Where do needs come from?
by Todd Youngblood
Nobody needs to be convinced that a pro-active selling style is preferable to a re-active one. The challenge lies in learning how to become more pro-active; in getting better at anticipating needs customers will have as opposed to reacting to the ones they already do have.
Customers buy the things they need. That’s why most sales reps focus most of their selling energy on finding out what their customers need. That’s why the most common sales questions are some form of “What do you need?” If that’s your mindset though, you have a big problem. If all you can do is ask about and fulfill customer needs, you’re doomed forever to the reactive world. (And by the way, that’s a world dominated by discussions about lowering your price.)
To be pro-active, your mind must be focused on understanding the three things that generate needs in the first place; Plans, Processes and Problems. Understand these drivers of needs and you’ll be able frame and articulate them in a context that favors the value of your own products and services. Not only that, assisting customers with the “Three Ps” positions you more like a member of their management team than as just another vendor.
Plans:
Everything in every organization begins with planning. For some it’s an ongoing, formal process. In others it’s more seat-of-the-pants. All, however, have some idea of their Vision, Mission, Goals, Objectives and SWOTs. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) They all have an internal Culture and have to deal with External Factors over which they have no control. (Things like government regulation, hurricanes, competitors…) All of these things are considered while developing an overall Strategy and the supporting strategies for each major functional area.
Processes:
To implement the strategies, an organization has to design, implement and execute business processes. Each process is comprised of a series of actions taken by employees using an assortment of tools and knowledge. Each employee has a cost as does each tool and each bit of knowledge. It follows, therefore that each action has a total cost comprised of employee cost and/or tool cost and/or knowledge cost. (Thus we have Activity Based Costing or ABC, which is so loved by our friends in accounting.)
Finance, by the way, is the one process every organization has in common. Fundamentally, this process groups “ABCs” into budgets for each department, rolls them up into a total organizational budget, creates a forecasted Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement and then tracks actual financial performance with after-the-fact budgets, Balance Sheets, etc.
Linkages among processes are even more important than the processes themselves. Consider, for example, how the receiving process is linked to the manufacturing process which is in turn linked to the shipping process. Because they are linked, they affect one another, even when the linkage is indirect. When the delivery truck is late, the folks on the receiving dock have nothing to do, production is held up, shipping has nothing to ship and sales has to explain the hold-up to the customer who refuses to pay the bill and places an order with a competitor. Note that activities within any given process are linked, processes within your own organization are linked and those processes are linked to still other processes within suppliers, customers and competitors.
Problems:
Without fail, things go wrong with any and every process. Dealing with problems requires the execution of a problem-solving process, and addressing the root causes of problems requires planning. Lower and mid-level managers at your customers spend most of their day identifying, defining and solving problems.
The job of your customers’ upper management, the real decision makers, is working with all three “Ps” to produce profit. The more effectively they do so, the more profit they make. The more effectively you help them do so, the more profit you make.
So back to the original question, “Where do needs come from?” They come from and are driven by plans, processes and problems. To be pro-active, a sales rep must be intimately familiar with customer plans, processes and problems …and oh yes, with the needs created by them.
Pause… Re-read the last sentence in the previous paragraph and give it a minute to sink in.
The “Plans” section talked about eleven distinct aspects of planning. The pro-active rep knows the details of all eleven and how they inter-relate for each key account. That requires lots of hard, detailed, perhaps unfamiliar work.
The “Process” section talked about activities, their individual activity based cost factors, eight different kinds of financial statements and linkages among activities and processes that create an amazingly complex web of interactions that in turn create many equally complex cash flows. The pro-active rep is conversant with all those details and can clearly articulate both the process and financial impact of his or her products and services. That requires an even bigger batch of hard, detailed, perhaps unfamiliar work.
The “Problem” section was probably more familiar. Even most reactive reps look for problems, learn the details about them and sell solutions. (Note: “Solution Selling” is great, but it’s still reactive.)
Now be honest with yourself. Are you really pro-active? Do you really know enough about how customer plans, processes and problems drive their needs? Or do you have a boatload of new skills and knowledge to acquire?
Think about it…
