The New Power Base Selling

Master The Politics, Create Unexpected Value and Higher Margins, and Outsmart the Competition

Jim Holden, Ryan Kubacki

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118206676
• eBook ISBN: 9781118240946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

An updated and revised version of the business classic Power Base Selling

Power Base Selling, originally published in 1990, left readers with an understanding of and language for gaining political advantage within accounts. Now famous among sellers, the concept of aligning with powerful customer individuals or "Foxes" is taken to a new level. The New Power Base Selling offers an updated and more in-depth edition of the original classic with an empirically based breakthrough to significantly increasing sales performance. It explains how competitive selling is as much a matter of politics, customer value, and strategy as it is a management science.

Based on data from one of the most comprehensive sales surveys in the sales training industry, along with over 50, 000 deal reviews, The New Power Base Selling will help salespeople quickly outfox the competition, impress customers with unexpected value, and achieve new levels of professional success.

• Create Demand, as well as competitively Service Demand
• Quickly leverage "Situational Power Bases" to drive up win rates
• Provide customers with value that advances their critical business initiatives
• Effectively use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social tools in a sales campaign
• Increase customer satisfaction and competitive differentiation

See measurable gains and exceed quota when you leverage customer politics, value, and competitive strategy.

PART 1

SALES AS A MANAGEMENT SCIENCE

CHAPTER 1

Seeing the Invisible

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

—often attributed to Charles Darwin

“Know this about yourself: there is only one reason professional salespeople lose orders. They are OUTSOLD,” began our first book, Power Base Selling, in 1990. Assessing over 28,000 sellers and coaching more than 50,000 competitive deals since then affirms that the best sellers are politically astute, driven to provide significant value to customers, and strategically competitive, as a matter of habit.

The best sellers win because how they sell increases the value of what they sell. In fact, how they sell adds value for their customers and for their own company, beyond the value inherent in their company’s product, price, and brand, as shown in Figure 1.1. Even without product superiority or price parity, the best sellers outsell their competition and please their customers. They are a source of competitive advantage for their company and are compensated accordingly. And you can be, too!

Figure 1.1: Maximizing Sources of Competitive Advantage

Most sellers do not gain clarity about their customers’ informal political structure—the Power Base—that really makes an organization run. At the same time, they focus on only their customer and do not engage their competition. Without insight into politics and competitors, it is almost impossible to get a sense of the larger issues that will determine your ability to improve your customer’s business, deepen loyalty, and win deals.

Let’s look at a practical example. Meet Amy. She was selling an online software solution to a large retail customer. When she previously sold to this customer, the Information Technology (IT) team made most of the decisions. In this current sales situation, she believed that she would close the deal because the IT team had confirmed that her product was the most innovative, it best matched their buying criteria, and she knew the IT organization chart inside and out. The Chief Information Officer (CIO), with whom she had met, appeared to be supportive. In addition, she linked her product’s value to business impact for the customer. Specifically, she made the case to the IT Department that her solution would facilitate more efficient communication among the customer’s supply chain. This, in turn, would enable her customer to stock lower-priced products on its store shelves much faster. Amy correctly identified this as an important business issue for the customer during a prolonged economic slowdown.

Confidently, Amy informed her manager of the probable win and began to think about how she would spend her commission check. Then, something started not to feel right. The customer had not given her the official order, and her contacts in the IT Department were not returning her emails or calls. After several weeks, the customer informed her that they “went in a different direction.” Amy was caught off guard. Her product was the best in the market. She established business value and developed a good relationship with the customer, who made it clear that things were looking good for her. She dreaded telling her manager, who had already forecasted the business as a win to upper management.

Have you ever been in Amy’s shoes? What happened? What didn’t she see? To find out, let’s meet Sara, who is the Account Manager for Amy’s competitor, calling on the same customer. Like Amy, Sara sells for a technology company and met with the customer’s IT team. Sara also positioned the business value of getting lower-priced products on the customer’s shelves quicker. However, Sara saw three things that Amy did not.

1. Sara studied the politics of the customer organization, seeing how authority and influence flowed. She identified that there had recently been management changes at the customer organization. An IT governance committee had been created to evaluate all IT decisions. This group consisted of company leaders from the Business, Finance, and Legal Departments. Sara recognized that this was something new. A new type of Power Base had formed. Its influence would likely assert itself over the IT team’s authority. Sara utilized social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook to gain as much insight as she could on the new players and identified patterns and connections in their past. She met with several of them and asked thoughtful questions, made observations, and tried to confirm hypotheses she had formed regarding the new flow of influence.

While listening to the customer’s quarterly earnings call, Sara became aware that the customer’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) had launched a new initiative, called Supply Chain Leadership, that focused on building relationships with more financially stable suppliers to reduce costly and disruptive supplier turnover. Sara also knew that the customer’s Chief Legal Counsel was focused on data privacy issues.

Furthermore, through the course of her meetings, Sara observed that political conflict was taking place between the customer CIO and CFO. The CFO wanted IT to be more accountable to company initiatives, while the CIO sought independence. Sara noticed that the CIO’s influence seemed to be waning among his own team, while the CFO was a proven company leader.

2. Sara provided the customer with Unexpected Value in addition to meeting the customer’s stated needs. Working with an IT Director, Sara produced a quantified expression of value that reflected a product solution that was 90 percent as capable as the alternative. Still, this solution represented expected value to the customer. Sara needed more. To provide unexpected customer value, not only did she stress compliance with the new initiative, but, focusing on the financial strength of her company, she also stressed the clear data privacy policies that the CFO could announce as an early example of his new initiative.

3. Sara assessed her competition and formulated a sales strategy. She analyzed who Amy was calling in the account and what type of value Amy was proposing. After firsthand evaluation, Sara concluded that the product Amy was proposing had superior capability. However, Amy’s company’s unclear financial health and unproven data privacy policies represented potential vulnerability.

Armed with her political and competitive insight, Sara formulated a sales strategy and partnered with an IT Director to approach the CFO, shifting the decision focus from only the stated buying criteria defined by the IT Department to also include the ability to fulfill the broader organizational needs as defined by the CFO and Chief Legal Counsel.

At the end of the day, Sara outsold Amy and better served her customer by seeing the three intangibles: politics, Unexpected Value, and strategy.

Selling Skills Are Not Enough

It’s fairly common knowledge that you must master certain skills to succeed in sales. Abilities such as prospecting, asking good questions, structuring a sales call, building a business case for your product, and establishing rapport with a customer, to name just a few, are essential. However, a majority of the techniques that dominate today’s notion of selling help sellers in only one dimension of their efforts: establishing the relationship between seller and buyer. Focusing solely on a prospective buyer assumes that there is only one thing between you and getting the order—the customer. It produces a distorted vision of what selling is all about, and it blinds you to the real threat—the competition.

Think about it this way: as much as you want the customer’s business, so does someone else. But typical sales campaigns don’t make provisions for competitive threats. Amy’s “quote and hope” mentality will not be enough when she’s up against an advanced seller like Sara. She needs a more complete sales approach, one that incorporates a view of the world as it really is—a three-dimensional interplay between you, your customer, and the competition, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: Selling Is Multi-Dimensional

Good Products Are Not Enough

Without question, a superior product, price, and brand give you an advantage. However, the times when you have an exceptional product and are the only game in town are rare; and although you can coast along for a while on only the capabilities and reputation of what you offer, this won’t last long. These glad circumstances mislead many people into believing they are selling well—when in reality, the product is doing all the work. The seller is just along for the ride.

This is far more serious than a mere case of mistaken identity. If you judge yourself and your efforts by the strength of your product, you might also judge the potency of your competitors only by the strength of their products—and make a fatal error in the process because:

The best product does not always win.

As much as product superiority can produce competitive advantage, it can also lull you into a false sense of security, as Amy found out.

A lot of sellers do not sell; they surf. Their prospecting is more like searching for the perfect wave than working to make things happen in accounts. They do not create demand. They become adept only at servicing demand, identifying niches for “hot” products that have developed a certain momentum and appeal. As with champion surfers, they make the job look easy—and it may be easy, for a while, until the currents shift. And they always do.

The Relevance Revolution

It is hard to imagine a time when more currents have shifted than from 1998 to the present. New skills, attitudes, behaviors, mind-sets, and approaches are now required for sellers to thrive. However, insight from our seller surveys and deal reviews indicate that sellers are struggling to keep up with a business market that has been changed forever.

We see five trends disrupting traditional selling methods and challenging seller relevance, as shown in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3: Disruptive Trends

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Sales as a Management Science
• Part 2: Politics
• Part 3: Unexpected Value
• Part 4: Strategy
• Epilogue
• Index