Whale Hunting With Global Accounts: Four Critical Sales Strategies to Win Global Customers by Barbara Weaver Smith
INTRODUCTION
- Knowledge: Global account salespeople need a massive store of knowledge about their target company and its market, as well as about its industry and business challenges.
- Structure: The way you structure your sales operation must arise from a deep understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences
- Process
- Vision: Vision is a detailed picture of how certain business circumstances will be much improved at some future time.
PART I KNOWLEDGE: LOOK DEEPER
CHAPTER 1 YOU DON’T KNOW ENOUGH
- The corporate persona for a global customer should include:
- The Corporate Strategy: What are the executives and board trying to accomplish in the next one year, three years, five years?
- Industry and Competitors.
- It’s hard to move up or even to move out from the people with whom you first talk.
- Make it unacceptable for your team to call on any company or company subsidiary without having a complete picture of who they are!
- The more strategic your service, the more complex a sale is likely to be.
- Discover how they make purchasing decisions for your services or products. Does each subsidiary purchase for itself, or each branch, or is there a centrally managed system? Do they manage their own procurement or do they outsource?
- Studying the research is definitely a sales rep’s job, but gathering and organizing is a sales support, or marketing, or sales enablement function.
CHAPTER 2 BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE
- You will need to be offering up ideas to your global customers, bringing your ideas of what’s on the horizon, what’s new and what’s possible, to help them make the best decisions.
- Executives at global companies expect your salespeople to have a deep understanding of their business, their markets, their industry and their challenges.
- Product-centric sales methods absolutely will not work in the global account environment. Only customer-centered activities will help you to be successful.
- Now, the customer is saying, “No, I actually want an outcome. I don’t want to talk about the individual items to get me to that outcome. I want to talk about the outcome.”
CHAPTER 3 COACH FOR KNOWLEDGE
- Front-line managers are the critical element in terms of reinforcing the key concepts from training and enablement sessions.
- Your employees need to believe that when they bring in lots of big new business, leadership will use some of the new resources to add capacity, not just expect everyone to take on more work.
- By moving people around, whether for two-year assignments or two-week visits, you will meet two sets of needs:
- Your customers’ need for attention
- Your team’s need for global perspectives and experiences
PART II STRUCTURE: GET ORGANIZED
CHAPTER 4 A GLOBAL ECOSYSTEM
- The inside sales model becomes problematic when you want to sell enterprise deals, which almost always require a considerable live, onsite presence in order to close them and then, of course, to deliver.
- There is a natural movement from regional structures to industry verticals because the global customers expect sellers to possess a great deal of industry knowledge.
- If you embed people, it’s hard for that customer to make a change down the road.
- Sales and delivery have to grow up in tandem when your company begins to expand its business to a new country.
CHAPTER 5 PLACE YOUR PEOPLE
- As you are growing it’s important not to let the idea take hold that the people who sell big accounts are much more important than those who sell smaller accounts or those who become account managers.
- Many big companies today have their large account sales organization strictly divided into hunters and farmers.
- in a global account, selling new business is much more like opening doors into a brand-new account than simply taking repeat orders from an existing customer. You need a focused leader architecting relationships and bringing your entire arsenal of offerings to the client.
- The differentiation of sales roles makes less sense in an Asia / Pacific region or in some parts of Europe. They are significantly high relationship-centric cultures, and it takes a long time to build a trusted relationship
- Global Service Director: Helps with project resourcing, escalations, governance processes, and other service-related functions as well as carrying a services revenue objective.
- Today’s buyers want to meet your subject matter experts (SMEs) — your technology team, customer service team, product team, engineers, R&D specialists, the people who design and install your products and services as well as the people who keep them going and working properly.
- We see the project manager as the one who makes the alignment between sales and technical. The project manager follows the project.
CHAPTER 6 INTEGRATE MARKETING
- Sales needs marketing to contribute throughout the sales process, not just in lead generation.
PART III PROCESS: BEYOND STEPS
CHAPTER 7 THE SELLERS’ PROCESS
- How do you explain in a process map or a CRM that at this step “you may need to talk with twenty people, representing seven departments, and you will need to use your sales support specialists to come along with you and meet their counterparts, Oh, and this is how you should prepare them to be part of your sales process?”
- The basic first step of your sales process needs to be the Go/No-Go decision — a set of questions to enable leadership to decide if this deal is worth pursuing
- You need a good [quality control] review process before a proposal is submitted to the client.
- Whale Hunters need to move from sales process to account planning.
CHAPTER 8 THE BUYERS ’ PROCESS
- You want to go in at the highest level possible.
- If you make a good impression on an executive, he or she may refer you to the right people, and you will have no trouble getting a meeting with them.
- When you succeed in getting a meeting with a well-placed executive, consider taking an executive higher than you to the first meeting.
- A stupid question would be one to which you should already know the answer, through your appropriate research about the company and its business.
- Rule number one, which is “On that first sales call, you’re not allowed to talk about your product or service.” — MATT HEINZ
- Buyers typically don’t know how best to organize themselves to make a buying decision.
- Big companies don’t like being rushed. You can’t push a big account. Engage them and keep them moving toward their vision of the future.
CHAPTER 9 BEING INSIDE
- Customers have high self-esteem, genuine buying power, and a good idea of what they want long before they talk to you. They may not be correct in what they want, but they will not be easily persuaded.
- As you work with a company you will learn a great deal about its strategy, culture, talent and technology. Put yourself in the habit of thinking about the interaction of these facets of their business,
- Putting out fires takes precious selling time as well as product engineering and project management and customer service and account leadership time.
- How do people tell you are high quality? Well, all the touch points.
- You must deliver what you sell. Therefore, you must sell what your team can deliver.
PART IV VISION: LEAD THE WAY
CHAPTER 10 TEAM VISION
- It’s the sales leader’s responsibility to make the time to prep with their team and to review [afterward].
CHAPTER 11 THE BUYERS ’ VISION
- Clients don’t want 62 options — they just want the plan.
CHAPTER 12 LOOK AROUND
(no highlights for this chapter)
CONCLUSION
- This book turned out to be primarily about differentiating your company from your competitors through the superior industry knowledge, market knowledge, business knowledge and individual customer knowledge of your salespeople, revealed in their specific interactions with members of the buyers’ team.