What is the difference between “sales” and “marketing”? Why do incumbents have an advantage in deals? Are new technologies, particularly revolutionary ones, sold differently than established ones? Should they be? All of these questions relate back to something even more basic, which is “how does something actually get sold?”
That seems a pretty basic question to me, given that virtually every company relies on selling things to sustain their very existence. The problem is that while it may be a basic question, there’s a fairly astonishing number of companies that don’t seem to answer it, or even try to. Today, a lot of what we hope for from networking and IT depend on sales success, and we’re falling short in more cases every day.
Decades ago, I started to augment surveys of companies with modeling, and in order to model how a market was going to work, you need to understand those basic workings. Fortunately my survey base was happy to cooperate in creating what I called a “decision model”, a model that considered the factors that made up the progress from “suspect” to “customer”. I’ve updated it over time as buyer behavior changed, but many of the lessons of that early period are still valid today.
Most selling in tech tends to happen through formal bidding, and most products and services are introduced into a tech framework for which there exists an incumbent vendor who has a degree of account control. In some cases, the account is big enough to justify an on-site sales team. In those cases, traditional sales-centric processes are generally successful in moving goods and services.
Companies that have real account control, and particularly those with on-site sales resources, are usually able to promote technology advances more easily because they interact regularly with management in both IT and operating organizations. They don’t always use this capability, though, because of the risk that new technology will overhang current sales and introduce new competitors in a game the incumbent is already winning.
The problem arises when one or more of those conditions aren’t true, which is often the case for new technologies or radical approaches, and is also true if a non-incumbent wants to break into an account. In all these cases, it’s critical to be able to transition companies efficiently from being suspects to being customers. And it’s not easy.
A company is a “suspect” when they are sensitive to the possibility of a purchase. In this stage of their evolution, they aren’t committed to anything, only perhaps interested. Their attitudes, value propositions, opinions, and sensitivities are all over the place; think Brownian Movement. In this state, with all this variability, it is almost always fruitless to apply sales resources to the company because there’s no way of knowing how to make an effective approach, and because too much “education” would be required to prep for an actual order.
The sales process, I’ve found, can be compared to a funnel. At the wide end, you want it to intersect all those “suspects”, but you want the process to gradually order the chaos so that, at the narrow end, companies emerge in a state where sales resources can be applied to them effectively. You’re controlling their “trajectory”, and so I’ve called this “trajectory management.” A company would progress through the funnel, changing from “suspect” to “prospect” to “customer” with the application of specific pressures, and it’s creating and managing those pressures that form the basis for an effective marketing/sales program.
In today’s world, the first of these pressures is editorial mentions. A suspect sees a news or opinion piece that mentions a source of goods or services, and because they’re “interested” in the topic, probably only because the headline catches their attention, they read the piece. If we were talking about consumer products, we might see this as the decisive step, followed by visiting an online storefront and making a purchase, but obviously business tech isn’t an impulse buy. So what do we expect to happen? That’s a question rarely asked.
Realistically, in my research into buyer progression, what happens is a website visit. I saw a nice article mentioning Company A’s product/service. I was intrigued, so I visited their website. This establishes the first of what we could call the Trajectory Management Truths, which is editorial mentions sell website visits. It’s perhaps the most critical truth in all of marketing/sales, and the one that vendors mess up most often.
I get pitches for stories all the time, even though I say on my website that I won’t take any suggestions. Vendors and service providers want me to talk about them and send me what they believe is the compelling reason, and way over 90% of the time, it’s garbage. What they’ve done is violate the second Trajectory Management Truth, which is you cannot take a sales message into a marketing channel. Marketing is about mass distribution of information to prepare a company for a deal, not the process of taking an order, yet most of these pitches are sales messages. No outlet is going to accept a piece long enough to carry a convincing sales message, and nobody would read it if they did. The pitches needed to focus on getting an editorial mention first, meaning getting somebody to write and run something, then they need to leverage that mention into a website visit.
So, OK, let’s assume that your editorial mention has actually gotten the suspect to your website. What now? Look at the websites of any of the big vendors or service providers today, and you’ll find that there is no correlation between the structure of the website in general, or the homepage in particular, that links to the editorial bias the company is presenting. If you seeded a story about AI, for example, what do you think a reader of that story is looking for on your website? AI, obviously, and my research says that if they can’t quickly navigate to that topic and find something interesting (three or four steps, maximum), they’ll abandon their effort.
Any PR campaign needs to be anchored on the homepage. You pick up the theme of the PR and editorial slant and you run with it. If you do that, then editorial mentions, which sell website visits, can carry you to the next step in the process. Which is…?
Which is that website visits sell preliminary engagement for collateral. So let’s say the suspect followed the AI editorial mention to your website, and found the necessary links to the information they now want. What information is that? Not product specifications, not at this point. It’s marketing collateral, things like white papers or videos. This is another step that vendor websites and programs typically mess up, by providing too much undigested information at this critical point. You do not want a prospective buyer to make a purchase decision without ever having sales contact, so don’t give them the information that encourages them to do that.
What do you expect, if not a sale, at this point? The primary thing you want is for the suspect to identify themselves and indicate that they are considering and not just interested. This is where all that Brownian Movement starts to enter the narrower part of our funnel. If you construct your website so that the choices your suspect makes while navigating it lead them on the path they belong on for deal-making, they will consume information that tags them as a prospect and identifies the value propositions they’re most sensitive to. That enables optimum targeting of your next step, which is based on the principle that engagement collateral sells sales calls. The path out of the collateral step is the realization by the prospect that they want to talk to you. Real sales processes can now start.
Based on what? According to my research, successful sales strategies are based on issue ownership. A potential buyer is sensitive to three classes of issues, enablers, differentiators, and objections.
Virtually all enterprise purchases of technology have to meet a business case, and the issues that can make a business case are the enablers. If you do not own the enablers, you have left the most critical aspect of the deal on the table. Your only hope is that your competition doesn’t do any better, because a source that can demonstrate they can help the buyer make the business case can move forward. Enablers are so important that you don’t want to leave them for the last phase of the trajectory; they should be considered as early as possible in the trajectory, even at the level of editorial mention.
Differentiators are the issues that set you apart from other sources of products or services. Unlike enablers, which you have to jump out and seize, you have to take care with differentiators because introducing them invites having your prospect want to know who you’re counterpunching against. They won’t make a business case, so they won’t move the prospect along, so introduce them when it’s inevitable that the prospect has reached the stage where they’re certain to be looking at other sources.
I recently audited a test of a pitch from a vendor who was promoting “sustainability”. My question was “Do you believe that a company will buy your product simply because it’s sustainable?” They admitted they would not. Then I asked “Do you think they’d buy your sustainable product in preference to one that could deliver a higher ROI?” They took a bit more time, but eventually said that wouldn’t happen unless the ROI difference was minimal. They just proved that sustainability is a differentiator, not an enabler.
The most troublesome of the issue types is the objection. Obviously, the term means an objection raised by a prospect to some visible or alleged element of your value proposition. There are two questions that have to be asked before a response can be devised. The first is whether the objection is a signal of a missing enabler or differentiator; have you failed to raise a point when it was important. The second question is where the objection really originated. It’s one thing if the prospect actually raised it, another if it was raised by a competitor, and yet a third if it originated in editorial commentary.
You can’t afford to lose enablers, and if there’s a valid differentiator a competitor raised, you probably want to have an effective response disseminated to the sales organization. There’s a body of reasoning that suggests you should respond to competitive differentiators raised as objections by including them in material delivered to the prospect early in their trajectory, but my data doesn’t show that’s a good idea.
A final point, at the final point in the process, which is the actual sales dialog. Collateral sells sales calls, sales calls sell the product or the service. Most tech sales organizations work effectively if the early stages of the trajectory are handled, but there is one key point that’s easy to miss. Sales is a process of confidence transfer. The prospect, if they’re confident in the salesperson, will transfer that confidence to the representations and to the product. If they are not, then nothing much can be said or done to facilitate a close. This is important because it may be that the greatest value of trajectory management is that it increases sales confidence. Not only does that happen because sales efforts are more successful, there’s less time wasted on bad prospects, buyer education, and so forth. Shortcomings early in the trajectory fall to the sales force to correct, and that is never easy, never fun.