The Collaborative Sale Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Definitions

  Part I: Foundations of the Collaborative Sale Chapter 1: “The Story” and What's behind The Collaborative Sale The Collaborative Sale

  What Is Sales Collaboration?

  Chapter 2: Solution Selling Meets the New Buyer The Emergence of the New Buyer—Buyer 2.0

  The Effect of Information Access on Buyer 2.0 Behavior

  The Millennials Are Coming

  The Effect of Economic Uncertainty on Buyer 2.0 Behavior

  Buyer 2.0 versus Buyer 1.0

  Adapting to the Buyer 2.0 Paradigm

  The Relevancy of Solution Selling and the Evolution of the Collaborative Sale

  The Story (Continued)

  Chapter 3: What the New Buyers Expect: Situational Fluency Seller Agility

  Situational Fluency

  Components of Situational Fluency

  Hiring for Situational Fluency

  Developing Situational Fluency

  Technology's Role in Situational Fluency

  Part II: Three Personae of the Collaborative Sale Chapter 4: The Micro-Marketer Persona Why Be a Micro-Marketer?

  Micro-Marketers Demonstrate Situational Fluency—With Constraint

  Micro-Marketers Create Their Own Personal Brand

  Planning and Executing a Micro-Marketer Strategy

  Enabling the Micro-Marketer Persona

  The Story (Continued)

  Chapter 5: The Visualizer Persona What Is a Visualizer?

  Buyer States and Strength of Vision

  Visualizer Conversations

  Embracing the Visualizer Persona

  The Story (Continued)

  Chapter 6: The Value Driver Persona Focusing on Value

  What Is the Value Driver Persona?

  Using a Collaboration Plan—A Buyer Alignment and Risk Mitigation Strategy

  The Myth of Control

  Create an Online Collaboration Site

  Collaborating to Close

  Enabling the Value Driver Persona

  The Story (Continued)

  Part III: Making the Collaborative Sale a Reality Chapter 7: Establishing a Dynamic Sales Process Buyer-Aligned Sales Process

  Dynamic Sales Process

  Automating Dynamic Sales Processes

  Expanding the View of Sales Process

  Sales Process Enables Management and Marketing

  Chapter 8: Coaching the Collaborative Sale Sales Management Cadence

  Motivation

  Chapter 9: Implementing the Collaborative Sale Right Process: Buyer-Aligned Learning and Development

  Right People: Talent Assessment and Analytics

  Right Tools: Focused Enablement

  Committing to Success—Individually and Organizationally

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Appendix Essential Competencies for The Collaborative Sale

  Additional Collaborative Selling Tools

  Contributors Keith M. Eades

  Timothy T. Sullivan

  Robert Kear

  James N. “Jimmy” Touchstone

  Dave Christofaro

  Kenneth Cross

  Tamela M. Rich Index

  End User License Agreement

  List of Illustrations

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  Figure 9.10

  Figure A.1

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  The Collaborative Sale

  Solution Selling in a Buyer-Driven World

  Keith M. Eades

  Timothy T. Sullivan

  Cover image: © iStock/CurvaBezier

  Cover design: Wiley

  Copyright © 2014 by Sales Performance International, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

  Published simultaneously in Canada.

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  Dedicated to sales and marketing professionals, who commit themselves to improve their performance and contribute to their customers' success.

  To our Sales Performance International family, who commit themselves every day to helping improve our clients' business results.

  To our families, friends, and mentors who support, encourage, and allow us to travel the world in pursuit of our dreams.

  To teachers globally that help educate, train, mentor, and coach us. It is through their love for leaning and giving to others that we achieve.

  To the m
en and women in the armed services around the world, who put themselves in harm's way to protect our freedoms.

  Foreword

  Buyer behavior has evolved and will continue to evolve through time. The more information buyers have access to, the less dependent they are on traditional sources of information—salespeople. Thanks to the Internet and the wealth of information it provides, buyers are more informed and more comfortable evaluating options on their own. As a result, buyers are more knowledgeable and more empowered than ever before.

  Anything or anyone that does not add value to their buying process is eliminated, including high-pressure or situationally unknowledgeable salespeople. Buyers are never again going to relinquish power, or control of their buying process, to aggressive sellers who do not have their best interest at heart.

  Further, we live in a world of uncertainty, with more unpredictability than ever before. Global economic uncertainties and the recent global recessions have made individual buyers as well as the companies they represent realize, perhaps once and for all, that they must see results and maximize their return on investment in every purchase. This means buyers are more cautious than ever and they are acutely aware of the risks of making bad decisions. In order to spread the risk, they involve many more people and often form buying committees in their rigorous evaluations. If today's buyers aren't convinced about the results and the value of a purchase, they simply choose to do nothing at all.

  Due to these trends, sales professionals must adapt. The good news is that I see a great transformation taking place globally with sales professionals as they work to adapt to the new buyers. In fact, my firm, ES Research Group, which analyzes trends in selling practices and conducts independent evaluations of sales training companies, is seeing sellers achieve great results when they adapt to the new buying trends.

  To succeed today, sellers need to be worthy collaborators with these knowledgeable buyers. No longer can sellers drive and control the sale; buyers are too empowered and savvy. Sellers must align with where the buyers are in their buying process and collaborate with them in an open and transparent manner. The sellers who do this are winning business and they are transforming selling forever. I truly believe this, and our research backs this up.

  We surveyed 239 buy-side and 352 sell-side negotiators at the end of 2012, and asked them identical questions about the buying-selling process. When our researchers asked how respondents expect the environment to change in the near future, a strong majority of both said that they believe that buyers and sellers must and will become more collaborative over the next three years.

  Our firm has been tracking and reporting on Sales Performance International (SPI) for seven years, and we have always rated it among the leading firms in the sales training and sales performance industry. Keith Eades and Tim Sullivan are two of SPI's thought leaders, and they share a passion for raising the quality of the sales profession. SPI has been best known for its methodology, Solution Selling®, which has been adopted by more than a million people all over the world. In many respects, that methodology has always been about effective collaboration with buyers. Keith and Tim have taken a close look at the recent changes in buyer behavior, evaluated the tenets of Solution Selling, and developed a modern view of what effective sellers need to do to succeed in today's world. The result is this book, The Collaborative Sale.

  The Collaborative Sale introduces three new sales personae (Micro-Marketer, Visualizer, and Value Driver) that enable sellers to be more effective with today's savvy and informed buyers. The foundational competency behind the three new personae is called situational fluency. This competency allows sellers to engage buyers in multiple ways—through conversations on social media outlets like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter or in direct conversations with buyers when trying to create, enhance, or reengineer their visions.

  To sell with the transparency The Collaborative Sale proposes may be challenging for some sellers and their organizations. I feel strongly that today's buyers are demanding transparency and are demanding that sellers add value to their buying process from the moment they are engaged.

  The Collaborative Age of Selling is now upon us. The Collaborative Sale will help you make the transition.

  Dave Stein

  Founder and CEO

  ES Research Group, Inc.

  Preface

  Published in November 2003, The New Solution Selling quickly became required reading for many sales, sales management, and marketing professionals around the world. With over 300,000 copies sold, the book became a best seller and one of the most popular business books on the topic of sales and marketing. It still sells well today, more than 10 years after its debut.

  However, propelled by the Internet and innovations in collaborative technologies, buyer behavior has changed significantly—some may even say radically—since 2003. In addition, the Millennial generation has arrived on the scene, bringing significant change to buying patterns as well. These changes in buyer behavior affect how we must market and sell in profound and highly disruptive ways. The reason for writing The Collaborative Sale is to address many of these significant changes in buyer behavior.

  While writing this book about sales collaboration, I am also finalizing the architectural plans for my company's new international headquarters. What I've learned about the importance of sales collaboration throughout my career prompted me to ask our architect to design every aspect of our new space to foster collaboration among our associates and with our clients. Our open work spaces, impromptu meeting areas, innovation rooms, and even the height of the office walls are all designed to help people get more done through collaboration, and to enjoy themselves more while doing so.

  I can't overemphasize the need for effective collaboration in this modern age. Effective selling is now a collaborative effort between equals—buyers and sellers—focused on an optimum result. Unfortunately, selling is viewed too often as an us-versus-them endeavor. But it doesn't need to be that way. This book, by my colleague Tim Sullivan and me, is our contribution to stemming the tides of disunity and mistrust.

  The word collaborate is based on the Latin word collaborare, which means “to labor together.” Each year, Sales Performance International works with more than 200 corporate clients to assess, train, and enable more than 25,000 sales and marketing professionals to “labor together” with buyers to solve their business problems. We have captured in this book much of what we've learned from our clients about sales collaboration.

  Social scientists have demonstrated that even though insight feels like a solitary exercise, it is actually rooted in collaboration. We discovered a recent academic study that shows that a group of average people who collaborate effectively can solve problems more quickly than an expert acting alone.

  Time after time, we've seen that sellers who successfully align their products, services, and capabilities with buyers' problems, critical business issues, and opportunities will elevate their status in the eyes of their customers. They will rise from “vendor” to “trusted partner,” enabling higher levels of trust and collaboration. As a matter of fact, buyers often ask their trusted partners to collaborate on new ideas and will regularly write specifications and even requests for proposals (RFPs) and tenders around their capabilities.

  And yes, sellers can achieve highly trusted status no matter what they sell. Some of our clients work in highly regulated monopolies, while others sell commodities like fuel, rocks, and financial investments; most fall somewhere in between, selling differentiated products or solutions in a competitive marketplace. But they all attain high levels of trust and credibility with customers by collaborating effectively and adding value in every interaction.

  The Collaborative Sale removes barriers to collaboration by providing sellers with the processes, methods, tools, and skills they need, as well as the specific sales personae that they should play, when working with the new buyers.

  I hope that you will not only enjoy our book, but will also
let us know how you have put it to use to collaborate with your customers. Please drop us a note at www.thecollaborativesale.com or www.spisales.com with your story.

  And if you will come visit us in our new headquarters, I'll treat you to a cup of coffee and take you for a tour. I hope you'll take me up on my offer.

  Keith Eades

  CEO and Founder

  Sales Performance International, LLC

  Acknowledgments

  The Collaborative Sale is the result of our research and our work with our global clients, who are always challenging us to discover better ways to equip their sales teams to achieve maximum performance. To all of our clients, we thank you for the opportunity to make a difference in your businesses.

  We also thank our colleagues at Sales Performance International (SPI), especially Robert Kear, Jimmy Touchstone, Brandon Uttley, Steve Smith, Jon Roy, Mike Racel, Dave Christofaro, Ken Cross, Grant Cox, Andy Smith, Mac McLaughlin, Phil McCrory, Jurgen Heyman, Steven Vantongelen, Sean DesNoyer, and Doug Handy. Their insights and contributions to this book have been enormous. Our thanks go also to Andrea Cinq-Mars and Leigh Anne Zeitouni for their help with graphics and aesthetic advice. And thanks also to the world's greatest assistant, Sandra Albertson.

  We interviewed many clients and industry experts to identify and validate current trends and best practices in selling, which have been included in this book's contents. We would especially like to thank Alan Cline, Rob Ritchie, Bill Williams, David Ivester, David Quebbemann, Perry Santia, Bruce Balthaser, Harry Kelly, Alex Boss, Stefaan van Hooydonk, Robert Chesney, Dave Stein, Peter Ostrow, Jim Ninivaggi, and Jim Dickie for their time and willingness to share their experiences and observations.

  We give special thanks and recognition to Tamela Rich, a talented writer, for her contributions to this book. Tamela has a special gift of getting the most out of other writers. And thanks to Judy Anderson, a talented teacher, for her edits and for introducing us to The Spyglass.