Achieve Sales Excellence

The 7 Customer Rules for Becoming the New Sales Professional

Howard Stevens, Theodore Kinni

• Publisher: Platinum Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781593376512
• eBook ISBN: 9781605508474
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Increase your business’s sales with these seven essential practices salespeople and organizations must embrace to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace.

Companies today are struggling to find the one thing that matters in today’s competitive marketplace. Price? Quality? Innovative product features?

While all of the above factors certainly influence a customer’s buying decision, none of them is the most influential factor. What is? The employee who has the most power to make or break your company’s bottom line and influence its customers—the salesperson.

Achieve Sales Excellence examines the paradigm of business-to- business sales. This book is based on the results of a fourteen-year study, which asked business customers—the key constituent group of professional salespeople—to define the qualities of world-class salespeople and organizations. It offers unmatched insights into sales performance issues and the practices sales professionals and organizations must embrace to become world-class sales forces.

6

“You Must Bring Us Applications”

It is unusual to find a salesperson profiled in a business magazine. It is much rarer to find such a profile in The New Yorker, a literary magazine covering contemporary culture. Then, one of its writers, James Stewart, went to Steinway Hall, the venerable piano maker's flagship showroom in Manhattan, and met Erica Feidner, who, in 2001, had been Steinway & Sons' top salesperson for six years running. She sold $4 million worth of pianos in 1999.

Feidner's success derived from her ability to match potential buyers to pianos. Her New Yorker profile “Matchmaker” (August 20, 2001) opens with a description of how after a discussion with a new customer, Feidner writes a number on a slip of paper. She then leads the customer through the 300-odd pianos on display, the largest inventory of Steinways in the world. The customer plays more than a dozen, but is unable to find one that is exactly right. Feidner mentions that there is a new arrival, which she has played, but it is not yet on the floor. The piano is brought to the display floor and, while playing it, the customer quickly realizes it is perfect. Feidner produces the piece of paper on which she had written the number earlier in the day. The number matches the serial number of the piano the customer has decided to buy.

Magic? It certainly feels that way to many of the customers who purposely seek out Feidner when they shop for a Steinway. But as Stewart delves into her methods, another picture emerges. For instance, at the beginning of a sale, Feidner habitually spends an hour or more chatting with the customer — not about the heritage, quality, or available models and options of Steinway's pianos, but about the customer's level of play, playing style, taste in music, where and how often the customer will play the piano, what he or she will play on it, and what kind of response, action, and tone the customer expects.

Although she was trained as a professional pianist and can make a piano sing, Feidner insists that her customers play the pianos they are considering rather than having her play for them. She leaves audience-shy customers alone while they play. If she is working with neophytes or non-players who are buying for someone else, she teaches them how to hear, feel, and describe the differences in pianos, and she teaches them simple tunes so that they can play, too. Stewart, who was planning to buy a Yamaha piano before meeting Feidner and eventually purchased a Steinway for twice the price instead, writes:

[A]fter they meet her many soon find themselves in the grip of musical ambitions they never knew they harbored. These ambitions often include buying a specific piano that they feel they can no longer live without, even if it strains both their living rooms and their bank accounts.

Interestingly, Steinway's best salesperson for years running does not always have the company's highest closing ratio with walk-in customers. One of the reasons is that she does not push her customers into buying decisions. Stewart himself “forgets” he is on a selling floor as he makes repeated visits to Steinway Hall to play the pianos, until he is startled to discover that one that he liked has been sold to someone else. Another reason is that Feidner is driven to sell each of her customers the perfect piano. “She will often ask a customer to wait until the right piano materializes, and this can take months or, in rare cases, years,” writes Stewart.

Luckily, Feidner does not need to close sales quickly to maintain her sales volume. Instead, she spends a substantial portion of her time maintaining contact with and providing service to her existing customers. For instance, she encourages Stewart to take lessons to improve his playing skills and recommends three teachers, one of whom he finds is a “good match.” (Feidner has worked with more than 800 teachers in the New York City area, many of whom refer potential customers.) She invites him to attend recitals at Steinway Hall. She even asks him to play in one. After Stewart accepts, and while he is traveling on a book tour, Feidner helps him maintain his practice schedule by arranging for him to play Steinways in each city he visits. Stewart ranks his appearance at the recital “among the high points of my life.”

As a result of services like these, Feidner is able to maintain her flow of deals through referrals from her customers. (The New Yorker article is essentially a 7,000-word customer recommendation read by three-quarters of a million subscribers.) In fact, the stream of recommendations she receives is so robust that in June 2004, Feidner was able to tell Inc. magazine, which featured her on the cover, that she was only seeing new customers by referral.⁵⁶

How does Feidner's highly successful selling strategy relate to the business-to-business environment? Let's review its major elements:

▪ The salesperson has expert knowledge of the product.

▪ The sales process is intensely focused on the customer's needs and the intended use of the product being purchased.

▪ The process includes the education and guidance that the customer requires to make the best buying decision.

▪ The salesperson refuses to sell a product that will not fulfill the customer's needs.

▪ The salesperson treats the sale itself as the first step in an ongoing process designed to ensure that the customer receives all of the benefits of the purchase.

These elements all sound very familiar to us because they are the same qualities that we hear business customers describing. These are qualities that the customers we have studied consistently identify with the world-class salespeople. They are also the qualities that satisfy the customer expectations and demands that have given rise to the fourth customer rule: “You must bring us applications.”

Applications Trump Features and Benefits

If you think back to the three overarching customer “wants” that we discussed in Chapter 2, it is clear that each is intimately connected to the fourth customer rule, which requires that salespeople provide applications. First, customers want substantiated value, a demand that cannot be fulfilled until whatever you are selling has been successfully applied. It must be in place and producing results. Second, they want solutions rather than products and services. In other words, they do not want to hear a soliloquy on features and benefits, no matter how entertaining. They want to learn how the offering fits their needs, see that it can be implemented, and be convinced that it will produce the results they desire. Third, they want to outsource any element of their business that is not a core competence. In other words, they will almost always want you to take on as much of the implementation of the solution, and the ongoing management responsibility for it, as is feasible.

These are the major reasons why a focus on solution applications will virtually always trump recitations of features and benefits — no matter how compelling they may be — in today's business-to-business environment. Your customers know that if they cannot capture the promise of value through successful application, the return they can earn on their investment will be, at best, limited and at worst, a total loss that might also negatively impact other aspects of their business performance and corporate results. The latter case is not an exaggeration. Consider, for example, what can happen to a company's productivity and workflow when the implementation of an enterprise-wide IT package runs off the rails.

The more complex the solutions you sell, the more critical and the more valuable your application expertise becomes to your customers. Pianos are not often thought of as complex products, but unlike many mass-produced instruments, there are substantial differences between each of Steinway's handmade pianos. Every piano that Erica Feidner sells responds differently when played, and every one has a unique sound. Every customer to whom she sells has a different repertoire and playing style. It is no wonder that customers place a high premium on her ability to create the perfect match between piano and player. The same is true of any complex business solution. Your ability to create the perfect match between your offerings and your customers' situations is a critical skill in bringing them applications.

At first glance, products and services that are commodities might not appear to require the same degree of application expertise on the part of salespeople as do more complex products. Commodities are typically mature, standardized categories of products and services with which customers are already very familiar. Accordingly, it is often suggested that customers do not need salespeople to provide applications in order to buy the commodities, use them, and achieve the desired results. Surprisingly, however, our studies of business customers have revealed just the opposite. Buyers in commodity markets consider application expertise to be as valuable, if not more valuable, than do buyers of complex solutions.

While the need for application expertise might not be as great in commodity markets, its relative rarity makes it an added benefit and a strong differentiating factor. Further, while commodities themselves may not be unique, the customers that buy them are. Each of your business customers has a unique strategy, culture, business structure, and so on. Each has different needs and is driving toward different results. Because of all these customer-based variables, the ways in which commoditized products and services can be applied within individual companies are unique too. The salesperson's ability to bring applications to commodity customers can improve their customers' results. Thus, salespeople who can provide application expertise shine in their customers' eyes.

In fact, as you can see in the table that follows, almost all of the sales forces rated world class by the business customers in our studies have been sellers of products that are usually considered low-margin commodities in mature markets, such as printing paper, business forms, office supplies, chemicals, and original equipment auto parts. Only two companies have been identified as world-class more than once, and they are in commodity markets, too. Because everything else is more or less equal in these industries, capabilities such as the application expertise of salespeople have an oversized impact on the customer.

CONSULTATIVE SELLING

The idea of salespeople as consultants should be familiar to anyone who has been following the evolution of sales strategy. Mack Hanan, along with coauthors James Cribbin and Herman Heiser, first coined the phrase “consultative selling” in a book of the same name published by the American Management Association in 1970. It has proven to be a perennially popular concept. Hanan's substantially heftier seventh edition of the book was published in 2004.

The original edition proposed consultative selling as a solution for key account selling in a newly emerging business environment that the authors characterized as driven by “increased product standardization,” “accelerated competition,” “protracted price erosion,” “demands for customer service,” and “stratified decision making.”⁵⁷ If you compare this list to your sales challenges today, it suggests that there might be some truth in the old quote, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

How Customers Rank Selling Effectiveness in Different Industry Segments

Rank	Industry	Average Rating
1	Fine Paper	89.50
2	Business Forms	88.65
3	Maintenance, Repair, and Operations	88.47
4	Original Equipment Auto Parts	88.36
5	Office Supplies	88.27
6	Chemicals	87.97
7	Rubber	87.87
8	Primary Metals	87.74
9	Electronics	87.70
10	Office Productivity	86.67
11	Aftermarket Auto Parts	86.52
12	Health Care	86.10
13	Pharmaceuticals	85.99
14	Computers and Software	85.80
15	Delivery/Freight*	85.51
16	Telecommunications	82.54

* Freight combined with Mail into a “Delivery” segment

Key to Ratings:

100 = Excellent

90 = Very Good

80 = Good

70 = Average

60 = Poor

Whether you sell complex solutions or commodities, providing applications requires a very different approach than presenting features and benefits. The primary expertise of salespeople who focus on features and benefits is product (and/or service) knowledge. This knowledge becomes the basis for describing the attributes of their products and services, as well as the generic benefits that those attributes can deliver to the customer. The ability to successfully provide applications requires product knowledge, too, but that is not enough. It also requires extended application competence, such as understanding customers' needs and installation and integration considerations. This is why we say that world-class salespeople adopt the role of the consultant in order to fulfill the fourth customer rule.

The Salesperson as Consultant

There are many reasons why the consultant metaphor is applicable to the work of providing applications. Consultants are expected to understand their clients' wants and needs. They are expected to provide expert, objective advice on how to best address those wants and needs. Often, they are engaged to manage the implementation of the solutions they recommend, as well as integrating them into the client's existing business systems. Finally, consultants are also increasingly being called upon to ensure that the solutions continue to produce the desired results as long as they are in use. (It is only a small step from this last consulting service to outsourcing, which is the primary reason so many of the biggest players in the global consulting industry have also become major providers of outsourced services.) These are the same tasks that we see business customers demanding of salespeople. Not coincidentally, they are also tasks that are integral to the customer-centered sales strategies that so many business-to-business sellers have adopted.

As with any metaphor, there are some limits to the consultant role that salespeople should keep in mind. Consultants are paid for the time they spend with clients, but salespeople (and/ or the companies that employ them) are paid only if and when a sale materializes. Second, consultants are paid no matter which solutions they recommend to their clients, but salespeople are rewarded for providing the fixed set of solutions offered by their companies. In other words, there are times when the roles of the salesperson and the consultant rightfully diverge.

When salespeople forget or confuse these distinctions, they sometimes end up becoming what Prime Resource Group founder Jeff Thull calls “unpaid consultants.” They can also become ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• DEDICATION The Greater Goal
• FOREWORD The New Sales Profession
• Introduction
• What Good Science Reveals about Sales Excellence
• The Sales Professional Is the Sale
• What Your Customers Want
• The Foundational Rules of Professional Competence
• “You Must Be Personally Accountable for Our Desired Results”
• “You Must Understand Our Business”
• “You Must Be on Our Side”
• The Advanced Rules of Sales Excellence
• “You Must Bring Us Applications”
• “You Must Be Easily Accessible”
• “You Must Solve Our Problems”
• “You Must Be Innovative in Responding to Our Needs”
• Eight Questions for Identifying World-Class Sales Organizations
• What Drives the Company's Culture?
• How Does the Company Segment Its Markets?
• How Efficiently Does the Company Adapt to Market Changes?
• How Are Customers Served by the Company's IT Initiatives?
• How Evolved Are the Company's Sales, Service, and Technical Support Systems?
• How Does the Company Solicit Customer Feedback and Measure Customer Satisfaction?
• How Does the Company Recruit and Select Salespeople?
• How Does the Company Train and Develop Its Sales Force?
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• About The HR Chally Group