If you believe, as I do, that the way to gain and maintain access to those influential people is by becoming a business resource for them—someone they can go to who can provide insight about their marketplace, their competitors, their challenges and their opportunities—your job has gotten tougher. You have to be more resourceful than ever before. Professionals whom I coach bring in other people with perceived value to your prospect’s executives—experts within your company, from your customer or client base, and from other, non-competing, business partners of yours. If you are selling into a new account, and have not been referenced by someone the prospect’s executive trusts, you generally have to earn you way into that position. Becoming the keeper and dispenser of information, insight and expert resources, beyond what they or their people can get on-line, or what your competitor is able to deliver, is a proven path to executive-level sponsorship. Strategy #6—Enlarge your audience. Enterprise selling now includes a broader base of interested executives than before, often including boards of directors. Take the time and effort to figure out who else in your prospect’s company might support the investment in your products or services. Perhaps the VP of Development could have an initiative they favor funded by the money you will save their company with your inventory control system, super-efficient lighting systems or your economical fleet of delivery trucks. Strategy #7—Expedite the selling process Time is compressing. Seize the moment before your competitor does. One of my clients tells me regularly that he can’t believe how quickly deals are happening, compared to the recent past. His customers feel competitive pressure and he is ready, willing and able to drive them even faster in going forward so they can more quickly reap the benefits of his services. If his salespeople take a moment to pause, someone else runs, not walks, away with the business. If you have properly qualified them, get back to your prospects right away, every time they call. Get information to them ahead of your competition. Have a sense of urgency that is at least as strong as theirs. Be more responsive than your competitors. When measured in Internet time, that’s real competitive advantage. Strategy #8—Excel in your competitive skills. Who is your competition and what are they doing right now to take your customers away? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you and your livelihood are at risk. Once you get to know your competitor—not only the company and their products or services, but how the salesperson that is your opponent competes—you can begin to employ strategies and tactics based upon that knowledge that will consistently put you in the lead. A client of mine is a smaller consulting firm. They are very, very good at what they do, and they are small. (Notice I didn’t use "but" right there.) When they compete against the big guys, their size is always brought up as an issue. They have learned to inoculate. They raise the subject right up front with every prospect and talk about the numerous advantages of doing business with a focused, specialized, lean organization. They provide answers in advance to the objections they know that their competition will raise. They don’t do it defensively, but offensively, cleverly creating a trap for their competition. Then they professionally and subtly predict to the prospect that they will be attacked on their size. When the big guys begin exploit my client’s size, the prospect is prepared and generally shuts down the conversation, leaving the attacker in a very uncomfortable position. Strategy #9— Exceed the level of value your customers expect you to provide. Today, an important part of the value that your customer receives has to come not from your company or my company’s products or services, but from you. The reason for that is the product proliferation that I mentioned earlier. A challenge today is that there are too many products, too much hype, too little differentiation, too much discounting and too little importance placed upon us, the sales professional. Our competitors will be attempting to differentiate themselves on some aspect of their product or service, a feature, a function, a unique selling point. When your unique selling point is you, and what you can bring to the table—knowledge, experience, insight, contacts, integrity, resources, friendship, an outside perspective, how to get things done in their company and yours—you will have again gained competitive advantage. Strategy #10—Enhance your relationships in your accounts Perhaps now more than ever, selling is about relationships between people. With all the great technology we have at our fingertips, we can fall into the trap of assuming that any communication is sufficient. For expedience, I occasionally find myself resorting to e-mail and voicemail as the primary communication mechanism with a client. I can justify that behavior as well as anyone else—through e-mail, I maintain an audit trail of our communication, it’s quick, I can communicate during off-hours, we don’t resort to phone tag, etc., but it jeopardizes the relationship. Let your competitor have an electronic relationship. Keep yourself real. And with whom do you establish these relationships? The decision makers and influencers in the account. Briefly, you need to find out how decisions were made in the past relating to the procurement of products and services such as yours. Unless things have changed dramatically, some or all of the people involved with those decisions will be involved with yours. Strategy #11—Examine your skill set and attitudes now, objectively. A requirement for consistent, successful selling is objectivity. Opportunities have to be qualified unemotionally and objectively, as does what people in your accounts tell you as it relates to what it will take to secure an order. One of the hardest things to do is to unemotionally and objective measure our skills compared to what is required to consistently win. Do you know how to cost justify your product or service in financial terms to your prospect’s CFO? Are you considered an expert in your prospect’s industry? Do you know exactly how to beat your toughest competitor in a certain classification of sales opportunity? Do you write grammatically correct letters with perfect spelling? Can you capture the attention and imagination of your audience during a presentation? Can you find what you need to know about a prospect or a competitor on the Internet within an hour? If there are skills that are required to excel at your job and you don’t measure up, admit it to yourself and figure out how to obtain those skills. If you don’t, your competition will show no mercy. Strategy #12—Embolden yourself to change now. Do you agree that, as sales professionals in this competitive, demanding e-Business world, we have challenges that we never had to face before? If you also agree that at least some of the strategies we listed might improve your effectiveness, now you must make the changes required. To paraphrase Jim Hennig, "Successful sales professionals have formed the habit of doing those things unsuccessful sales professionals dislike doing and therefore will not do." The first step is for you to accepting responsibility for your own professional growth. No one can do that for you.