As a select group of my Google/DCLK sales colleagues go off to for a 2 day offsite to sharpen up their value-based sales skills, I'm reminded that this type of training is super necessary, but more important - not sufficient - to win/earn your customer's business, and to win broadly in your product or company's competitive category.
What also matters?
- Selling the Solution's Value, and also the Vision. Every sales person in online media and technology sales has been introduced to, and most practice, a probing customer needs analysis followed by the differentiated solution that exactly matches their needs, solves their problems, and helps them achieve their business objectives: How do we grow our business, how do we save costs, how do we bring more to the bottom line, how do we execute against our business plan faster & more efficiently, and perhaps most strategically: how do we gain share, defend share, and define new market spaces in the minds of our current and future customers.
- Value, and vision more so, are not about feature and functionality parity. "Their pixel does backflips". "They have real-time API bidding with 8 of the 9 agency conglomerate trading desks". "They took our business 'cause our path to conversion reporting is inane" We hear these kinds of things regularly. Some things are important, some things are even more important. That's why high-level enterprise technology adoption sales require teams, teams not cowboys, to be successful. Yes, the customer's Manager of Online Customer Acquisition wants to know about the incremental uplift on viewthrough conversions. But more essentially, most salespeople and sales teams are not having the correspondingly appropriate conversations in the C-Suite. Those folks don't give a hoot about viewthrough attribution. They care about the Big Game of Chess. CMO's and CEO's don't know that they can demand more than "here are the game pieces, you go do the checkmate thingy". There are strategies. And they are looking for strategists and experts, not just technologies. If I go in and lay out how our technology can assist in double checking, forking or even skewering, pinning and zwischenzug - NOW, we've got game play. The result is I'm not going to ask them for a $50K test budget after that. I've got a partner: I'm going to earn their $1 or $2 million.
- Sales is like surfing. Huh? Exactly. On the front page of yesterday's SF Chronicle is a quote from 16 year old Noah Wegrich that gave me chills. First, he's goofy like me. Second, he's got a wicked backside off-the-lip (the dominant photo on the front page), very unlike me at my age. Third, Google should hire him - but he's 16 so his high GPA from an Elite or Top Tier is at least 5 years in the future (not 15 years in the past, like mine). So, on the front page, Noah, captain of the Los Aptos High surf team, is call-out quoted in support of an article on the rules and strategy that define the "game" (not contest) of high school surfing: "You're not surfing in a lineup, battling for position, trying to out-snake people. It's more fun as a team sport".
Amen. The Zen of Sales is like the Zen of surfing. Meditate a bit on this and the next time you lunch with a client, or whip out the powerpoint in their boardroom, remember: features, functionality, tests, budgets may be what's on their minds and on their lips, but those are but small moves in the grander Game of Chess.
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