Hope Is Not a Strategy (Book Summary)

Hope Is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale by Rick Page

Section 1 The Challenge — The Complex Sale

CHAPTER 1 Out of Control

• Five major transformations affecting selling:
• Product commodification: Differentiation often lies in the extended solution, including services, integration, partnerships, supply chain, financing — or trust.
• Disintermediation.
• e-Commerce
• Customer relationship management
• Business partnering. There are two types of business partnering. One is teaming with other firms to provide an integrated solution. The other is teaming with clients to solve problems for their customers or constituents.
• Additional considerations:
  • Buyer preferences for integrated solutions
  • Multi-departmental buying committees create shifting requirements and politics in ever-changing competitive evaluations,
  • Not returning phone calls
  • No access to power
  • New requirement late in the buying process.
  • Analysis paralysis. The client evaluates and evaluates but doesn’t move forward to a decision.
• If business pain or political power for sponsorship is missing from the evaluation, it will sit on your forecast forever.
• The best salespeople are often the best detectives. They ask the right questions earlier than their competition.
• Most salespeople in the complex sale work, at most, ten to twenty opportunities in a year,
• In order to link your solutions into the client’s business problem you must have an understanding of the industry, culture, competitors, clients, and politics.
• It’s to the customer’s advantage to keep you in the dark and to keep at least three vendors in the hunt. They do this for:
• Due diligence.
• Price leverage.
• Safety net. If they can’t come to legal terms and conditions with their first choice, they will need a backup alternative.
• Lack of knowledge.
• Lack of courage to tell you you’re losing.
• Because misinformation is such a critical part of the complex sale, anyone who takes one person’s opinion on anything will be a perpetual victim.
• Ask yourself:
  • “Did we help generate the requirements?”
  • “Was our point of entry high or low?”
  • “Did we have a team strategy session before the presentation?”
• Early prevention beats error correction.
• Control “doesn’t mean manipulation. It means understanding the client’s problem better, linking our solution to those problems in a better way, differentiating our solution in a professional manner, and earning trust by outperforming the competition.
• Salespeople need a system that tells them, in advance, whether their strategy is winning and how to change their strategy in time if it is not.

CHAPTER 2 What Makes Today’s Complex Sale Complex?

• The salesperson of the future must lead two to twelve people on a sales team that is selling to twenty people or more on a buying committee.
• Competitive selling isn’t negative selling unless it’s done wrong.
• The ethical premise of competitive selling is first, your solution is genuinely good for the client’s organization, and second, your tactics remain morally, legally, and ethically sound.
• A time-based sales strategy must be used to focus the right issues and tactics on the right people at the right time.

CHAPTER 3 The Canyon and the Crucible — The Competitive Evaluation

• Although evaluations start out in a logical mode, there is a point where they often turn from a logical and rational information-gathering process to an emotional and political selection process. This happens at the point where the buying committee has to make a decision.
• Late in the sales cycle, product functionality declines as an issue, and the client turns to non-product differentiators such as company strength, price, service, or relationship.
• The power of your capability is only as good as the political power of the client sponsor who wants it

CHAPTER 4 Talent and Team Selling: Tellers, Sellers, Hunters, Farmers, Business Developers, Partners, and the Industry-Networked Consultant

• The idea of showing a hospital feature to a bank is preposterous. But this is no less preposterous than showing somebody a solution to a problem they don’t have — or a feature for which they have no need.
• The best salespeople are not necessarily the best talkers. They are the best listeners.
• Their competitor’s strategy was “less is more.“ With less functionality, they emphasized simplicity and ease of use, and they did a better job of listening. They came to the client, rolled up their sleeves, and said, “What do you want this system to do?“ Then they listened. When they presented, they focused like a rifle on the pains the client had confessed. The superior product company marched in with an entourage of people, spent eight hours shot-gunning features, and fell into the trap of appearing to be too complex
• Selling inside your own company is as important, and often more difficult, as selling outside.
• Modern sellers’ new job is to deliver and document results and, in the process, to make higher and wider contacts in the organization and to sell between the sales.
• A consultative salesperson must look beyond the customer’s needs to the customer’s customer.
• Successful selling in the complex sales environment in the twenty-first century will take a combination of several elements:
  • Technique
  • Talent (esp. being able to adapt to the buying style of the client)
  • Teamwork
  • Technology

CHAPTER 5 The Arsenal of Competitive Advantage

• In differentiating complex solutions, we have identified six major component sources of competitive advantage, each of which has several elements.

• The task of the consultative salesperson is to take the competitive advantages from the company, the product, and the solution and focus it on the business problems of the client
• You simply need one capability connected to one powerful person at the right time in order to win. This is how you can out-sell or be outsold.

Section 2 The Solution — R.A.D.A.R. ®

CHAPTER 6 R.A.D.A.R. — Simplifying the Complex Sale

• Our acronym for the R.A.D.A.R. sales process stands for R.eading A.ccounts and D.eploying A.propriate R.esources. The R.A.D.A.R approach is:
  • Link solutions to pain (or gain)
  • Qualify the prospect
  • Build competitive preference
  • Determine the decision-making  process
  • Sell to power
  • Communicate the strategic plan
• The more we know about the committee’s decision-making process, the more effective our strategy will be; the more people with power involved who prefer us, the better our chances. The better our teammates understand our plan to win, the more accurate it will be and the more empowered they will be to leverage their efforts effectively.

CHAPTER 7 Key 1 — Link Solutions to Pain (or Gain)

• Understanding your customer’s business strategy, market forces, and financial situation is the new core competency.
• If the requirements have already been defined, you’ve missed the first step in the sales cycle.
• Every requirement either has a political sponsor or it doesn’t. Every requirement is either connected to a business problem or it’s not. Not all sponsors have equal power and not all business requirements have equal impact.
• The best business developers trace the connections of the requirements back to the sponsors and the business problem.
• Active pains are those business problems that have been acknowledged by the client and for which they are actively seeking a solution
• The best business developers can find dormant business problems, stimulate them to active pain, and thereby gain an advantage over the competition and perhaps an exclusive opportunity.
• The speed with which someone will share his or her personal agenda is a function of how quickly you can build trust.
• Examples of personal agenda benefits include recognition, promotion, innovation, technical elegance, conformity, retirement, control, money, peer respect, or quality.
• As not all personal pains are equal; not all business pains are equal.
• The simple “so what” test should be recycling inside a salesperson’s head whenever he or she is talking to a prospect.
• Sell strategic benefits to strategic buyers and technical benefits to tactical buyers.
• Sales can be flanked by a competitor with an expanded scope of solution that introduces political, interdepartmental, or strategic issues.
• Operational needs are important to the people who actually do the work. They include ease-of-use, efficiency, technical purity, throughput, integration, and functionality.
• If you can demonstrate how your solution can help a chief officer enable culture change, you can get their attention.
• Pain doesn’t come from the business problem; pain comes from the political embarrassment of the business problem.
• If we are to create urgency to generate or close business, we must creatively take the invisible costs and make them visible and politically painful.
• Although significant cost reduction can be strategic, political, strategic, and emotional issues usually override cost justifications.
• Strategic Benefits include competitive advantage, market share, speed to market, survival, government regulation, litigation, global expansion, corporate culture, leadership, growth, and mergers and acquisitions

CHAPTER 8 Key 2 — Qualify the Prospect

• How you qualify depends on how many opportunities you have and how many resources you have available.
• The first key qualifying question for anyone should be, “Will this business happen for anyone at all?”
• The second key question becomes, “Is this a good opportunity for us?”
• If you get an unsolicited RFP on your desk and you didn’t write it, there is a very good chance that someone else did.
• The most important emotional and strategic issues are quite often not budgeted.
• The next budget question leads into politics.”Whose budget is the money in?”
• Don’t underestimate the personal impact of signing bad business on your reputation with network peers — it can be career limiting.
• The earlier and tougher the qualifying is, the more effective it is.
• We may qualify out because of any of the following reasons:
  • We can’t solve their pain well.
  • We have no access to power.
  • The decision-making process doesn’t favor us.
  • We don’t have the resources for adequate pursuit.
  • We have better opportunities elsewhere.

CHAPTER 9 Key 3 — Build Competitive Preference

• The key question here is, “If they had to vote today, would they vote for us?”
• Positive preference rises to the next level where they are disclosing to you information you need about their company and its politics that will help you win.
• Building preference with an individual is a function of fundamental one-on-one selling skills: personality, credibility, persuasiveness, linkage, and alignment.
• Always leave a good reason to call this executive back. “Do you mind if I keep you appraised of how the project is going? And by the way, when we do the needs assessment, we’d like to spend some time with you to understand what the strategic objectives are for this project.”
• Talking about personal or competitive issues before you have established rapport is unprofessional and can be catastrophic. You will be perceived as negative and pushy.
• Selling starts from the heart — if we don’t like them, they won’t like us.
• As early and as delicately as possible, identify the more powerful influencers and what parts people will play in the sales cycle.

CHAPTER 10 Key 4 — Determine the Decision-Making Process

• “The single most important talent in selling professional services is the ability to understand the purchasing process from the clients’ perspective.” – David Maister in the book Managing the Professional Service Firm
• Top management wants people to feel like they had their say, even if they didn’t get their way.
• One problem is that the client often doesn’t know their own decision-making process.
• As politicians have done for years, you need to break the committee down into its component parts and count the votes. You then need to come up with separate strategies and messages for each important participant
• To arrive at a four-level sales plan, you must analyze each stakeholder based upon their
  • pain (or gain)
  • preference for you
  • their power
  • part they will play in the decision-making process.
• “Coach,” as commonly used, is an indicator of preference, not of power. In some cases you can have people who like you, but who are so disliked in their own organizations, they can actually set you back.
• Once you’ve offered a discount to close business, you have announced what kind of vendor you are, and the only question now is the price. Let the games begin.
• The best salespeople detect and close on the client’s pain or opportunity, not their own.
• In negotiation, power lies in alternatives. If the client knows that you have a deadline, they have the power.
• Financial returns alone won’t excite people to buy. Problems with dates attached to them, along with political exposure for making or missing those dates, have the highest urgency, especially if it means exposure for powerful people.

CHAPTER 11 Key 5 — Sell to Power

• Effective sales leaders constantly make deposits and build networks of people inside their organizations and industry who help them get things done for the client (as well as themselves
• People with influence and no authority can be extremely powerful agents and important to unlocking the complex sale.
• You need to begin mapping out the zones of influence from the first visit.
• We entertain so we can discuss politics and personal agendas in private.

CHAPTER 12 Key 6 — Communicate the Strategic Plan

• At the sales level, it is critical we strategize at four different levels:
  • (1) the industry market level
  • (2) the enterprise level
  • (3) the opportunity level
  • (4) the individual level
• Effective power comes when the entire team knows the plan and can execute it, with timing, together.
• Real profitability comes from shorter sales cycles and better margins on repeat business after you gained access, built trust, and reduced risk.
• Professor Tom Kosnik of Stanford University says, “Testing their strategy is what separates the amateur strategists from the effective ones.”
• Once your top executives say the wrong thing because they weren’t prepared adequately, you can’t buy enough “mind erasers” to get it out of the prospect’s head.
• Salespeople don’t get paid to be busy; they get paid to win.

Section 3 Strategies for Execution

CHAPTER 13 Sixteen Opportunity-Level Sales Strategies

• Preemptive Strategies
  • Demand creation rather than demand reaction.
  • Ask for and seek an exclusive or sole source evaluation.
  • Align yourself with a power partner.
  • Walk away early
• Frontal Strategies
• Flanking Strategies: Flanking in marketing or sales includes changing or expanding the issues, altering the buying process, or introducing new players to your advantage.
  • (1) changing the pain
  • (2) changing the power
  • (3) changing the process
  • (4) linking solutions or products
  • (5) expanding scope.
• Changing the pain means either
  • Finding new issues to link into
  • Linking into higher issues that have not been connected before
  • Linking them to issues that are sponsored by more powerful people.
• Fractional Strategies
  • Divide and Conquer; Penetrate and Radiate
  • If You Can’t Get a Loaf, Get a Slice
  • Partnering
• Timing Strategies:
  • Delay (to buy time if you are losing)
  • Accelerate (if you are winning): Every day you are in a winning position and have no contract, you leave an opening for your competitor.

CHAPTER 14 Changing Issues and Time-Based Sales Tactics

• The issues change in relative importance over a long sales cycle.
• The speed with which you can refine or revalidate a dynamic plan is the key to victory
• As the client committee approaches a decision to purchase a solution, the difficulty of the post-sale implementation begins to rise as an issue.
• As the buyers approach the decision-making phase, issues can begin to shift off product features or solution fit onto implementation risk issues such as service, financial stability, responsiveness, references, and terms and conditions on the contract, such as penalty clauses, guarantees, warranties, delivery dates, and liquidated damages.
• Unless you are in a purchasing department, most business people are not measured on purchase price variance.
• Never go to purchasing or legal alone- bring your sponsor(s)
• One of the strategic things top management looks for by having these evaluations is involvement and buy-in from the project team.
• What worked early in the sale may not work late in the sale and vice-versa.
• Opportunities don’t coast across the finish line; they have to be pushed.
• Prepare for counterattacks at the end because nothing is more dangerous than a wounded competitor
• When trust is established, price sensitivity goes down.

CHAPTER 15 Ten Individual-Level Strategies

• Nothing will drive a strategy to win better than a clear understanding of the decision-making process at the stakeholder level, person-by-person on the project team.
• By analyzing each stakeholder using four of the keys, pain, preference, power, and part (in the process), we can arrive at the individual-level strategy
• If the answer to the question, “If they voted today, who would win?” is “Not me,” then it’s time for plan B.

CHAPTER 16 Selling at “C-Level “— Calling on Chief Executives and Political Navigation

• You have to find a reason in the contact’s interests to take you to their boss.
• Why would someone take you to their boss?
  • Recognition and glory.
  • Secure resources.
  • Mitigate risk.
  • Project scope (lateral). When projects become interdepartmental or international, managers usually need to be brought in to coordinate with other business units.
  • Project scope (strategic). When issues go beyond operational and begin to affect organizational politics or strategy, project teams realize the need for management involvement.
  • My boss, your boss. Equivalent rank meetings
  • Bargain for access. Trade for access while the client has something they need from you.
  • You asked. Perhaps the only reason someone hasn’t taken you to the boss is because you’ve never asked!
• In order to make things happen in the complex sale, we have to get out of our comfort zone and into the power zone.
• The best way to get access to an executive is through another executive or a trusted colleague.
• The gateway (as well as the barrier) to repeat business and reference business is performance on the last sale.
• Executives’ issues often include:
  • Strategic. Competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, mergers and acquisitions, stockholders, boards of directors, growth, government regulation, litigation, market share, company image
  • Political. Stockholders, boards of directors, promotion, recognition, elections, unions, succession planning, taxpayers, stakeholders, environment, trade barriers, risk
  • Financial. Return on investment, cash flow, stock price, budgets, survival, economy, earnings per share, productivity, exchange rates, significant cost savings, third-party payments
  • Cultural. Competitiveness, deregulation, innovation, quality, risk-taking, teamwork, communication, cooperation, vision, consensus
• Connecting your capabilities or features to the higher-level benefits will give you greater power in the sale.
• Consultative research is still important — but it has to be done before you get to the executive.
• Executives don’t have time to tell you about their company; they want you to tell them something they don’t know about their own company — with an outside expert’s opinion.
• Help Executives Prepare for the Future with Ideas and Innovations
• Motivating pain doesn’t come from the rational side of the business problem; it comes if there is political recognition for success or embarrassment for inaction.
• You not only need to show how you can do something better than the client can do for themselves, you must show why you are better than anyone else.
• The challenge of an executive sales call is that you must create a reason to return or you will be on the outside again.

Section 4 Winning Before the Battle — Account Management

CHAPTER 17 From Opportunity Management to Account Management

• One of the biggest challenges faced by sales management as market share grows is the transition to the next level of strategy from competitive selling to repetitive selling — from opportunity management to account management.
• Account management should drive opportunity management by influencing preferences, requirements, processes, players, and issues before an evaluation breaks out.
• Initiate sponsorship from one satisfied executive to another.