Ch 6: Tailoring for Resonance
aversion, but the increase in consensus requirements is a trend we were tracking long before the downturn.
WHAT DECISION MAKERS REALLY WANT Earlier we discussed the findings from our customer loyalty survey— specifically, that 53 percent of B2B customer loyalty is a product of how you sell, not what you sell. One of the fascinating things we were able to do in that survey was to split out decision makers from influencers and end users in order to understand what makes these two different types of stakeholders loyal to a certain supplier. Let’s look first at decision makers—defined in our study as the people who actually sign the agreement. These individuals generally fall into one of two categories: senior executives or procurement. So what really matters to these senior buyers? When we isolate decision makers from the rest of the sample, and then compare the impact of the overall sales experience with that of the individual rep selling into the account, what we find is that for decision makers, aspects of the overall sales experience are nearly twice as important as individual rep attributes. Decision makers think of themselves as buying from organizations, not from individuals. So what does that mean for your sales organization?
Source: Sales Executive Council research. Figure 6.1. Sales Experience Drivers of Customer Loyalty for Decision Makers (Indexed) Of all the things that decision makers care about, topping the list in figure 6.1 is “widespread support for the supplier across my organization.” One way to think of that is that senior decision makers simply aren’t willing to go out on a limb for a supplier on a big purchase—at least not on their own. At the same time, we found that decision makers don’t want you to waste their time, either. They want suppliers to be accessible, easy to buy from, and willing to collaborate with other suppliers when necessary. Finally, while we might have assumed that things like price and willingness to customize would top the list for decision makers, they’re significantly less important than widespread support and ease of doing business. That’s a hugely important finding and flies in the face of most sales training that emphasizes the need to identify and engage the C-level buyer. Your reps spend so much time and effort trying to go directly to the senior decision maker, thinking, “If we can just get in that door, that’s going to help us close the deal.” But the best path to the decision maker isn’t directly through that door at all. It turns out it’s an indirect path that a rep needs to take to earn that decision maker’s support, one that lays the groundwork with the customer’s team— identifying, nurturing, and encouraging key customer stakeholders across the organization. When it does come time to decide, the decision maker wants to know he’s got the strong backing of his team. In other words, the consensus sale isn’t something you should be fighting—it’s something you should be actively pursuing. You can’t just elevate the conversation and cut everyone else out because it’s exactly that team input that the decision maker values most when it comes to loyalty. One final point: When we broke out senior executives and compared them side by side with procurement for what makes them loyal, we found almost no difference between the two groups. Not surprisingly, senior execs place higher value on rep knowledge, and procurement places greater value on reps’ not overstating the value of their product, but that’s about it. Both groups prioritize widespread support and ease of use above any significant differences. If loyalty at the senior level is all about winning widespread support from the team, then you’re going to need to understand how to generate that widespread support. You need to know what drives loyalty for the team, not just seniormost
decision makers.
THE KEY TO GENERATING “WIDESPREAD SUPPORT” Just as we did with decision makers, we can look at what it is that drives loyalty for end users and influencers—those individuals who play a key role in a purchase but don’t ultimately sign the check. Managed well, these individuals are powerfully positioned to advocate on your behalf. First, when we isolate influencers and end users from the larger sample, and compare the impact on their loyalty of the overall sales experience versus that of the individual rep, what we find is that—unlike decision makers—these influencers place much more emphasis on the individual rep selling to them. End users don’t think of themselves as buying from organizations; they buy from people. So what is it about the people they interact with that makes them more likely to be loyal? Source: Sales Executive Council research. Figure 6.2. Drivers of Sales Representative Loyalty for Influencers and End Users (Indexed)
As you look at figure 6.2, you’ll notice that the biggest driver of end-user and influencer loyalty is the rep’s professionalism. Most likely, this is the legacy of years of reps overpromising and underdelivering. You remember the increased customer skepticism we talked about earlier? This is where it’s gotten you. Customers are simply looking for a professional—someone they can believe, and someone they can trust. As one member put it, “We want our customers to think of our reps as an extension of their own organization . . . to view them as a resource and not just a nuisance.” We really think it’s that kind of professionalism that customers are thinking about here. But the bigger story lies in the next set of drivers we found, right behind professionalism in their predictive power: the ability of the rep to “offer unique and valuable perspectives” and “frequently educate the customer on issues and outcomes.” In other words, what you find is a whole set of high-scoring loyalty drivers around the rep’s ability to help non–decision makers recognize previously underappreciated or undervalued needs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, more traditional selling skills like needs analysis are much farther down the list when it comes to driving end-user and influencer loyalty. So while sales organizations continue to pour time and money into helping reps to ask better, more incisive questions, these skills prove to be much more weakly associated with loyalty, as customers aren’t looking for reps to anticipate, or “discover,” needs they already know they have, but rather to teach them about opportunities to make or save money that they didn’t even know were possible. What the data tells us is that for non–decision makers, loyalty is much less about discovering needs they already know, and much more about teaching them something they don’t know, for example, something new about how to compete more effectively in their world. Customers will repay you with loyalty when you teach them something they value, not just sell them something they need. Remember, it’s not just the products and services you sell, it’s the insight you deliver as part of the sales interaction itself. When you think about it, these findings provide a very clear road map for turning influencers and end users into actual advocates for your organization. This is how you build the widespread support that decision makers are looking for—by teaching end users something of value. Yet while a teaching approach presents a huge untapped opportunity for managing customer stakeholders more strategically than you have in the past, nearly two-thirds of suppliers report using customer stakeholder interactions to extract insight, rather than provide it. As you might have guessed, most reps spend their time mining influencers for more information on decision-making
processes and priorities, rather than empowering their potential stakeholders with valuable insight they can take back to their organizations. In fact, ask yourself this: How does your sales organization currently manage stakeholders and influencers? How likely is it that these influencers would find interactions with your sales reps to be valuable and memorable? Would they use words like “interesting,” “new,” “thought-provoking,” or “game-changing” to describe their conversations with your salespeople? Do your reps deliver value in every interaction? If you’re anything like most sales organizations, the answer is probably no. Lest we leave you with the impression that insight is something only valued by customer stakeholders, it is worth noting that this strategy isn’t lost on executive-level decision makers either. Yes, these senior buyers care most about widespread support, but as business leaders, they are just as interested in new ideas to save money or make money as their teams are. Figure 6.3 shows the overlap in loyalty drivers between decision makers and end users. It turns out that a teaching approach is an opportunity that serves a sales organization well regardless of whom reps are engaging with. Senior decision makers don’t want their own time wasted nor do they want salespeople to waste the time of others in the organization—they want widespread support before pulling the trigger on a purchase, but they won’t let a rep go out to build that support if the rep doesn’t have something compelling to share. Similarly, in sales efforts that start farther down in the organization—with the end users themselves—these individuals are highly unlikely to grant you access to their bosses unless they are supremely confident that you will add value once you sit down with them.
Source: Marketing Leadership Council research: Sales Executive Council research. Figure 6.3. Purchase Experience Loyalty Drivers for Decision Makers Versus End Users and Influencers
THE NEW PHYSICS OF SALES When you put all this data together, it has far-reaching consequences for sales effectiveness. One of the conventional strategies for building loyalty is to elevate the conversation to the C-suite. But of all the things that decision makers could care about when it comes to doing business with a particular supplier, the most important thing, as you now know, is that the supplier has “widespread support across the organization.” You can see implications of that finding mapped out dramatically in figure 6.4 (page 108). In the traditional approach, reps pull information from customer stakeholders in order to present the senior decision maker with a more finely tuned pitch. The link between stakeholders and decision makers is perceived as relatively weak, compared with the relationship the rep can establish directly with the decision maker, so information largely flows clockwise from advocate to rep to decision maker.
Source: Sales Executive Council research Figure 6.4. The New Physics of Sales The emerging model, however, flows in the opposite direction: The best way you sell more stuff over time isn’t by going directly to the person who signs the deal, but by approaching him or her indirectly through stakeholders able to establish more widespread support for your solution. The link between stakeholders and the decision maker is significantly stronger, whereas the link
between the rep and the decision maker is significantly weaker—the rep’s ability to influence the sale in the executive suite is nowhere near as strong as stakeholders’ ability to do the same thing. However, just as important as the direction of the information flow is the nature of the actual information flowing through them. In the traditional model, it’s customer-generated intelligence valuable to the supplier. In the emerging model, it’s supplier-generated insight valuable to the customer. This is the new physics of sales—it’s like the whole world is spinning in the opposite direction. And this shift begs an important question. Over the last several years, how well have you balanced the time, effort, and money you’ve invested in gaining access to the customer’s executive office with comparable efforts to identify key stakeholders and equip them to evangelize on your behalf? For most organizations, that’s a huge missed opportunity. While you shouldn’t stop calling on decision makers, you now know that those efforts do not negate the huge impact key stakeholders can have on driving more business over time. And this is something your best sales reps, your Challengers, do as a matter of course.
TAILORING THE MESSAGE From a practical standpoint, what all of this means is that your reps now have to talk to more people than ever just to get the deal done. And we have found that one of the biggest obstacles that core reps grapple with when it comes to dealing with a consensus-based buying environment is how to tailor the sales message to these different stakeholders in order to achieve maximum resonance. For individual customers, tailoring takes on many forms. A good way to think about how to tailor messages is to start at the broadest level—the customer’s industry—and to work your way down, to the person’s company, the person’s role, and, finally, to that individual person. Figure 6.5, which our SEC Solutions group uses in its Challenger Development Program, shows these progressive “layers” of tailoring:
Source: SEC Solutions, Sales Executive Council research. Figure 6.5. Layers of Tailoring As you look at that diagram, think about how well your current sales approach
resonates at each of these levels for each of the many diverse customer stakeholders your reps now need to contact. The vast majority of sales messaging out in the market is not contextualized at any level let alone at each of these levels for each kind of stakeholder. Typically, that messaging is about a supplier and that supplier’s product and services. So as a starting point, marketing can add a tremendous amount of value simply by helping sales reps to tailor at the industry and company levels. There are so many sources of information—and many of them free—that can aid a rep in offering, at the very least, some industry and company context to the sales pitch. What’s going on in terms of industry trends and current events? Has a big competitor recently folded or has there been a meaningful merger? Is the customer rapidly gaining or losing share? What about regulatory changes? What do the company’s recent press releases and earnings statements suggest about strategic priorities? When a rep comes in not just with a sales pitch, but with a sense of what’s going on in that customer’s company and industry, you’ve got the beginnings of a tailored message. These outer two layers are arguably the easier ones, and when you see tailored messaging in practice, it’s usually at this level. Much rarer is messaging that is tailored at the level of a customer stakeholder’s role—and rarer still is messaging that’s tailored to that individual, i.e., their personal goals and objectives.
REDUCING VARIABILITY Many sales leaders think of the ability to tailor to individual stakeholders as some sort of supernatural ability found only among their very best salespeople. For the rest of the sales force, the biggest obstacle to tailoring—companies assume—is their core reps’ natural lack of empathy, sensitivity, or listening skills. But that’s not the case. The biggest challenge to getting tailoring right is that it seems there are so many different things reps need to know to tailor effectively. So if you call on new people at the customer and you want to make sure you deliver as tailored a message as possible, what do you focus on? Their personality type? Their role? Their region? Their interests? The list of possibilities seems endless. So how do you narrow it down? How do you get from that amorphous cloud to a tailored, resonant message? As you’ll recall from chapter 2, two things Challenger reps tailor to are their knowledge of an individual stakeholder’s value drivers and an understanding of the economic drivers of that person’s business. A Challenger rep arrives at the customer with a deep understanding of how individual stakeholders fit into their overall business—what their role is and what they are worried about—as well as the specific quantifiable results that those individuals want to achieve. Challenger reps aren’t focused on what they are selling, but on what the person they’re speaking to is trying to accomplish. Most sales reps tend to deliver the same message whether they’re talking to senior decision makers or more junior end users, and usually that message is about your products rather than the customer’s challenges. So how do you get your entire sales force to tailor their approach to each individual stakeholder’s most pressing needs? Let’s look at some tailoring tools that can help reps speak to individuals in their language about their context and outcomes. Customer outcomes are what an individual at the customer organization is trying to achieve—how they would define success as part of their job. These outcomes encompass the actual activity or responsibility in need of improvement, the metric used to measure that task, and the direction and magnitude of the desired change. Examples of outcome statements might
include, “Decrease reject rate by 5 percent on our high-capacity production line,” or “Decrease the number of clicks it takes for customers to find an answer on our Web site.” There are some significant benefits to approaching a customer’s needs in this way. First, customer outcomes are predictable, especially in terms of a customer’s role. If you can figure out what CIOs at five different companies care about, chances are you can use that information to predict what other CIOs at similar companies care about as well. Second, these outcomes typically remain fairly stable across time and people. If a CIO gets promoted, her successor will probably have similar goals. Third, for any given role, they’re finite. In other words, you can develop a short list of desired outcomes and focus on the few things that that person cares about most. And lastly, the approach is scalable. Once you’ve learned it, you can apply the same concept again and again across a company’s org chart. The best thing about understanding and mapping customer outcomes is that you don’t have to rely on individual reps to figure all this out on their own. This is something that can be determined centrally—in marketing or sales operations —and then given to your reps in the form of a tool. Solae, a maker of soy-based food ingredients, has done just that. This company has found a way to focus reps’ conversations with various customer stakeholders on the specific capabilities and messages that will resonate most strongly with that individual.
TAILORING CASE STUDY: SOLAE’S MESSAGE-TO-ROLE MAPPING Recently, Solae launched an aggressive strategy to sell bigger, more complex solutions in order to grow their market beyond traditional applications. As has been the experience of most companies that shift from selling products to selling solutions, these efforts brought a much wider range of stakeholders into each deal than had previously been the case. Solae’s sales team was now talking to CMOs, VPs of manufacturing, procurement officers, and anyone else with a stake in their solution. This was a big change for Solae’s sales reps. However, the real problem was that reps led off these conversations with the same product and technical specifications they had used with the technical experts they had more traditionally dealt with in the past. But more often than not these newer stakeholders had no idea what the Solae reps were talking about. The rep might as well have been speaking a foreign language. Many of these nontechnical stakeholders would scratch their heads and say, “So what?” once the Solae rep was finished delivering the pitch. These customers couldn’t make a connection between all of the technical specifications of Solae’s products and what was most important to them. And that—as you can imagine—significantly hampered the company’s solutions strategy.
Framing the Personal Win To boost reps’ ability to approach various customer stakeholders in a language they were more likely to understand, Solae’s first step was to document for the rep what these various customer stakeholders cared about in the first place. To do that they went beyond general demographic information, providing their reps with a set of cards explaining what each stakeholder was trying to accomplish as a business leader. In sum, each explains a stakeholders’ functional bias: their personal value drivers and their economic context.
Source: Solae LLC; Sales Executive Council research Figure 6.6 Components of Functional Bias The example functional bias card in figure 6.6 is for a head of manufacturing. On these functional bias cards, you find things like the high-level decision
criteria (or business outcomes) that a person in this role cares most about. Reps also get a sense of the stakeholder’s focus, or those things that that person monitors most often in order to achieve the high-level outcomes in the first section. In addition, the tool captures a stakeholder’s key concerns—the questions that that person asks day-to-day to do the job, the things they worry about most. This is incredibly fertile ground for building empathy and credibility. And lastly, the tool captures for reps the stakeholder’s potential value areas. These are the levers this person might pull to improve performance. So if a sales rep is going to tailor the solution to this person’s desired outcomes, these are the types of things that that solution is going to have to do. This is the language you use to sell your solution to this particular person. This is how you translate customer insight into something reps can actually use to tailor. With information like this, reps don’t need to ask the customer the dreaded “What’s keeping you up at night?” question, because they already know. It’s right there on the card. It’s a clear, easy-to-use framework for each major stakeholder’s context and outcomes, all laid out in a powerful but user- friendly format.
Getting Past the “So What” That said, in addition to the customer outcomes cards, Solae provides reps with very specific guidance on how to position each of its primary solutions, or product bundles, to different people across the customer organization. Here is where Solae makes tailoring very concrete. This is exactly the kind of help reps need to adopt more of a Challenger rep posture. What you see in figure 6.7 is a hypothetical tailoring tool for Solae’s “Solution A” (some of the information is disguised here, given its proprietary nature). Solae uses the tool to show reps the various customer stakeholders who are relevant for Solution A, as well as the high-level outcomes most important to each of those individuals. The tool also shows the primary means by which that person is likely to achieve those outcomes—for instance, increase sales, increase market share, or build brand image. Finally, in the real version of the tool, Solae offers its reps some specific “scripting” tying Solae’s Solution A directly back to what that individual is looking to achieve. This scripting isn’t meant to be delivered verbatim. Rather, it’s meant to serve as a set of “conversational guidelines” to direct the rep to the specific language that will resonate most strongly with that individual.
Source: Solae LLC; Sales Executive Council research. Figure 6.7. Desired Outcomes and Supplier Capabilities Mapped to Functional Roles This is tailoring at its best. Using it, a rep will be speaking to the customer in their own language about how to better achieve the outcomes that they care about most in their context. This is also the kind of thing that Challengers might do instinctively, but that the majority of reps struggle with mightily—and that’s really the beauty of a tool like this: It’s a tailoring “cheat sheet” to help the rest of their reps sound more like the ones who do this well. It’s simple, it’s concrete, and it’s based on context and outcomes. What’s more, it provides managers with a way to scale tailoring across the sales organization.
MAKING TAILORING HAPPEN Still, to ensure that that tailored message remains front and center with each customer stakeholder through the entire sales process, Solae goes one step further. Once a deal has progressed far enough along the sales process, and the Solae account team has developed a project proposal for customer review, their reps use a template similar to the one you see in figure 6.8 to both win and document customer buy-in to the project. Source: Solae LLC; Sales Executive Council research. Figure 6.8. Value Planning Tool as Stage-Gate Between Project Development and Execution The template captures the agreed-upon high-level project objective—laid out
specifically in terms of what the customer gets and the major stakeholders across whom Solae needs to build consensus. Then, for each stakeholder, Solae documents the specific outcome that the proposed solution addresses for that individual. For example, for marketing, the goal is to “maintain or improve product quality and taste despite cutting costs.” And then, for each role, Solae documents in writing that person’s strongest concern or objection and the specific capabilities or actions Solae will employ to overcome those objections. The most impressive thing about this approach is that all of this is mapped out with the customer. This information is determined through conversations and then captured using the tool. Though it’s not required, Solae’s very best reps actually ask that stakeholder to sign off on the column indicating their agreement with the plan. That way each stakeholder is agreeing, in advance, to the value you’re going to create for them as an individual and how that value is going to be measured across the life of the deal. As a result, when it comes time for this person to decide whether or not they’re going to support the deal, they’re not making that decision based on some vague sense of whether the deal is “good for the company.” Instead, they can look at this sheet and see exactly how it’s tailored to their specific goals. And you can imagine what happens when the rep ultimately sits down with the top-level decision maker to close the deal and he can lay this document on the table. There’s your consensus right there—all captured on a single piece of paper. In fact, even if you use it only for internal purposes, this tool still represents an essential and yet typically missing page in any good account plan: a concrete, concise summary of how you’re going to deliver your solution in a way that doesn’t just meet overall expectations, but individual ones as well. In the end, Solae’s approach represents a simple yet elegant means to capture on paper what your Challenger reps do in their heads every day—address each customer stakeholder as if he or she actually was the customer. Because in today’s world of consensus-based selling, that’s exactly who stakeholders are.
7 TAKING CONTROL OF THE SALE SO FAR, WE’VE checked off two of the three key attributes of the Challenger profile, teaching and tailoring. Our next stop is a look at the third distinguishing characteristic of Challenger reps: their ability to take control of the sale. According to the data, this ability comes from two things: Challenger reps are naturally more comfortable talking about money, and they’re able to “push” the customer. What we’re really talking about here is the Challenger’s ability to