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| Home - Industry Article - Jun 05 Issue |
Why Did We Lose the Big Deal? 5 Questions Every CEO Should Ask
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Question #4- Did we have a coach or internal advocate in the account?
All successful software sales involve a salesperson being “coached” through the evaluation process. You need an internal advocate within the customer account to win the deal. This person is a constant, accurate source of information revealing the internal machinations of the customer’s selection process. The term “coach” is the popular name of a person who is the source of this privileged inside information.
Quite often, ordinary salespeople mistake someone for a coach when in fact the person isn’t a loyal compatriot. Several specific conditions must exist in order for a friendly evaluator to be considered a coach. First, coaches must have a personal reason for wanting the salesperson or his company to win. Second,
Coaches need to specifically say they want the salesperson to win and be willing to fight for the salesperson’s cause. Finally, the information a coach provides must be accurate.
The ideal coach is the person with the highest authority or influence involved in the selection process. When this person becomes the coach, the salesperson will enjoy a unique advantage. However, the coach could be anybody inside the customer’s company or even outside the company, such as a consultant working on the project.
Why would someone coach one salesperson versus another? To establish a relationship with a coach, Heavy Hitters build different types of rapport with a customer. At the foundation is a special relationship, a personal rapport between two individuals. Although powerful, this personal rapport is meaningless unless technical rapport is present. Technical rapport is achieved when a product’s features satisfy the customer’s requirements. Finally, there must be a business rapport between the two companies to consummate the deal.
Heavy Hitters manage their time by qualifying people. They know before you decide to work on an account, you need to determine if you can find a coach (friend) within the customer company to help you win the deal. If you can’t develop a coach, it does not make sense to invest your time in any account.
Question #5 Did we build personal relationships with the customer?
Counter to common sense, psychologists believe the loneliest time of life is not retirement age but between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. It turns out the age group you naturally associate with schoolmates, friends, and parties actually has the one of the highest suicide rates. This raises an interesting point. Regardless of how many people surround someone, how much fortune, fame, and power you think a person has, everyone is lonely in his or her own way. Loneliness isn’t only about being alone. It is when you feel disconnected, isolated, alienated, unwanted, inadequate, self-conscious, and unloved. Every decision-maker is uniquely lonely and the deal winner is the salesperson who is best able to build a mutual friendship.
Now I admire persistent salespeople and respect the underdog who will fight with passion and battle against the odds. However, sometimes it’s impossible to win. Such is the case when your competitor holds such a tight grip on the account there is no way to break loose their relationship. In some accounts, although they may not say so directly, the customer simply doesn’t like you.
Even facing these circumstances, some salespeople believe the customer is just playing hard to get or treating every vendor in this way (which they aren’t). These salespeople mistakenly believe they can turn the situation around by sheer willpower and determination. Recognizing when to abandon an account is as important as knowing what accounts to pursue. Ultimately, you will only win deals where you are given the opportunity to build personal relationships.
Closing Thoughts
The balance of power is definitely in the hands of today’s buyer and the situation will only continue to get worse. Today’s customers are smarter at buying software and more skeptical than ever. In addition, product differentiation is at an all time low.
Your competitors have not sat idly by either. They’ve educated themselves about your products and sales tactics, and they’re more focused on defeating you than ever. Fortunately, they usually believe in the use of brute force and think the best way to defeat the enemy is by frontal attack, when in reality, winning over the hearts and minds of customers carries the day.
I recently completed an exhaustive study for a software company to help them understand where they won and why they lost. A CIO I interviewed made these poignant comments:
“In the end it came down to the people we work with. We made it clear we weren’t buying a brochure, we weren’t buying a demonstration, and in fact we weren’t even buying a product. We were buying a 10 to 20 relationship and if we weren’t going to get that then we didn’t care about their product. All products fail, all products need to be changed and in five years if we hate the people we are dealing with, it is not going to work.”
Ultimately, we are selling customers something much larger—the idea that we can help change their lives for the better, enable them to be a part of something greater than themselves, and partner with them for the long-term.
In roles ranging from salesperson to vice president, Steve Martin has been personally responsible for over a quarter of billion dollars of high technology sales while working for leading edge Silicon Valley companies over the past twenty years. His new book titled, Heavy Hitter Selling—How Successful Salespeople Use Language and Intuition to Persuade Customers to Buy, is the first book to truly explain the human nature of selling high technology. Visit www.heavyhitterselling.com for additional articles and information. He can be reached at: stevemartin@heavyhitterselling.com.
 
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