Same Side Selling Read online

  After a cursory look at another training company, the association hired the consulting firm to manage and conduct the training program.

  Three years later, the results were disappointing. The training initiative had not met its quantitative goals and had received only fair reviews. The consulting firm made several new hires to develop its capability, yet struggled to deliver.

  The association concluded that they needed a different partner to run their training program, and the first qualification was extensive experience in training. Worse still, the wasted time and money on the project soured the overall relationship between the consulting firm and the association, and the association terminated the relationship with the consulting firm.

  Too often a working relationship evolves from a sweet spot, where the vendor’s expertise is perfectly matched to the client’s needs, to an overextension. The round peg, which once fit so beautifully, begins to turn square. When a seller says yes too often, trust leads to an outsized scope that ultimately leads to distrust.

  To avoid this negative cycle, a seller must be committed to her company’s core strengths, and sell only the products and services that deliver the most impact. We explore this further in Chapter 7, Don’t Force the Fit.

  What’s Wrong With Being Opportunistic?

  We are not arguing against expansion or trying new things. Nor are we suggesting that every company must limit itself to one and only one defined function. The goal is to create and maintain the level of trust needed for the buyer and seller to have a meaningful collaboration (that is, to stay on the same side).

  When a buyer senses that the seller is more interested in selling than in delivering value, trust vanishes and the adversarial mode takes over. In a similar way, a creeping scope can weaken trust as the seller overpromises, then under-delivers.

  Companies can be nimble, and they often need to be opportunistic. But responsiveness must be balanced with strategic intent.

  Aim to Be “Some Things to the Right People”

  A keen awareness of where value can be delivered begins with the sales process. While it seems self-evident that not every company can do everything well, many salespeople go into a meeting trying to be all things to all people.

  A posture of universal helpfulness doesn’t just set you up for failure; it means less likelihood of making a sale. As the adage states, “When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.” When you present a wide list of capabilities as a seller, the discerning buyer begins to discount what you are saying and believes you less. Being all things to all people doesn’t ring true and won’t sell. Plus, it’s exhausting. It’s much better and easier to be some things to the right people.

  Buyer’s Perspective: It makes me nuts when I see a business website saying “we specialize in” followed by a list of ten or twenty things. Huh? I want to say: “Specialize … in twenty things?”

  It reminds me of the movie The Princess Bride. The brains behind the devious plot is a character named Vizzini. Each time he is confronted with a potential threat, he says “Inconceivable.” Of course, each “inconceivable” scenario is followed shortly by its occurrence. Finally, after the fourth or fifth time Vizzini says “inconceivable” in disbelief, Inigo Montoya says, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Such is the case with “specialize” when you follow it with a huge list.

  One Hundred Pennies of Trust

  Imagine that you show up at a sales meeting with a beautiful printed brochure explaining all of your company’s services. Your prospect arrives with one hundred “pennies of trust.” This money is a resource that she is ready and willing to spend as she listens to you and believes in your capability. But the resource is finite. She cannot get more pennies.

  As you share what you do, she puts pennies down on the part of the brochure that describes what you are talking about. Finally, your time is up and her pennies are spent.

  How would you like to have those pennies allocated? When the prospect walks out of the meeting, should she have eighty pennies on your main capability and twenty on your secondary capability? Or should there be ten stacks of ten pennies each on different products or services?

  This exercise illustrates focus—or perhaps lack of focus. When a company says they do everything well, do you believe them? Do you remember what they do?

  Refusing to be Graded on an Average: Five Guys

  Perhaps you have had the experience of sitting down at a diner with a menu of over a hundred items, ranging from pizza to soup to fish to gyros. When you ask the server what he recommends, he says: “Everything is great.” Hmm. You might conclude that everything can’t be great, so each item must be equally mediocre.

  Contrast the broad menu offering to Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Five Guys has achieved the unprecedented feat in the restaurant world of simultaneous critical acclaim and spectacular growth. Five Guys is the most reviewed restaurant in the world, and it has grown from one store in Virginia to more than 570 locations in recent years.

  The key has been focus. While other restaurants are continually experimenting with new options and menu items, Five Guys has stuck to its limited offering of burgers, hot dogs, and French fries. Five Guys doesn’t even sell milkshakes, despite pleas from customers and franchisees to do so.

  Owner Jerry Murrell refuses to add to the menu any items that Five Guys cannot be the best at cooking. Why invite mediocre reviews, when your main fare is consistently rated at the very top?

  Avoid the Mediocre Reviews

  It is exciting when an existing client is willing to pay you to do something more, and it is tempting to present a wide array of solutions to a vast audience of prospects. But remember that you will be graded on any item you add to your menu.

  In a client relationship, the evaluation will be based on how you perform. In a sales situation, the grading will be based on how convincingly you present a case that you are qualified to understand and solve a specific problem. Making your case will be easier and more effective when you present the unique understanding and skills that you bring to the world.

  When You Think You Are Not Unique

  Most people reading this book will not be world-class innovators or acclaimed industry leaders. Some of you are no doubt struggling with the question of how your offering is unique in the marketplace. You may be saying to yourself, “this approach would be great if my job were more unusual, but there are eighteen other (realtors/dentist/accountants/wine stores/gardeners/etc.) within a few miles!”

  Take heart. Most of the businesses that Ian works with would not appear to be one-of-a-kind, but they have managed to develop Same Side pitches that set them apart and greatly accelerate their sales process. Even if your profession is well known and you face many competitors with comparable offerings, you still have the opportunity to differentiate and be unique.

  In fact, if you are in a profession that is widely understood, you have a great advantage: nearly everyone will understand the core of what you do with little explanation. You don’t have to say, “People come to me when they have discomfort in their mouth or teeth; I help them find solutions so they can start eating and sleeping again.” You can simply say “I’m a dentist” and they will get it. That’s good.

  What people won’t know is how you are set apart from others in your field. They won’t know that you are unique and remarkable. The fact is that you are special, and you specialize.

  Convince Yourself First

  If you don’t believe that your offering is unique, no one else will. So it’s worth confirming your specific role in the marketplace, and here’s the proof:

  When you sell something to a client, it is sold by you. Even if a different company can sell exactly the same product in the same way, it can’t be sold by YOU. Ergo, you are unique.

  If that last paragraph felt like a mushy moment from a weekend retreat, hang in there. (Trust us, we are not the mushy, weekend-retreat kind of guys.) Embracing your indiv
iduality is a legitimate and important part of Same Side Selling. When you connect your unique personality to what and how you sell, it will make your offering more authentic and attractive. Ultimately that will help you sell more and enjoy it more.

  Think about your best clients and your favorite experiences. What past projects make you smile when you think about them? Which clients are the most fun to work with? Where have you had the most impact?

  It is probable that those clients and projects near the top of your list contain the definition of your uniqueness. When you can articulate the words to describe them, you will be able to find more of them.

  Emphasize the Contours That Separate You

  As you consider the types of engagements that have been best for you, trends or patterns will emerge. What are the strands that seem to run between your best clients?

  Those qualifiers do not necessarily limit the work that you do or represent every client, but they can be useful in defining a specialty that you are known for—or will become known for in the near future.

  Your contours might run along one of the following dimensions:

  • Demographic: There may be demographic qualifiers that separate your best clients. Do they live in a certain geographic region? Are they companies in a specific industry? Does the number of employees or customers they have fall within a certain range? Is there a minimum or maximum revenue amount?

  • Situational: Your best clients may face similar conditions or circumstances. Are they facing a certain stage of growth? Do they have a common frustration? (Think back to the elevator rant.) Are they experiencing a milestone or common external pressures?

  • Attitudinal: Do your best clients have certain values? Are there common things that they love? Do they share certain goals? Do they have similar cultures?

  Through these dimensions, sellers of everyday products can create their own hill instead of sharing someone else’s mountain.

  Following are some specific examples of companies we know in mature, competitive fields that have carved out distinctive areas to separate themselves from their competitors. In some cases, they are making themselves distinctive along one dimension; in others, they combine the dimensions.

  Industry

  Specialty

  Fundraising

  We specialize in serving faith-based [attitudinal] schools [demographic] with over 300 students [demographic].

  Residential real estate

  Families with multiple kids in grade school [demographic] come to us when they are looking to live near the best public schools in the region [attitudinal].

  Physical therapy

  Seniors [demographic] hire me when they are recovering from hip or knee surgeries [situational] and want to regain mobility and get back to competitive sports [attitudinal].

  Law

  My specialty is serving construction companies [demographic] who are in litigation with their vendors [situational].

  Executive coaching

  I work with CEOs and VPs [demographic] who are passionate about building innovative cultures where they work [attitudinal].

  Financial advising

  Our best clients are business owners [demographic] who are planning to exit their company operations within five years [situational].

  Recruiting

  Clients who love us have more than 100 employees [demographic] and are sick of paying high commission fees to recruiters [attitudinal].

  Auto sales

  My best prospects are young professionals [demographic] who have done their research and want no-frills, no-nonsense service [attitudinal].

  Table 2-3: A Distinctive Offering.

  From our experience, we suspect that there’s a good chance that some of you are still worrying that presenting such a targeted version of your profession will reduce your opportunities. If that is how you feel, we strongly encourage you to simply try it.

  It may seem like a paradox: When you are forthcoming about where you don’t fit, others around you are more likely to help figure out where you do. Your commitment to making an impact over making the sale is attractive. Finding Impact Together is much better than convincing or being sold.

  Put Same Side Selling to Work

  We hope you see how you can define your unique position in the marketplace. You first need to convince yourself, and then consider your ideal client’s elevator rant to narrow down your best opportunities. Though it may be tempting to expand beyond your strengths, remember that some clients will evaluate you based on your weakest offering, not on your strongest. Define what makes you a great fit. More important, define your boundaries. You might be surprised; telling people where you are not a good fit just might entice them to learn more about your strengths.

  Where are you essential? Where are you useless?

  Whom do you serve, and what do you do for them?

  What are the triggers that cause clients to hire you? Build a When/Why table like Table 2-1 and translate every when into a why. How compelling is the why?

  Write a draft of your Same Side pitch. Refer to the examples in the Results and Impact table. After you have the draft, call a client and ask them if it sounds right. Use their input to improve the pitch. Repeat.

  Write down your core competencies, and note how you would like new prospects to allocate their “hundred pennies of trust.” Review the results with the rest of your sales team. Discuss how effectively you are guiding prospects in where they place their pennies.

  Is your uniqueness evident in the demographic, situational, or attitudinal qualities of your best clients? If so, identify those specific qualities.

  CHAPTER 3

  Narrow Your Market

  In the previous chapter, we explained how to take inventory of your pieces of the puzzle, so you know which problems you can solve and for whom. The next step is to find someone to build a puzzle with you. In selling, this is where many people lose their way because they underappreciate a key distinction between someone who might be interested in what you sell and someone who is willing to make an investment or willing to change from their existing solution in order to obtain what you sell. Effective selling is a quest to determine whether or not the potential client has an issue worth solving.

  Imagine yourself walking down a familiar street, carrying your bag of puzzle pieces. You encounter other people, but some of them are holding board games or decks of cards. These people might be wonderful, but they’re not the ones you’re looking for; you want to find the ones who have puzzle pieces. Of course, even those people might not have the pieces that complement your pieces. Specifically, you are looking for people who have gaps in their puzzle where your pieces fit perfectly. Your goal in qualifying sales prospects is simple: Find people who not only face problems you can solve, but also recognize those problems and believe they are worth solving.

  Knowing which people are worth taking a look at and which ones are not worth your time, today, is essential to your success. The ones who are not a fit—we’ll call them non-prospects—pose a great danger to your business because they have the potential to suck in your energy and resources like a black hole. In this chapter, we explain the danger of attempting to serve a wide market, and we present an approach to narrowing your market to the right opportunities. In addition to sharing a specific method for qualifying your prospects, we explain how to use Same Side Selling to have potential buyers qualify themselves.

  The Cost of Pursuing Too Many Prospects

  Many companies spread themselves too thin chasing weak opportunities. This means that when a great opportunity arrives, a company might not have sufficient resources to pursue it properly. When too many prospects are pursued before they are adequately qualified, sales teams expend resources chasing bad deals and pay inadequate attention to the good ones.

  Elephant Hunting Can Be Costly

  Dave is the CEO of a firm offering outsourced services for bill payment. He was introduced to the controller for a national retailer that had a high level
of interest in the outsourced services that Dave’s company offers. This retailer also had the potential to become the largest customer of Dave’s company. Accordingly, Dave, along with the sales and technical teams, invested many hours in preparing for the first meeting with the retailer and for several subsequent demonstrations.

  Unfortunately, the retailer responded slowly and the conversation dragged on for many months. Periods of silence extended for weeks and months, and then the retailer appeared to regain interest. This pattern continued for nearly two years. Finally realizing that the deal was going nowhere, Dave and his team were disgusted with the retailer and mad at themselves for putting so much time and energy into a fruitless lead. When they calculated their investment in travel and employee time on the pursuit, they realized that they had wasted the profit earned from good business in pursuit of a client who was never going to spend money on a solution.

  Does that scenario sound familiar? Effort wasted on the wrong prospects is always expensive—not to mention demoralizing. Pursuing large customers is often called “elephant hunting.” When you are not able to qualify the opportunity, the pursuit is probably closer to chasing rainbows, and it can be fatal for a business.

  In the example above, the seller, Dave, qualified the prospect based on the potential revenue for his company. He thought, “The deal is big enough that we have to chase it.” That is a common rationale and it sounds reasonable, but in this case (as in most cases), it proved costly and frustrating.

  The Hidden Costs of Playing a Numbers Game

  You might say, “So what? Our deals are so large that we can afford to chase ten for every one that we win.” Even if your economics do support a high cost of sales and a low conversion rate, failing to narrow your market can hurt your company.

  The cost of poor qualifying is more than wasted time. It can take a toll on your team.