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B2B Sales Best Practices

Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play (Book Summary)

Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig

Foreword by STEPHEN R. COVEY

  • The role of salespeople is to passionately focus on clients to help them succeed.
  • Salespeople have to follow the principle of seeking first to understand, then to be understood.
  • Those who can truly understand clients and their business issues, and deliver tangible benefits, are the ones who win more business — better and faster.

INTRODUCTION

  • Getting “real”: This is a subjective term, used in this book to mean being authentic, being truthful, saying what we mean, being congruent with what we value. Getting real involves challenging lazy thinking and penetrating façades, games, defenses, fears, and illusions. We open belief systems to examination. We get to the heart of the matter.
  • When buyers do not trust sellers, they hide and protect vital information and restrict personal contact.

CHAPTER ONE KEY BELIEFS

  • Trust = Intent + Expertise.
  • The more important it is to meet your numbers, the more important it is to stop concentrating on your numbers and start concentrating on the clients’ numbers.
  • How you sell is a free sample of how you solve.
  • When you start talking about a solution before understanding what it is supposed to solve, you decrease client confidence, lessen your credibility, and significantly reduce your ability to produce an exact solution.
  • One of the hardest behaviors to overcome is the tendency to immediately go for the first solution.
  • A brief overview of the ORDER methodology
    • Opportunity: Should they do it? You can develop a mutual understanding of an opportunity by examining the following:
      • Issues: What problems or results is the client trying to address? In what priority?
      • Evidence: How do we define the problem? How do we measure success?
      • Impact: What are the financial and intangible costs and benefits?
      • Context: Who or what else is affected by the issues and the solution?
      • Constraints: What has stopped (or might stop) the organization from resolving these issues?
    • Resources: Can they do it?
      • Time
      • People
      • Money
    • Decisions: How will the decision be made, and by whom?
  • Exact Solution / Enable Decisions: Will they do it with us?
    • Results: Will they do more with us?
  • We qualify by talking about Opportunity, Resources, Decisions, and testing possible elements of an Exact Solution.

CHAPTER TWO QUALIFYING: OVERVIEW

  • Identify what has stopped the client from fixing the problem itself
  • Gain access to key stakeholders and identify the criteria those people would use to make the decision.
  • The rule with yellow lights is: If you see it, hear it, or feel it, find a way to say it — tactfully.
  • Yellow lights are doubts, stalls, concerns, fears, objections, or tough questions. They can be raised by either the client or you.
  • Here is a three-part response that works well:
    • “I have a concern.”
    • State the concern, the confusion, or the potential problem.
    • Ask what they think should happen next.
  • Feed back key words and phrases that the client uses repeatedly
  • Explore the significance of those words more deeply.
  • Repeat the client’s metaphors and analogies
  • Emulate the client’s speed of talking, intonation, inflection, or emphasis
  • Hear “what is not being said, the “meaning between the words.”

CHAPTER THREE QUALIFYING OPPORTUNITIES

  • STRUCTURE THE CONVERSATION
    • Move off the solution
    • Get out all of the issues
    • Prioritize the issues
    • Gather evidence and impact
    • Explore content and constraints
  • THE FIVE GOLDEN QUESTIONS
    • 1. How do you measure it?
    • 2. What is it now?
    • 3. What would you like it to be?
    • 4. What is the value of the difference?
    • 5. What is the value over time?
  • “If you cannot quantify, at least strongly qualify. One way to qualify is to use a scale of one to ten. We put a numeric qualifier on a feeling or belief.
    • 8-10:  the issue is important and motivating.
    • 7: Enough to keep us talking and not enough to make it a “no brainer.”
    • 1 to 6: It is a yellow light.
  • The lack of a good business case can result in either no funds being allocated or an insufficient amount of funds being allocated to address the issue.
  • Bad constraints are factors that have prevented success in the past and, if not changed, will prevent it again in the future. Our question is “What is different this time? “If nothing is different, it is likely nothing will be different. Sellers must not fail to address the following:
    • Clients have not been able to get this adequately budgeted.
    • They cannot get buy-in from the executive committee.
    • The XYZ group has a vested interest in killing it.
    • Politics always get in the way.
    • It has been too complicated.
    • They have had higher priorities.
  • When trying to elicit clients’ criteria for making a decision, we can structure a conversation around two topics:
    • 1. Their criteria for the ideal implementation.
    • 2. Their criteria for the ideal solution provider.

CHAPTER FOUR QUALIFYING RESOURCES

  • Three critical resources to examine are: time, people, and money.
  • Time:
    • “What is the date by which you hope to have these results in place?”
    • “When were you hoping to get started?”
  • People: A potential concern is that the client may not give us access to the key people we need to be successful.
  • Money:
    • In Resources, we are talking only about value justification. We are not going to give clients our fees or price, and we are not asking them for the specific dollars they have in a budget.  In the Exact Solution step, when we actually present our proposal and give them a price, price negotiation may come into play.
    • “How do you typically fund projects like this?”
    • Whenever the client comes up with a number that is smaller than our number, it is helpful to ask, “And how did you come up with that number?”

CHAPTER FIVE QUALIFYING DECISIONS

  • articulating and influencing the decision process; gaining access to key stakeholders; and understanding decision criteria.
  • ARTICULATING AND INFLUENCING THE DECISION PROCESS
    • Who is going to make the decision?
    • Who is going to influence the decision?
    • Who can veto the decision?
    • Who signs the check?
    • Who approves the decision?
    • What are the criteria for a “yes “decision?
    • What is the process?
    • How will the decision be made?
    • What information do you need?
    • When are you going to make the decision?
    • Who is the competition?
    • How do I stack up against the competition?
    • What do I have to do to win?
    • Are you sure you’ll go with someone?
  • First, find out the steps involved in making the decision. Next, find out what decision gets made in each step. (Sometimes these two are the same, and sometimes they are different.) Find out when they will decide. Find out who is involved in each step. Finally, find out how each person will decide. To find out how each person will decide, talk with them personally. One of the key outcomes in this process is to find out the “how” directly from the “who.” When we talk to the “who,” we will explore the Opportunity from their perspective — as well as their criteria for making the decision. Those criteria will include how they will decide between alternative solutions (the competition).
  • If we have thought through an “ideal” set of steps, we can often suggest what we see as improvements.
  • Some typical roles would be:
    • Initiator: Opens the transaction.
    • Gatekeeper: Controls information flow and access.
    • Champion: Willing to support our cause and aid access to decision makers.
    • Influencer: Nonbuyer who affects the purchase — from inside or outside the organization.
    • User: Affected directly by the purchase.
    • Decision maker: Makes the decision to buy.
    • Ratifier: Approves the decision to buy.
  • In complex opportunities, it is almost always helpful to have an organizational chart — either a formal one or an ad hoc one — created with the client.
  • Do not confuse organizational authority with buying authority.
  • As you talk with the various stakeholders, keep asking who they feel you should be talking to.
  • If the client will not let us talk to the key stakeholders, refuses any equivalence of actions, or wants us to spend a lot of time and money merely guessing — that is a strong yellow light.
  • You may find someone other than you from your company who can gain access to the client stakeholder.
  • We want to accomplish the following when meeting 1:1 with each stakeholder:
    • 1. Understand the Opportunity from each person’s perspective. What are the key issues, evidence, impact, context, and constraints?
    • 2. Understand stakeholders’ criteria for deciding between alternatives.
    • 3. Understand what they would like to see, hear, and experience in our presentation that would allow them to make a good decision.
    • 4. Test out yellow lights.
    • 5. Gain permission for another call, should it be helpful.
  • The smaller the number of competitors, the more likely the client has done due diligence and is ready to select; greater numbers suggest that a client is still in the information-gathering process.
  • Even more important than knowing the names of our competitors, is understanding the clients’ criteria for deciding among them.
  • If the client has been working with an incumbent, what is the motivation to change? Is this just a market check or price check, or is this a real opportunity? Usually, there is a transition cost associated with change. You can’t be equal to the incumbent; you have to be demonstrably better.
  • If we can understand how individuals stand to win or lose, we have a chance to align what’s in their best interest with what’s in the organization’s best interest.

CHAPTER SIX WINNING: THE ART OF ENABLING DECISIONS

  • Only present to people whose criteria for judging you are known to you.
  • Present in person, to the right people, for the right amount of time.
  • Proposals don’t sell, people do.
  • When the client asks, “When can you send me a proposal?” we can say, “Well, we are the proposal. When would you like to meet with us?”
  • You benefit everyone when you make a compelling case for presenting solutions only with sufficient time to arrive at good decisions.
  • Meeting Plan
    • End in Mind: What do we want the client to say, do, or decide at the end of our interaction? The End in Mind should seem logical for where you are in the buying process. In initiating opportunities, the End in Mind is often, “Should we be talking?” In qualifying, it is often, “Should we keep talking?” In enabling decisions, it often takes the form “Should you do this with us?”
    • Key Beliefs: What will the client need to believe either intellectually or emotionally to comfortably choose us?
    • Proof/Action: What proof or proposed action will we provide to address the key belief?
    • Questions: What would we most like to know from the client? What are they most likely to ask us?
    • Yellow Lights: What reasons might the client have for not deciding in our favor (stalls; doubts; concerns; objections)
    • Next Steps: What next steps, if any, should we be prepared to offer?
    • Agenda: Gain agreement on the meeting agenda with the client before the meeting.
  • Only give clients what they need in order to decide on the End in Mind. Nothing extra.
  • There are two types of questions to plan for:
    • questions we want answered by the client
    • questions the client will likely have for us
  • The goal is to win the business only when there is a good fit between what the client needs and what we do well.
  • Clients tend to be convinced more easily, and with more conviction, if we resolve a yellow light using their criteria rather than our own.
  • A helpful phrase to elicit clients’ criteria for yellow light resolution is: “What would have to happen…?” We do not say, “What would I have to do…?”
  • With criteria you cannot meet:
    • 1. Change the relative importance of the criterion.
    • 2. Show that no one can meet the criterion.
    • 3. Change how the person thinks about the criterion.
  • On pricing & negotiation:
    • The final price we select should not be a shock or surprise to the client.
    • We want to choose a price that is aggressive, yet realistic
    • Right or wrong, there are some people who will never pay the quoted price.
    • CONCEDE SLOWLY, CONCEDE IN SMALL AMOUNTS
  • If the decision we enable is not the final decision, we should confirm the remaining steps in the decision grid. We and the client should stay mutually aware of how we are jointly moving forward.
  • If we don’t treat current clients like prospective clients, they will become former clients.

CHAPTER SEVEN INITIATING NEW OPPORTUNITIES

  • NO COLD CALLS! Get a referral to the person you want to see.
  • When we do fewer calls, and do them better, we make more sales and enjoy our profession a lot more.
  • The authors recommend that you choose your top five prospects and invest 95 percent of your prospecting energy in those opportunities. When you take one prospect off the focused priority list, put a new one on; periodically review the list.
  • There are three parts to the business case hypothesis:
    • the client’s situation
    • our solution
    • the reasons adopting that solution might make sense.
  • Initial client calls are more successful when the client does most of the talking.
  • It can benefit us greatly if we practice the art of redirection — answering a question with a question.
  • At the initial stage of the sales cycle, all we are asking is should we be talking?
  • Objection: “I am not interested. “Response: “Thanks for being direct. Before we go, just out of curiosity, are you not interested because you are not experiencing these issues? Am I calling at a bad time? Or is it because you have these issues covered?”

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