A common concern among sales executives is the “velocity” of their sales approach. In other words, how rapidly can the sales team engage with customers and close opportunities? The way many Tech vendors approach this problem is to focus on selling “transactions”, and they generally try to steer clear of adding complexity to the sales process. Why? Because it could slow “velocity” and reduce the Rep’s ability to control the sales outcome and timing.
For many Tech organizations, complexity is often equated to selling “Solutions” that often include products from other vendors and professional services (which they may not get sales credit for, take a long time to “deliver” and equal more complexity). But as we’ve talked about in many posts, selling solutions is often what is needed to be successful selling a particular product. Particularly if it falls to the right of the diagram shown in Figure 1 below. I shared these 3 indicators in my post, “What 3 Questions Indicate Whether You Need to Sell “Solutions”? (and when does selling “Product” work better?…)”
Figure 1: The 3 Indicators for “Solution Selling”
You can find more information on how and when to sell solutions in the “Solutions” section of the “GTM Best Practices page” on my blog.
What I am finding is that fewer and fewer products fit on the left side of the diagram. In today’s world, software and services drive customer value, and hardware is often not the lead message in the solution. But this situation leaves the organizations with a difficult choice –which one of these paths should they follow?
- Market and sell products as part of a “Solution”, to connect with customers and create more long-term revenue
OR
- Sell “Transactions” at a higher velocity, to meet their sales goals (and keep their job)
These two choices seem incompatible – or are they?
Over the years, I have found an approach to bridge “Solutions” and “Transactions” that enables marketing and sales to generate opportunities and sales to qualify, position and close “Transactions” that are part of a “Solution”. To accomplish this goal, the organization needs to make two fundamental changes to how they market and sell their products:
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Use “Vision-Quest Marketing” – to generate awareness and inbound inquires
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Use “Destination-Based Selling” – to enable sales to create transactional sales within a Solution family
I talked about “the first change, “Vision Quest Marketing” in detail in my post, Are You Using a “Hook” in Your Marketing to Create a Path to a “Destination” (and more revenue for your products)?
Step #1: Use “Vision-Quest Marketing” – to generate awareness, create “Pull” marketing and inbound inquires. Think of this principle as having three key components. Figure 2 below shows the importance of connecting with customers to get them interested in your products. This hook creates customer “Pull” and inbound inquiries – and makes the life of both marketing and sales teams a lot easier. We also talked about the three elements of Vision Quest Marketing:
A) Communicate a strong “hook” that provides a vision for how your company offerings can address a big customer challenge and vision for a better future
B) Communicate how customers can take concrete and realistic steps to move toward this “destination”
C) Map your products to solutions that address with some concrete steps
Figure 2: Marketing with a “Vision Quest”: Creating the “Hook”
Now let’s focus on the second key change organizations need to make, “Destination-based Selling”, which involves a sales approach that connects to customer vision, to sell products.
Step #2 and 3 – Use “Destination-based Selling” – to create transactional sales to support a “Solution: sale. This approach is critical to enabling your sales team and channel to sell your products with high velocity. Let’s talk about 3 Key Elements of “Destination-based Selling:
A) Position a destination that can be achieved by leveraging your products broadly, as a platform
B) Provide a path to the destination with specific sales plays that advance customers toward that destination
C) Enable generalist sales and channels to qualify specific sales plays on this journey, and give them the tools to sell each of these opportunities transactionally
Figure 3: The Steps for Destination-Based Selling
Let’s discuss each of these three elements in more detail:
A) Provide a Destination
All of us know intuitively that when we know where we are going, we can take steps to get there faster. If we want to be an architect, we enroll in an architecture program to get the needed qualifications. If we want to become an Olympic athlete, we train hard for the event and enter the necessary preliminary events to qualify us to participate in the Olympic trials. When do we move slowly? When we do not know where we are going. When we do not have a direction, we evaluate options; we contemplate steps needed to succeed and the likelihood of success. Each step is like a tentative step forward in a dark tunnel, hoping that the ground beneath our feet is solid.
The same situation applies to uncertainty for organizations on IT strategy and buying decisions. When organizations don’t know where they are going, they move slowly. Unfortunately, today’s IT buying is very complex, with organizations moving toward the cloud, toward SDDC for their on-premise infrastructure and grappling with open source versus IT vendor offerings – and that means slow buying and lower revenue for your sales team.
Think about daily selling activities for many tech vendors and you will notice that the activities appear very scattered. Follow up a customer request for information, work on a couple of hot opportunities, follow up some leads or appointments set by marketing, collaborate with key channel partners on some opportunities and perhaps develop an account plan for a few key customers where there is more opportunity.
What should this plan be about? You probably said “about them” and that is a good start. It should be about their priorities and how you can map what you sell to those priorities. But perhaps the larger opportunity is to help your accounts develop a “Destination” vision of the future (that includes heavy doses of your products). For example, your account may be sold on the direction of IT-as-a-Service, and they see that connected to their cloud initiatives, perhaps as a “hybrid cloud”. It would make it much easier for you to sell point products that fit into that vision (virtual networking, tools for application performance monitoring, management and orchestration, containers for application portability, converged and hyper-converged infrastructure that supports an SDDC environment and/or professional services to architect and implement any of these pieces), IF YOU SELL THE PRODUCT IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS LARGER AND MORE IMPACTFUL DESTINATION – rather than as a point product that fits into the organizations’ IT infrastructure in some way (and let them or your resellers/integrators figure out exactly how… )
But a “Destination” is not enough – it needs to be viable and it needs to be clear how product purchases made today could benefit their organization in achieving this “Destination” . In next week’s post, I will talk about the other key elements you can use for “Destination-based-Selling”.
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