8 drivers of empathy that deliver sales success.

8 drivers of empathy that deliver sales success.

Nov 15, 2017 | Change, Sales

Selling is not for everyone, it is a hard gig that requires that you are able to understand and deal with rejection. All the most successful sales people recognise that the process is not about them, but is all about the prospect.

Even the most likely prospect who will buy, may not be ready to buy right now, so timing and follow up are key components of success. However, the best indicator of success at sales has always been the ability to build empathy, and employ subtle persuasion, by whatever means you can, on top of a solid sales foundation. When the planets align, empathy can lead to engagement that sometimes leads to the transaction.

Having the ability to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect and see things through their eyes is the route to empathy.  It is a skill not many have naturally, but can be learnt.

When you are the prospect, the subject of someone else’s efforts to herd you towards that sales transaction, consider the things you might expect from the sales hopeful:

  • They treat your time with great respect
  • They recognise that the risks of change outweigh the maintenance of the status quo by a large amount therefore there must be some compelling reason to make a switch.
  • They assume that your expertise is valuable, and that you have no obligation to answer question after question aimed at understanding your business. They do their homework before bothering you.
  • They understand that there is a buying process in place in your organisation, and that it will be followed in almost all circumstances.
  • They understand that the purchase decision for anything new, or that requires change will go through a number of tests and barriers. It is their job to supply you with all the information and arguments you might need in their absence, to carry the decision internally. Obtaining buy in from others in the organisation for a change, is a challenging task, and even if you are well on board with the change, you will probably need their help to bring others in the organisation, sometimes more removed from the consequences of the decision, and sometimes directly impacted, to the same conclusion.
  • They understand that your actions will be driven by your best interests, in all its forms, not theirs
  • They understand your purchase patterns, as well as the process, and do not set out to disrupt them, rather work with them, which usually means the process takes longer than they would like on the odd occasion you decide to make the change.
  • They understand that the incumbent supplier is unlikely to just stand around and let their business be taken by an alternative supplier, so they are ready for the debate.

 

If they did all these things, would you be persuaded?

When you need help with any of this stuff, let me know.

Illustration credit; shchambers.com

8 Reasons not to change.

8 Reasons not to change.

Nov 13, 2017 | Change, Governance, Strategy

We all understand the power of ‘Not broken, don’t fix’ sort of thinking. When things are going OK, even if that is not as well as you would expect, the temptation to leave the status quo in place is compelling.

No risk in that is there.

I see reasons not to change all the time, and find that change is easiest when all concerned see that there is simply no option, and even then, it is sometimes hard, as any improvement is put down to the status quo delivering as it always has, not to the changes made.

Here are the reasons I hear most often, each with their own variation.

  • We are doing OK, do not rock the boat, there are sharks out there.

Counterargument. The success to date is no indicator of  success into the future, in fact we do know that the future will not look like the past, so we better get on with shaping our own future or we will end up being shark-shit.

  • We are really busy getting stuff done, in order to make these changes, there is a whole bunch of work we do not have the resources or time to do.

Counterargument.  If we are so busy getting stuff done, that is a sure sign that what we are doing is suboptimal. In a world where knowledge is king, unless we are sufficiently curious to think about and try new stuff we will just get busier, and busier, and end up  not seeing the wall before we hit it.

  • We tried that, and it did not work.

Counterargument. It may  not have worked, but do we understand why it did not, and how with the benefit of hindsight we would go about it a second time? Perhaps things have changed sufficiently for it or a variation of it to work today.

  • If we improve what we are doing just a little bit, we will have a huge improvement, so let’s concentrate on that.

Counterargument. Having in place a process of continuous improvement is great but not enough to be sustainably successful. Continuous improvement is a core management responsibility, not an option, or reason for celebration, as at best it optimises existing processes, which may be poor process in the first place. The challenge is to seek new ways of achieving the result that create new sources of value, or indeed, create a new result.

  • Our customers do not seem to think that we need to do it that way

Counterargument. Customers usually see things in their existing context, and so long as the product or service you provide continues to be competitive, often see no reason to change or push you for improvement. However, when an alternative supplier turns up with a better solution, they will move. Steve Jobs famously quipped that he never asked customers what they wanted, simply because they did not know, and Henry Ford observed that if he asked customers what they wanted, the answer would be a faster horse. Don’t get caught having the best horse stables in town when the residents are all driving cars.

  • Change is risky, what if it all goes to hell?.

Counterargument. Change is risky, and it can easily go pear-shaped, so the smart managers avoid betting the farm while changing as quickly as practical and possible.

  • What if we are wrong?

Counterargument. Being wrong can and does happen, indeed, being wrong some of the time is a part of learning how to improve. The key is to plan the changes, understand the outcomes required, monitor the outcomes as they emerge, and be prepared to make adjustments quickly as necessary.  You could also ask yourself ‘what if we are right, but did nothing. What would be the cost of that inaction?

  • We do not have the skills or experience to make these sorts of changes

Counterargument. Few do when they start, that is what change is all about, and what makes it so challenging. What is required is a dose of leadership, someone who inspires the idea that change is necessary, communicates the need widely, then is seen to be ‘walking the walk’ and leading it. Besides, there are plenty of advisors out there with a lot of experience  and knowledge,  pick someone who can help by guiding, mentoring and advising.

Initiating and managing change is the biggest challenge a leader faces. It impacts on every corner and crevice of their business. Most shy away, and very few are able to see all the forces at work themselves. Change is necessarily collaborative and highly ‘leadership sensitive’. An appropriate dispassionate and experienced outside resource, often teams of them, always add value to the process.

Header cartoon credit: Hugh McLeod at gaping Void.

5 realities we Australians should  be thinking about.

5 realities we Australians should  be thinking about.

Nov 10, 2017 | Change, Governance, Leadership, rant

This is a personal rant motivated by the continuing  sight of politicians pontificating about stuff that does not matter and either ignoring much of the stuff that does, or presenting as facts, suppositions and bullshit that is supposed to make their case and cover their culpability for inaction  and stupidity.

Not a bad start.

However, much as it is good to blame someone else for the things frustrating the hell out of us, it is not entirely their fault.

We live, for those who have not noticed, well into the 21st century.  Our institutions were designed and evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most would accept the notion that change has never been faster or more all-encompassing as in the last 20 years, so why are we surprised that  the institutions have failed to keep up?

So, let me just have a look at an area I am at least partially familiar with after 40 years of operating in it, the current state of small business, and the relationship they have to the economic well being of the communities they serve. Nothing about the stupid non binding vote on same sex marriage, nothing about the nonsense of setting out to build submarines of a hybrid and bodgied  design over which we have no control, and cannot crew anyway in the name of saving a few government seats, nothing about the hysteria and confusion about what is means to be an Australian citizen, …. Need I go on?

There is a general recognition that small business is the backbone of the economy, employing 5 million (the data is 2 years old, which tells you something about our institutions) people and contributing billions in tax, in other words, they carry the weight of the economy, but the statistics do not tell us all we need to understand, as they, like everything else, were designed to give information on the 20th century economy, not the 21st.

A few examples.

  • Micro entrepreneurs are everywhere. There are hundreds of thousands of Australians making a bit on the side via eBay, Etsy, and Amazon, buying and selling stuff that never gets counted. This is a new breed of entrepreneur, and they are operating almost under the radar. The tools that enable this sort of activity did not exist 20 years ago.

 

  • The net is ubiquitous. The enabler of the previous point, the net, has also enabled thousands to start new businesses, often on the side, simply because the cost of failure is now so low, as the cost of entry has shrunk to a fraction of what it was 20 years ago. Many of these businesses fail, perhaps even most,  but that no longer means penury for  the entrepreneur, he/she simply picks up and has another go. Few of my children’s friends and colleagues expect to work for a corporation all their lives, then retire, as my generation did, although many of us are radically rethinking that at  the moment. They expect to get some experience, at somebody else’s expense, then  leverage that into their own business.

 

  • The tax base is hiding. The goldmine of PAYE tax is rapidly disappearing, as individuals go into business for themselves, rather than working for corporations, and often, as well as working for corporations. This gives access to all sorts of reasonable deductions of expenses not available to a PAYE employee. While we have a spending problem in this country, pollies spending to get themselves re-elected, or massively overspending to correct the failures of the past (look at the Sydney road and rail systems for any evidence you need of this) we also have a revenue problem. The GST was a sensible step, compromised as it was, and is, by politics, but the whole tax and welfare system needs a radical rethink, which simply will not happen until we are faced with a true crisis. On top of all that is the simple reality that paying tax has become optional for the large multinationals around the globe who have the reach and resources to structure their affairs towards minimisation. it may not be illegal, but it sure as hell is immoral, and the price we ‘ordinary taxpayers’ are all paying, and will continue to pay unless we, and other international tax institutions figure out that we need to collaborate to stop it. Perhaps we should summon the ghost of Kerry Packer to deliver another broadside.

 

  • Baby Boomers are not ‘retiring’. The so called baby boomers, of which I am one, are not retiring, they may be cutting back, but often they are starting businesses, setting out to use their experience and lifetime wisdom in some useful way. The retirement age is a function of a world where we worked physically much harder than we do now, and the body gave out just before we kicked the bucket. Now the body is not giving out, and when it does we go in for renovations to keep on going. The  only bucket we are interested in  is the list of stuff we still want to do.

 

  • Manufacturing is not dead, it has just changed shape. The 20th century manufacturing model is dead, but is being replaced by a highly technical, globally connected combination of technologies from electronics to additive and 3D manufacturing, which employs just a few highly qualified and motivated people. Yet, our industrial institutions still believe we have big factories full of people doing repetitive tasks. Worse still, our education systems are still geared to mass production of kids who can recite rather than think, and this is despite the disastrous rebalancing of education towards university at the expense of trade skills. While we need less people digging holes, we need more who can design, fabricate, and operate a complex piece of machinery or electronics, and we are not training them in sufficient numbers, or giving them the self belief that valuable and rewarding work does not necessarily equate to sitting in an air conditioned office driving a mouse.

 

All of this simply means that opportunity multiplies, as the institutions that supposedly govern us sit idly by at best, but get in the way most of the time, more often than not by accident. The status quo for which they were designed has been chucked out, trashed, and is significantly irrelevant now, rapidly becoming utterly irrelevant  and a wet blanket on progress without real and immediate change.

 

9 forces you must harness to be a successful C21 marketer

9 forces you must harness to be a successful C21 marketer

Nov 8, 2017 | Branding, Change, Customers, Marketing

The tools of Marketing have changed, not just a bit, but totally, since the century clock ticked over.

The scary thing is that it seems to me that we have seen nothing yet. It is becoming more unpredictable than riding a wild bull every day!

While the tools have changed, and will continue to do so, the foundations remain intact. The successful marketer in the rest of the 21st century must reconcile the complexity and technology of the tools, with the simple and unchanged foundations of marketing success.

Following are the nine macro forces I see that businesses, and their marketing leaders should be considering:

The power of information.

Technology has put the power of information into the hands of the consumer, wherever they are. The tools that have achieved this, social platforms, mobile, the ubiquity of the net, have interacted to destroy  all the rules of marketing beyond the basic principals. We used to say information is power, and that remains true, it is just that the power is now in different hands, and they are not afraid to use it.

Brand building.

Building a brand is not what it used to be.  C19 marketing relied on scale, large ad dollars placed by large companies who could scale distribution, supported by the scale of capital intensive manufacturing. The brand powerhouses of the C19 are in trouble as options pop up everywhere, supported by direct to interested consumer marketing.

However, all is not lost, access direct to consumers has enabled a whole new group of brands to emerge based on the direct digital access.

Advertising in crisis.

Advertising as an industry is in real trouble. This is  not  the divide between the analogue TV, radio and magazine Vs the Gooface digital advertising duopoly, but the opportunity that consumers have to remove advertising from their environment by a combination of ad blockers and subscription based streaming services.   The communication challenge will become harder as consumers avoid more and more advertising to minimise the disruption, in the process, removing the opportunity for advertising serendipity.

Bureaucracies no longer work.

The pace of change has been so fast that the siloed and bureaucratic organisation and management structures of the past no longer move  quickly enough to respond in real time to the requirements of the market place. The businesses that succeed into the future will be those that enable the decision making to be decentralised in meaningful ways such that those in direct contact with the market and customers have the power to make often substantial decisions, This is a really challenging prospect to everything that has been true about organisations for the last 150 years. I see it as an external extension of the Lean manufacturing notion of Takt time, but instead of companies using the rhythms of demand to drive their operational responses, they need to reverse it to be able to be in advance of the market Takt time, to understand and respond to the drivers of demand, to remain competitive.

Consumer power.

The locus of power has moved from those doing the selling to those doing the buying. No longer do sellers have the information needed to make a purchase decision that they can dole out to potential customers in any way that best suits their sales strategies. Now, in most cases, a seller does not know of a buyers interest in a market until their decision is made, or almost made. In these circumstances, getting on customers radar early is essential as a means to be on the short list, which offers the opportunity to at least have a conversation.

Brands are no longer the authorities they once were, that role has been taken by individuals who have managed to build a profile, usually digitally, that attracts attention and offers credibility. There are however some exceptions, and these exceptions are mostly brands that have emerged in the C21

Buyer journey.

The journey of  a buyer is a minefield. Back in the old days, last century, it was pretty simple, there were few choices realistically available, mostly serviced  from the local area, and the sellers had the power. Now  there are a huge range of choices, and often confronted by the range consumers either filter out all but the very few, or decide not to decide, becoming hypnotised by the array of choice, with all the competing claims. Therefore, the first battle is the one for attention. In this situation, you would think that brands have a real role to play, but largely, that hole remains to be filled, which will be I believe the challenge for the 21st century marketer.

Big data oxymoron.

The oxymoron of big data is coming. We have all  this data sourced from an array of places, and cobbled together by algorithms to give us insights and detail never dreamed of just a few years ago. However, big data is all really about going to the level of the individual, so it is in some ways, small data. Market segmentation is moving from broad demographic descriptors that had little to do with actual behaviour, to a segment of one. The implications of this are profound, in that customers can choose to do business not just on an ‘algorithmic’ basis, but on a personal one as well.

Marketing is data driven: with a twist.

Marketing used to be all about people, emotion, supposition, instinct, and experience, mixed with often lethal doses of bullshit. Suddenly all the imformation we marketers had ever dreamed of turned up on our desks as data, and we dove in trying to become data nerds, a role entirely unsuited to most, so the new shiny thing, the tools, became the obsession, rather than the insights that the tools could  deliver. The pendulum swung too far, and it is still swinging, but in my assessment, the pace of  the swing is slowing, and slowly the realisation will again emerge that people really do matter, and you cannot learn that from data, you have to go out to where the people are, and actually talk to them, face to face, one to one, to get a grasp of the humanity behind all  the data.,

Marketers in the C-Suite.

Marketers have never been held in high esteem by the ‘C-Suite’  as the Americans love to call it. To a significant extend to my mind this is for two reasons: first, marketers have not often been the smartest people in the room, as measured by the normal things that are all about the optimisation and continuation of the status quo, they have been flaky. Second, they are the future tellers, talking and speculating about what might happen, and then having a number of bets on the table depending on the variables that show up, so holding marketers to a data driven world has been hard. By contrast, the other functions in the c-suite are all about what has happened, the past, so it is relatively easier to produce hard facts and data to describe it. This difference makes the marketers look by contrast they are having each way bets, and perhaps do not know what they are doing, and neither is healthy.  This has to change, and I believe the change is starting, as what has happened is an increasingly bad indicator of what will happen, and it is the informed, creative but analytically capable flakey ones who can demonstrate value are usually best placed to place the bets on the future.

There are several items above that will generate discussion, which I look forward to hearing.

 

Image credit: Tom Driggers via Flikr

The essential template for profitable management of key, Strategically important customers.

The essential template for profitable management of key, Strategically important customers.

Nov 6, 2017 | Customers, Sales, Strategy

One of the current marketing buzzwords is ‘ABM,’ or Account Based Marketing. It is heralded as the panacea for all B2B sales challenges, generally with the caveat that you buy their software.

What utter Bollocks.

Allocating resources against important, and potentially important customers is about the oldest strategy in sales. I am pretty sure that Cato the grain merchant took Decimus, the biggest baker in Rome to that hot little restaurant in the forum for lunch and a few vinos in 200BC.

Certainly, the whole storyline of that great series ‘Madmen’ is focussed on the acquisition, holding onto and squeezing money out of an ‘Account’. In the early nineties, as a newly minted consultant, I successfully marketed a sales training program I called ‘SKAM’ or Strategic Key Account Management’.

The acronym always got at least a wry grin, and depending on circumstances, I would sometimes substitute ‘Planning’ for ‘Management’

So, to ABM.

The only thing that is new about it is that there is now a slew of software vendors promising to automate and make easy the age-old tasks of sales. There is no doubt that the software can deliver significant productivity benefits, but those benefits are absolutely dependent on doing the basics well, having a solid foundation of sales and marketing disciplines, and that has not changed. After all, if you automate a crap process, all you do is get buried in more crap quicker.

So, to the template.

Define ‘Strategically important’

Pretty obviously the first step is to define just what strategically important means in your context. To many it is those top customers, the 20% that generate the 80% of sales revenue and even more importantly, margin. It is worth remembering however, that each of those top customers were at some point, just a prospect, or a small and therefore easy to ignore customer, that grew. Really smart businesses define clearly a profile of their next group of strategically important customers, and allocate the resources to ensure that they grow to the potential they appear to have.

Have a clear strategy.

This goes hand in hand with the previous point. Without a clear strategy, the result of making often challenging choices about which markets, which types of customers, geographic locations, industry segments, technology base and many others, you will not be in a position to create a definition of what ‘strategically important’ means in your context. The default is almost always the biggest, but as noted, current size is a lagging indicator.

Articulate your value proposition.

Again, this is utterly dependent on the first two steps being done well, as what may be valuable to one customer, will not be to another, and you do  not want to waste precious resources trying to talk to and sell to people who do not care, or have no need for what you can offer.

Create a prioritised prospect hit list.

This is a list of potential customers who fit the general profiles from the first three points. There are many ways to do this, and no one right way, but almost universally it will involve the collection and analysis of publicly available data, from which some conclusions can be drawn.

Progressively execute on, and renew the hit list. 

This is where the rubber hits the sales road, and where most marketing and sales automation cuts in, and often creates significant complication before the benefits can be seen. it is also often the first point of call for many, a huge mistake made by those seduced by the siren song of automation.

Selling is a process based on psychology and understanding the prospective customer in as much detail as possible. We all like to buy, but generally hate to be sold to. Therefore selling is about gaining the attention, and progressively, trust, that you have a solution to the problem the prospect faces, that delivers value, however value is defined in the circumstances that apply to the sale and ongoing relationship.

Rinse and repeat.

As noted, sales is a process, and the more you treat it like a process, a set of steps to be followed that enable feedback loops, learning and improvement at every stage the better.

When you find you need some wisdom gained from extensive experience to be applied, a bespoke program to be developed, or just have some of the gobbledygook and jargon explained, call me.