A Sales Process Infographic
In SPIN Selling, Neil Rackham writes “Success in the larger sale depends, more than anything else, on how the investigating stage of the sale is handled.” (page 14) And in a study of 200 B2B firms by RainToday.com titled How Clients Buy, the contributing cause of sales failures is a faulty discovery phase. The interview and question skills of the detective role can uncover the key information which makes sales.
The general business objective of the infographic is moving from sales automation to customer relationship management (CRM). The detective role moves from suspects to prospects as a first step to reach the objective. All the imagery and plotline of detective stories, both good and bad, can be related to sales. What makes for a bad detective story filled with cliché and tired plotlines makes for a bad sales process…
- Objective: Use evidence to prove your benefit case
- Turn a suspect list into a list of prospects
- Get the information that makes the sale, without interrogation
- Investigate the situation and solve for source problems, not symptoms
- Make the case from the evidence, forget solutions in search of problems
- Prevent objections and evasiveness; don’t overcome them
Round up the usual suspects
key: getting prospects to step forward
The better detectives are conversationalists; before a suspect even knows they’re under interrogation, it’s over. Sales people can seem like interrogators only out to get the appointment or sale. Captology would call this bad design, setting up unnecessarily adversarial roles is a persuasive design barrier. Cheap detective fiction and low cost sales can get away with this, but not large sales which involve a consultative sales role. Sales detectives spend more time qualifying, so time spent closing will pay off.
The good detective listens deeply, changing approach and solution to fit. Likewise infographics have to be adaptive in response to feedback; hypertext links, forums and web analytics are the mechanisms for listening now. Redesigning sales materials based on feeback from the sales force proves you listen far better than words will.
The Detective As Sought Out Problem Solver
Consultative sales processes foster
refferals and walk–ins.
Where the comparison between roles breaks down is people seek out detectives to help solve some problem. You won’t find sales people top many lists of problem solvers. Yet top sellers get just such a reputation as troubleshooter, which is what influences clients to identify themselves and walk through the door. Often the key decision maker is hidden, yet our detective senses when someone else is “pulling the strings” behind the scenes. The dynamic tension (to put it charitably) between cops and detectives can serve as a metaphor for a couple of factious business silos — sales and marketing.
Because the stories are in comic form, sensitive issues can be explored and solved. By monitoring those stories which are most accessed, business problems can be seen and addressed before they show up in the bottom line.
Situation awareness based on superior information wins the day. To get that information a sales detective has to ask the right questions, connecting the dots between the answers. And that includes questions about assumptions underlying the sales process itself.
When Pieces Of The Puzzle Don’t Fit
As the plot unfolds all the stories are plausible, but the pieces don’t always fit.
Asking questions that focus on customer needs is a more powerful way to sell than talking about the product and its “bells and whistles.” However, when a new product is launched that is rich in “bells and whistles…” salespeople become remarkably product–centered. They ask roughly half as many questions as they do in selling their existing products. Instead of focusing on the customer’s needs, their enthusiasm for the new product causes them to talk product features instead.
—Interview With Neil Rackham July/August 1998 By Kerry Moyer
In similar fashion, vendors can get tunnel vision, trying to talk about what they sell in the context of their own competition. Testing can reveal when this well rehearsed pitch leaves out the customer, and the customer’s competitors. Any proposed solution then seems like a McGuffin, an obvious plot device to lash elements together and move the story along. Applying interaction test techniques to sales, Rackham practices good detective work.
Detect, Design, Direct, Develop
The detective is one of four roles in this relationship selling infographic. The challenge during the design phase is turning prospects into customers. The director works to bring out the performance of best customers and his own company through collaboration. Role four, the developer, shifts the perspective of sales people from account maintenance to account development. Far from arbitrary roles, each leads the organization from one–shot sales “pellets” to interwoven social webs where customers talk to each other. The critical shift is changing the operational model, not the arrival of some new software or hardware.
Infographics have to work for the interests of business, align the sales professional with marketing, and in the process serve the customer. To earn the fancy title, infographics should work along critical dimensions and solve high–payoff problems.
Resources
- The context clash between marketing and sales has been compared to Mars and Venus, and even Coke versus Pepsi. Aberdeen Group’s Sales Effectiveness: Helping Sales Sell maps out the factions: sales, marketing, CRM and Sales Force Automation. Diagrams avoid the elephant in the living room, while infographics deal with it.
- Raintoday.com Marketing and Selling Professional Services: How Clients Buy underscores how important discovery and listening are. The book Questions That Make The Sale is a good supplement for the detection phase of the sales cycle.
- The Customer Knows Best? Better Think Again introduces a sales methodology more familiar to interaction designers performing user interviews.
- Reconnect Sales Management to Profitability explains how a sales force becomes disconnected. “In effective companies, the top managers communicate the company’s objectives to the sales force. If the objectives have changed, they explain the decision and why the new objectives are good for the company, the customers, and the sales force.” Want a Happy Customer? Coordinate Sales and Marketing, and one way is a balanced scorecard approach.
- Seth Godin suggests a test, “Ask yourself a simple question: If all of our customers were well-informed, would we do better — or worse? For many companies, the answer is grim.” In contrast consultative selling shifts focus to customer experience, benefits, and information exchange to uncover source problems underlying symptoms.
- Columnist Bob Lewis talks about his experience with Customer Elimination Management, CRM’s evil twin. In a similar article, Ben Swartz reveals an important clue, “We still see firms trying to foist CRM onto staff that don’t have a customer focus or an organisation which isn’t geared to building customer relationships. We tell our customers: forget about the software for now. Do your due diligence first.”
- The sales funnel diagram is alive, well, and hanging on many a wall. Software based on the sales funnel hardwires the model into business processes. Captology would require some background on the influence this model exerts on the sales style of the organization, and interaction with sales prospects. Taking down the old diagram while offering no viable alternative is not information work.
- A key to CRM is being contextually aware, which includes explaining what CRM is.
- The McGuffin in sales is the word solution, or solution–based selling. Such terms have been used a little too often from the wrong side of the conversation; better to let customers say it first.
- Neil Rackham, developer of SPIN Selling, approached the sales process much like an interaction designer, testing how sales people interact with clients. Rackham’s introduction of test methodologies to sales techniques turned up surprises not unlike other interaction testing.