Really. Is that the best question we can ask? Sure seems like it. I chat with other sales leaders and gurus in our occupation and I hear a term that makes me shudder… Deal Review. Now, I have been around this world for nearly 7 decades, and this term is not new to me. Sadly, it is still used in today’s complex sales environment. The conversation sounds something like this…

The setup… an account rep is in front of a whole gaggle of corporate executives trying to change their “situation”. Often times this is at the end of a month or a quarter and the corporate folks are doing everything they can to squeeze blood from every stone and meet those financial commitments that they made to the street.

The conversation is a seemingly benign one with a simple question… “So, Salesperson X, we see this really large deal that is in your funnel is still not done… what will it take to “CLOSE THE DEAL?. And this is the same routine that they are going to go through endlessly with each salesperson with a desperate attempt to counter the fact that there actually has not been any real client value created and the possibility of “CLOSING THE DEAL” will come down to deep discounting, extending payment terms, offering a value-added element for FREE, or otherwise giving away the family jewels in desperation. Sadly again, this process seems to be institutionalized by many selling organizations and even the clients know it, so they wait till selling desperation sets in and go for the big money discount payoff. And it works!

Sound familiar? It’s a disease that is almost everywhere. Giving things away out of desperation and in an attempt to cover up the fact that the true value creation job has not been done. Salespeople are used to it. Sales leadership builds it into their DEAL REVIEW process. Corporate management is the worst.. they drive the dialog out of an even bigger desperation perspective and it is all well oiled by individual commission systems that simply do not care about client value, only revenue dollars.

What is an out-of-the-box thinking person to do here? It’s not terribly difficult. We must change our view of serving a client and NOT closing “deals”. We know we still have objectives that are important. We don’t ever get to ignore that. My perspective is that, like “sales”, we are the revenue engine for our corporation. A task that is not taken lightly. Our deeper objective is the continual GROWTH of revenue, at or above corporate gross margins. We don’t discount, and we don’t give things away. Both of those actually erode the client value and commoditize valuable relationships doing much more harm and setting the tone for a relationship that has you seen as a “vendor”, not an asset.

Our role with a client is to co-create value that THEY recognize AND get rewarded for doing it.

Let’s kill the words DEAL REVIEWS. Let’s build a process and a dialog that focuses on the client-recognized VALUE that we have co-created and that THEY have acknowledged. Only by shifting our focus away from the very weak perspective of the DEAL do we open up the total dialog to a much higher plane around CLIENT VALUE. My suggestion is that we rename this entire thing to CLIENT VALUE REVIEWS! Words matter!

DEAL REVIEWS… may you rest in peace!

Long live CLIENT VALUE REVIEWS!

Now, let’s go demonstrate the value of this to all those old souls in our ranks that are still stuck in pre-COVID time. Evangelists are always needed to help those less open to seeing the new light.

OK, LET’s ROLL!

Mitch

And let's start right off with that does NOT mean we can BUY our way into a winning position. The lowest price equates to LOWEST value in most cases. I sadly see it every day. Our products and services are all world-class. Our deliveries are competitive. Our prices are in line with what the world sees as reasonable. We can leave it that and see how we do… Or NOT. As many times as I have said it, and it has in theory been “heard” it is worth repeating, and it is critical to absolutely understand, that it is our Value Added efforts at a client that are the difference-maker. It is what we DO that makes the only difference that truly matters. Now…value-added must be in the eyes of the client. How do you know what matters to them? Simple…ask them…. It goes like this… “Hey Karen (client), several of my long-term clients tell me that what they value the most from a supplier partner is their ability to bring me insight into my industry that I did not have. We find that there are significant similarities in the thousands of clients that we serve. Would it be of value to you if I offer up a few of the trends that we are seeing today in clients similar to you?" You can’t wing this one, you actually need to do the planning work and conversation simulation needed to actually bring value to the table.

Insight comes in many forms and for it to be of value to the client we need to understand their very specific challenge so that we can tailor our efforts towards helping them make better decisions, quicker. One barrier to the decision-making process is the client’s own ability to facilitate change in their own world. That can be a huge barrier that you CAN help them navigate. It requires a clear consensus creation within their organization and ALL of the people involved in the thinking around the issue. You CAN become a change agent to help them tackle that problem. It too starts with asking the client, “who all do you believe will be needed to make this happen?”. There is a LOT of science around change-facilitation. I choose to take it back to basics about caring about the people that we serve. As long as our motives are pure….helping them, then our actions do not have to be deeply steeped in psychology. Keep it simple and remember that we are aiming to help PEOPLE, not companies, INDIVIDUALS, not corporations. Start out of the blocks with caring!

CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE

Dig deeply into each one of those 4 steps and create the PLAN/DO/REVIEW steps to bring the conversations to the surface. Simulate the conversations with your team. Tweak it all, and take it to the street with LOVE as the intent.

OK, LET’S ROLL!

Mitch

I decided to go back to what I was writing years ago and see if it all still made sense. And from nearly 6 years ago here is what I found…. I love that even then the thinking of CUSP was at the core.

CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE.

OK. LET’s ROLL!
Mitch

------------------------------- from Nov 2015-------------------------------

Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
Theodore Roosevelt

As salespeople, our past success over several decades has been driven by data - data in the form of what we KNEW. Our success in “selling” was once based on the information that we had in our heads, the people that we knew, the contacts that we had, and the resources that we knew how to deploy.

Unfortunately, today significant portions of what once made us winners no longer matter, and many of us still can’t get over the ways of the past.

In a recent blog, a friend and fellow sales fanatic, Dave Brock wrote about how poorly many salespeople today prospect for clients. Check out his thoughts, they are great. I see the same thing today from EVERY single call and email that I get from salespeople who are wanting a piece of my time.

The message starts like this:

“Mitchell…”

(We can stop right here because clearly my name was picked out of some database somewhere. The only person ever to call me by my full name was my Mother, when I was in trouble.)

“Mitchell, my name is Bob Blah and I would really like to have just 10 minutes of your time to tell you all about my blah, blah, blah. We are number one in blah, blah, blah. And we today we serve 159 of the Fortune 500 companies. Our blah, blah, blah, will help you sell more and solve all of your problems.”

I actually do not pick up my office phone any longer because these calls come all day, every day. It’s sad. If just once, one of these hard-working folks would call up and demonstrate that they actually cared about what was important to me, I would be delighted to call them back. But in the last decade that has never happened. Not even once.

To connect with the people in our lives, while selling or not, we have to CARE, and we have to care about THEM.

Our understanding of what is important to THEM, what their challenges are, and how we can help, must come before we ever get into a discussion about our products or services or anything to do with us.

Our clients will care about what we have to say, ONLY when we clearly demonstrate that we care about them FIRST. And it must be in that order. And it must be genuine and sincere. No games, no pitches, no opening and closing strategies, no handling of objections, no manipulation, no SELLING!

Start with caring about them as people, not as a part of a company. Do your homework about their world. Understand what you can about their issues in their company, their challenges in their industry, the risks that they face daily in innovation… And keep seeking to understand, because you care. Turn the understanding and caring around to focus on the person that you are serving.

You will find that those people that you care enough to serve well from their perspective will in fact care a great deal about what YOU have to say, in time. And from there the caring and information sharing explodes.

Your clients care because you care. You first!

Once upon a time, our value as salespeople was information. It actually still is, but the new reality is that to get to the point in a client relationship where your information is again valuable, you must enter into that relationship from the perspective of listening and diagnosing first, extensively, before you prescribe.

Sounds easy, but most salespeople that I interact with today are still pushing their stuff on me before they have ever stopped to understand me. Too bad. Their loss, and our gain, since we know the secret… CARE about the people who you serve.

Are you curious?

If you are a curious sort, just that question alone should have got your attention. The reality is that curiosity did NOT kill the cat… IT MADE THE SALE!

We have all had great conversations with people that flowed well and seemed to go on and on. And we have had the opposite, major flops. In the case of the latter, and in the realm of selling, it is almost always due to our own self-interest and an overwhelming burning desire to TELL our story to the potential client.

Now on its own, without understanding the client and setting up all of the connections that tactic will simply cause endlessly glazed-over eyes outcomes. Your time will come to talk about your stuff…be patient.

And create curiosity!

The genesis to great early on conversations is the layering of little bits of credible client-focused information between layers of curiosity creating questions or thoughts. A bit of contextually specific information, the posing of a curiosity creating question… tee up the next bit of new information… add in another curiosity provoking thought…repeat till done.

This all must be planned out in advance of the conversation. You will be best served if you can simulate it with a friend and get comfortable with the iterating style.

If you are not curious about your client it will show to them in your conversations. Our sales world is way too full of people that simply want to “tell you all about MY stuff”. And our clients know that and until you prove that you are different and provide value that they acknowledge you will be stuck in the short loop chat routine, going nowhere.

So, here is an idea… be curious about what unique outcomes your “stuff” can create with your client. Put your “stuff” value into their terms. This too will take some specific client prep work. So just do it! Dig in, find out what business challenges your client is facing, build some solutions to that, create some conversation simulations around the curiosity of how to communicate the value… and get it done!
All of this is a continuation of the grand theme of making the world a better place by serving. And of course, it looks like this…

CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE

And, have a little fun while you are creating massive amounts of curiosity.

OK, LET’s ROLL!

Mitch

The BIG 2 questions… they are not what you think they are!

My lovely wife and I raised 5 kids while we were both working. That was a long time ago. And ALL of them were quite inquisitive. The top question of every road trip was of course… “are we there yet?” But the dominant question, regardless of situation or timing was “WHY?”

So the road trip question, “are we there yet”, applies quite literally to the journey that we take when we seek to serve our clients. In the case of serving a client, it ends up that we oftentimes don’t really know the destination as the client does not know it either. So our inquiry must be continual and open and sincere. Sadly, most “sales” people already have a predefined destination in mind… having the client buy their “stuff”. If you will take the time to open the mind map with the client and explore where they “might” go, with your help, you will find the journey to be substantially rewarding for everyone. Start the trip, take out a map, look at possible destinations and sights to see along the way that may actually open up the alternative destinations. We can NEVER close our eyes to different paths than what we started down. If we are open and receptive the client will guide us. We need only to ask the question “are we there yet”? And keep looking for the next waypoint.

Now, the second question is a classic one. When the kids were young it was “why Daddy”. It morphed in the teen years to a bit more belligerent “WHY!!!”, often stated as a demand for justice. In our B2B world, “why” is magical, but only if used not as a tool, but as a legitimate desire to understand and explore deeper. Here again, sadly, what I see often is highly experienced sales souls seeking to get their message across so they spend an amazing amount of time pitching the client on “why” their solutions are superior and on “why” they should choose them vs the competition. These are folks that are stuck in a choice between the status quo and the dreaded big “C” word…change. Not knowing how to facilitate change within their own world they are desperately in need of someone that can help them tackle the ”change” question. They don’t need product features and benefits knowledge. They need help, real help, in understanding WHY they should change. And beyond that…. how to make it happen.

So, serve your clients by helping them understand WHY they need to change, WHY now, and WHY to your solution. Solutions come last. We all need a primer on this one… I suggest a book titled “Leading Change” by John P. Kotter.

So, get your WHY on, and truly look to serve your clients, to their benefit!

CUSP
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE

OK, LET’S ROLL!

Mitch

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