Think About It… the e-book version

by Todd Youngblood

Customers are a demanding bunch. They have to be because of the intensity of the competition they face and the fact that their customers are just as demanding. It puts a sales pro who genuinely cares about the customer in an odd situation because…

They only care about your ability to repeatedly generate pull on streams of value that facilitate achievement of their objectives. There are a lot of moving parts in that last sentence, so a closer look at the key words and phrases is in order.

• Repeatedly – A one-shot deal is just that. It may not have been a simple matter of luck or good timing, but it looks that way to the customer. No matter how valuable that one shot was, the customer is far too busy for relationship-building with you unless you can quickly do it again. (and again, and again…) You’ve got to constantly rapidly and continuously discover, learn, create, develop, solve, advance and deliver.

• Generate Pull - Pushing your products and services is an obsolete strategy. Oh sure, it still works. The vast majority of sales reps still use it, but make no mistake, it is obsolete. Technology has enabled customers to quickly locate and “pull” whatever they want, whenever they want it into their organizations, at a great price. You need to be able to deliver whatever “it” is and right now. That means you must get really good at anticipating requirements; which means you must know what they want before they know what they want and where they’ll look first to find it and be there when they do finally look; which means you must know their business and where it is and/or should be heading; which means you need to know the same about their customers… Sound difficult? Complicated? Different? It most certainly is. Better get started on discovering and inventing the best practices of this brave new world of “pull” selling right now!

• Streams of Value - Think about the chain, not the links. Lets say your widget is a key link in your customer’s value chain. That’s why they have been buying widgets from you for twenty years. Lets also say that I sell a widget with similar specs. Not only that, I can provide the link that comes before the widget link and the link that comes after. I have partners that provide links 3, 4, 5… both up & down the value chain (i.e., the “value stream”) and will integrate all of them for you. Does my stream of value address and solve a much broader, deeper range of issues than your widget standing there all by itself? And then there’s our mutual competitor X. X is thinking in terms not only of the widget stream of value, but also of the related A stream of value and the B stream and C stream… and how all those streams connect to pull value streams into the customer’s customers.

No doubt about it, the world we’re selling into is getting vastly more complex at a faster rate than ever. You can remain a one-shot wonder; and get shut out by customers too busy building relationships with your rapid-fire competitors. You can keep pushing yourself into accounts and once there push your products and services into them; and really, really annoy the decision makers who genuinely can get whatever they want, whenever they want it. You can practice all day long and get quite good at articulating your “value add” only to find customers far more concerned with integrating a wide array of value streams and perceiving your pitch as painfully narrow-minded or even boring.

Think, think, think. Learn, learn, learn. Figure out how to repeatedly generate pull on streams of value that facilitate achievement of your customers’ objectives.