Seventeen
WMMM #040 - This week’s edition covers sales frameworks and offers tips to help us compete like the best.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter November 4, 2023 8 min read
Win More, Make More is back after taking a break last week.
We went west and found ourselves hiking in the Redwood Forest in Big Sur, CA.
How long is 17-Mile Drive?
17-Mile Drive is a scenic road through Pebble Beach and Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula in the great state of California.
It hugs one of the most dramatic coastlines in the world, where the Pacific Ocean meets northern California at the Monterey Peninsula. It passes many famous scenic attractions, including the Lone Cypress, Bird Rock, and the Del Monte Forest of Monterey Cypress trees.
The road is 16.78 miles in length.
17 ways we can compete like the best
1) Understand how enterprises make purchase decisions.
An individual employee within an enterprise identifies a technology they believe will deliver value to the business.
More often than not, that individual does not understand the process required to make a buying decision.
A sales professional in enterprise technology brings considerable value to the Buyer by merely understanding how enterprises make decisions.
One can learn this skill from sales training programs and from personally experiencing this process with several repetitions.
Consider this:
A professional salesperson likely participates in more enterprise buying decisions in a single year than an individual, line-of-business employee does in a lifetime.
2) Establish trust.
People tend to do business with people they trust.
Particular behaviors influence a person’s trust.
These behaviors can be learned by studying the principles of behavioral science.
Consistency, social proof, and liking are examples.
Read “Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini
Personal trust is not enough when selling to enterprises. We must establish institutional trust between our employer and the Buyer’s.
3) Communicate effectively.
Communication has many forms, and mastering them is essential for professional salespeople.
Do we look into a person’s eyes when speaking with them, or do we look away, roll our eyes, or bat our eyelids?
Do we fold our arms when listening, or do we lean in and nod?
Are we conscious of our tempo, pitch, inflection, and volume?
Have we captured ourselves on video and gone through a critique?
Do we use words like “we, share, with,” or “I, me, you, tell, to?”
Have we taken a copywriting course?
4) Know when to act with speed.
There are certainly moments in a sales cycle where it is prudent to slow things down.
Sometimes, doing nothing is the best strategy for a given situation.
But, for the most part, operating with speed is a behavior that produces many desirable impressions.
Attentiveness, competence, interest, confidence, priority, and responsiveness come to mind.
Let’s not put off until tomorrow what we can do today.
5) Demonstrate the ability to make things happen for the Buyer.
Part of establishing institutional trust is demonstrating to the Buyer that your organization can respond to theirs.
We can influence this by knowing how to engage our employer into action on behalf of our Buyer.
Look strategically for openings to demonstrate that we can make things happen.
6) Tell stories.
Storytelling is one of the more effective tools in communication, but it requires practice.
Have we taken a course in storytelling to improve our skills? Verbal storytelling? Written?
Read Stephen King’s “On Writing” and Max Yoder’s “Do Better Work.”
7) Write compelling content.
Copywriting has recently become a necessary skill for the professional salesperson, given how much email is used to communicate with Buyers.
To help us write better and faster, try grammarly.com, “Seven Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills” at coursera.org, and gocharlie.ai.
8) Help the Buyer make a decision.
As discussed in “1),” we know from experience that most enterprises invest heavily in sourcing and procurement departments to facilitate technology buying decisions. Enterprise sales professionals prioritize their time with these teams and invest in these relationships.
Working with sourcing and procurement professionals is an absolute requirement for enterprise selling.
9) Network.
Social media offers another tool for Sellers and Buyers to learn about one another without ever meeting. Professional salespeople realize that their social profile influences others.
An everyday use of LinkedIn is identifying the connections we share with people we meet.
Invest in our LinkedIn profile and our connections.
10) Automate.
Do we use the exact words when writing an introductory email?
How about a follow-up, meeting recap, or thank you email?
When we perform some of our Discovery by email (in-person is highly preferred), does that feel repetitive across sales cycles?
Do we already cut ‘n paste from older emails?
We can save time by developing templates or using conversational AI tools to automate some of our administrative tasks.
Sandler Sales System has implemented AI in its integration with Hubspot to do precisely that.
We will begin to see this across many sales productivity tools.
11) Be Disciplined.
Do the tasks we must do, but don’t want/like to.
Don’t do the things that we aren’t supposed to be doing but want/like to do.
If we use a coach or trainer for nothing more than to hold us accountable and remind us of our goals, we will outperform much of the industry.
12) Have a Process.
Sales professionals should have a process, or by default, we will follow someone else’s process.
Following someone else’s process inevitably leads to a less desirable outcome, like a “no decision.”
Here is my list of the top sales frameworks that I’ve encountered: Strategic Selling, Solution Selling, Conceptual Selling, Target Account Selling, Sandler Selling System, SNAP Selling, SPIN Selling, Value Selling Framework, The Challenger Sale, and MEDDIC / MEDDPICC.
13) Draw from best practices.
Some of the best sales professionals pick and choose from the top sales frameworks, pulling the best from each.
“You can’t sell anybody anything until they discover they want to buy it.”
Help them self-discover.
Help then buy.
14) Be Aware - Example #1
One size does not fit all when it comes to sales frameworks.
Imagine that we are assigned a single account for our sales territory.
Many popular sales frameworks, including MEDDPICC and Sandler, are very good at helping us qualify an opportunity.
They are as good at getting us to a “No” as they are to a “Yes.”
But, with a single account, we do not have the luxury of throwing that fish back into the pond and continuing to fish for another account.
So, while we can still use the qualification principles on individual sales cycles, we are likely to relax our qualifiers a bit and pull from the Target Account Selling framework, which fits the situation better.
15) Be Aware - Example #2
Imagine that we are with a startup that has at most fifteen customers.
We have no “pull” because there is no awareness of our company in our target account segment.
Our company has created a solution that does not exist anywhere else in the industry.
We are a first-mover and define the market.
There is no budget for what we sell because it does not replace anything in place today.
Our market is the enterprise segment; literally every enterprise could use our solution, but they haven’t realized it yet.
We are responsible for creating our own leads.
We aren’t looking for ways to prioritize the leads we are getting.
We aren’t getting any.
We aren’t looking for ways to end a conversation with an early disqualification.
We are interested in initiating the beginning of a discovery session.
We are interested in establishing a rapport and beginning to build trust.
We are interested in influencing a small amount of interest through fear, uncertainty, doubt, or some form of personal win.
Principles found in SPIN Selling, Sandler, and Solution Selling might work best in this scenario.
16) Be Aware - Example #3
The Challenger Sale is often misused and abused.
Instead of unraveling the needs and demands of the prospect, the Challenger Sale challenges the prospect by making them aware of the pitfalls within their industry.
Challenger is often implemented by directing the salesperson to learn something about the industry that the prospect has yet to understand or does not address in its current go-to-market. When ready, the salesperson must call on the C-level of the prospect, revealing to them the knowledge they possess. The hope is that the C-level will be so impressed with the salesperson’s knowledge that they are influenced to transform their business to match the salesperson’s vision. The resulting transformation can only be accomplished by purchasing whatever the salesperson is selling.
While I have heard of this abuse of Challenger on multiple occasions, I have never heard of a successful outcome.
To be fair to the Challenger Sale, I listened to a podcast where one of its co-authors was interviewed. He never intended to lay the industry-transforming knowledge acquisition at the salesperson’s feet. This information was designed to be created by the technology company, using their product and service as the solution to the vision they painted for that particular industry. Once that process was completed, the tech company would provide its sales force with the materials that outlined its vision and solution.
Imagine, once again, that we are assigned a single account and are tasked with selling a business-changing transformation to a C-level.
Assume we are given nothing from our employer to help us.
How would we go about this?
We could call upon the tried and true “Elevator Pitch.”
It’s an abbreviated form of a Point-of-View.
Thirty (30) seconds is all the time a C-level will give to capture their interest.
“Our customers have found that they struggle with X, Y, and Z. They estimate that this costs them about $50M annually. We solve that problem with our ABC technology for about $5M. It usually takes us six months from procurement to value. Is this something you’d care to hear more about?”
If the C-level gives us more time, we drop into Discovery but keep the number of questions under twelve (12), or they will feel like they are being interrogated. Use principles found in Sandler and SPIN to construct our questions.
17) Focus on Behaviors, not Results.
Focus on behaviors, and the results are sure to follow.
Thank you for reading,
Jeff
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