Written by: Antony Bream, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
As a business advisor, mentor, and executive coach to software companies ranging from start-ups and scaleups to unicorns I repeatedly come across one common issue, selling is really tough and getting tougher.
Whether my client has a brilliant product that can save their client millions of dollars from automating manual processes or make millions of more dollars by selling products through digital channels even the most compelling of propositions is hard to sell.
From a seller’s perspective, it often feels like the old adage you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince. In fact, detailed research has found that in the world of romance on average a female needs to kiss 22 men to find her prince!
But why is this happening and what can entrepreneurs and business leaders do to make sure their huge investments in talent, time, and technology pay off to make a return?
On the buyers’ side they have more access to information earlier in their buying cycle and can reach out to sources ranging from analysts, advisors, and consultants to market reports, case studies, and company reviews to form views and assessments.
And on the sellers’ side, there are more competitors, ranging from incumbents to disruptive challengers, coming from all angles, not just traditional entrants.
For instance, in financial services, traditional consultants who have been advising their clients on business and technology strategy are now also providing software development and deployment services competing against traditional software houses. They often have the ear of and influence the ‘C’ level and so already have a head start.
When I researched this trend and set up my company Ribbit Consulting in 2016 to help my clients address these challenges and look at smart ways to counter the challenge I came across some compelling research.
First, companies looking to go to the market to purchase a product or service have often reached two-thirds of their buying cycle before they reach out to the vendor market to get direct information and dialogue.
Second, on average in an enterprise company, there are eight stakeholders involved in the decision-making process.
So how do the vendors who are striving to make their limited marketing spend attract the attention of their target buyers stand a chance to engage early enough and establish credibility, create value and influence the buyer’s decision-making process?
After all, buying is simply a process to select a product or service to bring value into and de-risk their business. So how do the buyers know which vendors can bring the most value, reduce the most risk and be the most cost-efficient?
With all these frogs what can companies do to keep the kissing to a minimum and find those clients who want to buy their products or services more easily and more quickly?
Here are some tips gathered from my own intellectual property and experience built over many years of working closely with and advising founders and CEOs of businesses facing this conundrum.
1. Understand Your Customer’s Buying Cycle
It amazes me how many of my clients’ concerns are that their sales processes or execution aren’t working with much scrutiny and blame hanging over the poor sales director and team who in turn are probably blaming marketing for not being a lead generation machine.
I advise my clients to use the PRINCE methodology as a framework for their client buying cycle where:
P is the program of work the board has sanctioned as part of their annual strategy to address their risks and opportunities across their business to deliver shareholder or investor returns.
R is the resource allocated responsibility by the board to solve the issue or realize the opportunity and to report back with a regular status update and final recommendations. This is your sponsor if you can find them and needs to be engaged early in the cycle, understand your unique value proposition and be brave and open-minded enough to be influenced by your benefits versus the competition by becoming your internal sales champion.
I is the ideas or initiatives that are decided upon by the resource and often start the formation of a team of resources and a package of workstreams.
N is the needs analysis whereby the assembled team looks at their options and starts some initial research and analysis often resulting in a long list of options and an RFI (request for information) to narrow them down.
C is the case to do business and will start to look at the KPIs of the initiative and assess the options being considered often resulting in an RFP (request for proposal).
E is the execution of an agreement and is the final recommendation sanctioned by the board for approval often resulting in an RFQ (request for quote).
2. Align Your Sales Cycle With The Customer's Buying Cycle
Look carefully at your customer’s buying cycle and think very carefully about how you can:
Engage with the customer as early as possible in their buying cycle to identify the sponsor of the project, the Resource in PRINCE, and influence and control their thinking as they move their cycle forward.
Think what marketing, sales, customer success, and product management can do to engage and add value at each stage of the buying cycle. Can you challenge the client to look at alternative ways of solving the problem and influence their thinking toward your value proposition? Can you persuade them to commit to spending some budget on building a POC (proof of concept) or an FDS (functional design study) versus engaging in an RFI or RFP process which is often designed by the competition or a consultant heavily biased towards your competition to win? Would a business case-generating template on your website help a client build their own ROI (return on investment) models and influence their thinking more your way?
3. Understand Your Target Addressable Market
Get a clear view of the market sector, the market players and the size of your ideal customer base, and who would buy your solution with the benefits it delivers.
Find a market big enough to be important to your solution and small enough to lead. What are their issues and challenges and how do you triage which companies are worth approaching first? What competition is there already selling into this space and what market share do they have? Is there enough to bag some for yourself or can you disrupt the incumbents and take market share off them?
Decide who the buyers are of your solution and profile their personas. How do you communicate with them to engage in a language and context they understand? How do you break through the noise and find them in the first place? What happens if they ghost you or say no?
Have your answers ready and available to address objections across the whole of the buying cycle.
4. Establish Your Value, Validate It, Quantify It and Learn How To Sell It
Founders of a brilliant idea often come from a technology or economics background and don’t have commercial experience so when they launch their idea as a product or service and their beautiful baby isn’t winning the best-looking baby competition they often don’t know why.
Your brilliant game-changing world-beating proposition needs to be established in terms of business benefits that are validated, proven, and quantified to make sense.
Are you helping your clients save or make money or both and how? How long will it take to deliver that value and what investment in terms of people and money is needed to realize that value? Can that be achieved in 12 months and will it be spent from capital or operational expenditure?
Geoffrey Moore, the author of Crossing the Chasm, identified the trends for establishing and delivering value across the technology innovation lifecycle.
He saw those early adopters, who are invariably risk-takers but with no budget, might be the first frogs you’re kissing as they are looking for innovation to drive their businesses forward. These could be IT people who speak a different language to the business.
But he also recognized that the next stage of innovation is selling to a self-referencing group of clients who understand and validate your value proposition. These are often business people who look for a POC (proof of concept) or MVP (minimum viable product) to test and prove your solution can help address their problem. But they speak a different language to IT and typically have a budget that will need to be reallocated to fund your solution so how do you help them do that?
So, you need to prepare, plan and pivot your approach to your target customers at each stage of their buying cycle recognizing different personas are looking for communications in words they can understand and articulate inside their own organizations at different times across the buying cycle.
5. Prepare For the Politics, Posturing, and Power Games
You’re often entering a viper’s nest when engaging with a client and so you need to be ready to play the game of politics, posturing, and power games.
Don’t forget you need to identify early on in the client’s buying cycle the sponsor who has ultimate decision-making authority and responsibility to the board and get them to be your internal sales person convincing the other, on average, seven stakeholders you are the least risky and most valuable vendor.
But the clients get stuck in vacuums of indecision based on internal politics, posturing, and power games so how are you going to cope with that when all you are trying to do is convince your client you’ve got the answers to all of their problems?
So, as you can read there are a lot of frogs to be found and kissed but done in the right way with careful thought, rigor, patience, flexibility, open-mindedness, careful planning, and analysis of trends and signals you can find your prince.
Planning, preparation, and pivoting are the secrets to success and once you’ve got a handle on your customer’s buying cycle and aligned your sales processes to build in control and influence you can start to find your princes more quickly!
If you would like to learn more about my company and services or connect to arrange a call in case you have any of these challenges, please visit my website here.
Antony Bream, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Antony Bream, is a business advisor and executive coach working closely alongside founders, boards and their teams to help them and their businesses take the leap to their next level. With a passion for understanding the processes and psychology behind how companies sell their products and customers buy them, he formed Ribbit Consulting to bring that experience and knowledge to his customers to empower them to reach their full potential.
