"Provocation-based selling"

"Provocation-based selling goes beyond the conventional consultative or solution-selling approach, whereby the vendor’s sales team seeks out current concerns in a question-and-answer dialogue with customer managers. 

...

This was provocation-based selling at its finest: The vendor identified a process that was critical for customers in the current business environment, developed a compelling point of view on how it was broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor was offering. How does that differ from the way you sell today?

...

provocation-based selling is most effective when the customer’s problem is unacknowledged or poorly understood, the budget doesn’t exist, and the customer’s main question is “How can we change our approach to this problem, because we haven’t yet managed to deal with it effectively?”

In a severe downturn, provocation-based selling may be the only way to move past the “buy nothing” mantra emanating from customer organizations."

Trechos retirados de "In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers"

Mudar de modelo de negócio

Num projecto em curso com uma empresa de informática tem-se repetido que o modelo de negócio está a mudar, da venda de software para a venda de assistência.

Recentemente usei com eles um esquema de Bob Moesta:

Quis alertar para as alterações de contexto em curso, e como elas podem despertar novos desafios para os seus clientes actuais ou potenciais. Quis que abrissem a mente para as oportunidades a construir.

Entretanto, leio na Harvard Business Review de Março de 2021 este artigo "How to Shift from Selling Products to Selling Services":

"In my classes, I teach that most sales strategy and management decisions revolve around three issues: how to sell what to whom. The shift from selling products to selling services requires leaders to rethink not just the what (services instead of products) but also the who (the types of customers the sales force pursues) and the how (the way salespeople engage with customers before and after the sale, the new skills necessary for the job, and how they are trained and compensated). That’s a tall order, and many tech firms have seen waves of sales force reorgs and downsizings as they struggle to fill it.

...

Although tech companies are the most prominent examples, the guidance applies to any organization making this leap. Daimler Trucks, for instance, is shifting from leasing vehicles to large companies, such as UPS, for set periods of time to charging them for miles driven. The prescriptions—which involve resegmenting the customer base, rethinking the sales organization’s structure, and changing the way salespeople interact with customers and targets on a day-to-day basis—enable companies to transform their sales forces to most effectively support the new strategy.

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To effectively shift to selling a service, salespeople and their managers must rethink the metrics that identify a potential enterprise client. This is more difficult than it may seem. 

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Rethinking customer segmentation focuses on the question: Who are the company’s target customers? Once they are identified, the sales organization must focus on how to sell to them. The traditional sales process typically involves generating leads, qualifying prospects, demonstrating products, and closing sales. Many salespeople have spent decades learning and implementing that routine. A consumption-based model requires a different process. “Closing the deal” becomes an interim step because the contract will generate substantial revenue only if the client subsequently uses the service at high volume. The industry’s euphemistic term for this is “customer success,” and it has begun to dominate the way companies think about selling. As Microsoft’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, puts it, “Ultimately, in a consumption-based business, customer success is all that matters, because it builds on itself over time.”

Although salespeople still must be skilled at building relationships, the new approach requires them to have far more technical expertise.

To drive that success (that is, to increase customer usage), salespeople must stay engaged after the contract is signed. They become quasi consultants to their clients, helping them grow adept at using (and finding new ways to use) the metered technology. Although salespeople still must be skilled at building relationships, the new approach requires them to have far more technical expertise. Many companies, including Microsoft, have supplemented their sales teams’ technical prowess by creating “customer success teams” and “technical sales teams” to drive consultative work after a customer signs a contract. Companies have always provided after-sales service as a cost of doing business; these new functions illustrate how this unglamorous task has become a vital part of generating revenue.

The benefits of having highly skilled cloud engineers as part of the sales organization go beyond increasing revenue, however. One result of the shift from selling products to selling services is that the relationship with customers becomes both closer and more continuous. That gives sales teams deeper, ongoing insights into customers’ pain points, product features that might add value, and new ways to use products. This is valuable feedback that companies can use to spark innovation—a source of information that was rarely tapped in the old “see you in three years” model.

...

In developing a new offering, a company needs to first identify the potential customers’ pain point. Only then can it determine whether the customers’ pain is sufficient to make the company’s value proposition viable. These calculations are important, but they are not enough to create sustainable profit: The firm must also find the right sales strategy to effectively pair with the innovation to engage customers.

Para reflexão

"Talking too much early in the greeting. No trust; no relationship
Talking too much in the discovery. Can’t learn the true pain
Talking too much in the demo. Feature dumping.
Talking too much in the $ discussion. Unresolved issues
Talking too much on an objection. Don’t learn the real issue
Talking too much in the closing. Tough to make a decision
It might be time for a bit of self-analysis on your part."

Trecho retirado de "Want Better Results? Align Your Sales Strategy With The Communication Curve"

Resultados são consequência de...

Resultados são consequência de exigência e planeamento.
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Atenção a este vídeo "What Sets Top Sales Teams Apart".
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Equipas de vendas de topo têm objectivos exigentes e planeamento:

"Structure - Expectations are followed up on and processes are put in place
11. High-performing sales organizations hold their team members to a higher level of accountability.
12. High-performing sales organizations are quicker to terminate underperforming salespeople.
13. Sales managers at high-performing sales organizations reported a higher percentage of their salespeople achieved their annual quotas.
14. High-performing sales organizations employ a morestructured sales process.
15. High-performing sales organizations more closely monitor their lead follow-up process."

Trecho retirado de "Sales Organization Performance Gap Research Report"

Items or insights?

"To the surprise of many, these firms are showing that commissions can sometimes do more harm than good—and that getting rid of them can open a path to higher profits.
...
contingent rewards—I call them “if then” rewards, as in “If you do this, then you get that”—work well with routine tasks social scientists dub “algorithmic.” Think stuffing envelopes quickly or turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line. The promise of a reward, especially cash, excites our attention, and we focus narrowly on getting the job done.
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However, those same if-then rewards turn out to be far less effective for complex, creative, conceptual endeavors—what psychologists call “heuristic” work.
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That leads us back to sales. In the middle of the last century, selling was fairly simple. Memorize your script, open your sample case a certain way, fire back standard responses to predictable objections—and do it over and over again until the law of averages works in your favor.
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Today, though, the transactional aspects of sales are disappearing. When routine functions can be automated, and when customers and prospects often have as much data as the saleswoman herself, the skills that matter most are heuristic: Curating and interpreting information instead of merely dispensing it. Identifying new problems along with solving established ones. Selling insights rather than items.
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Should every company forswear sales commissions? No. But simply challenging this orthodoxy helps us recognize that selling today is sophisticated, complex work—and that the people doing it therefore require incentives beyond a dangled carrot."

E recordo a diferença entre vendedores e consultores de compra.
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Trechos retirados de "A Radical Prescription for Sales" de Daniel H. Pink

Most people resist selling but enjoy buying

Ontem voltei ao tema da diferença entre Vendedor vs consultor de compra.
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Entretanto, ao final do dia numa releitura do "Crossing the Chasm" de Geoffrey Moore encontro a seguinte passagem:
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"Companies focus on making products easier to sell because that is what they are worried about – selling. They load their marketing communications with every possible selling argument, following the age-old axiom that if you throw a lot of mud at a wall, some of it is bound to stick.
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Prospective customers shrink from this barrage, which in turn causes the salespeople to chase after them that much harder. Even though the words appear to address the customers’ values and needs, the communication is really focused on the seller’s attempt to manipulate them, a fact that is transparently obvious to the potential customer. It’s a complete turn-off – all because the company was trying to make its product easy to sell instead of easy to buy.
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Think about it. Most people resist selling but enjoy buying. By focusing on making a product easy to buy, you are focusing on what the customers really want. In turn, they will sense this and reward you with their purchases. Thus, easy to buy becomes easy to sell. The goal of positioning, therefore, is to create a space inside the target customer’s head called “best buy for this type of situation” and to attain sole, undisputed occupancy of that space. Only then, when the green light is on, and there is no remaining competing alternative, is a product easy to buy.”
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É uma mina por desenvolver esta mudança de perspectiva, ajudar a comprar em vez de despejar a tentativa de venda pela garganta abaixo... lembro-me da podologia.

Vendedor vs consultor de compra

Há dias combinei um ponto de encontro à saida do metro junto ao Estádio do Dragão na cidade do Porto.
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Enquanto aguardava descobri que existe por ali uma loja da cadeia Rádio Popular. Entrei e dei uma vista de olhos pelo espaço.
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A certa altura paro e fico a apreciar como é que uma vendedora apresentava as máquinas de lavar roupa a um casal já com cinquenta e muitos anos.
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A vendedora recitava dados técnicos das máquinas ... dei comigo a pensar "Está a falar grego! Eles, o casal, e eu, não quero saber dos dados técnicos. Eu quero é saber se a máquina me vai ajudar na minha vida. E entre tantas máquinas ... qual a que melhor se ajusta à minha vida, à minha rotina. O que será uma boa compra? E se eu fizer uma má compra? A última vez que comprei uma máquina de lavar roupa foi há mais de 20 anos ... é um investimento e peras, tenho de fazer uma boa escolha. Eu quero fazer uma boa escolha, uma que se ajuste à minha vida, não quero comprar a melhor máquina do mundo, não quero saber de especificaçoes técnicas ...
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Por que é quem vende, as lojas, não preparam, não formam os seus vendedores, para ajudarem a comprar, em vez de venderem?
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Por que não constroem o perfil de 3, 4 ou 5 compradores-tipo e identificam as máquinas que melhor se ajustam a cada um desses perfis?
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Por que não se centram nos compradores e na sua vida em vez de se concentrarem nas máquinas?

Planos de Relacionamento, em vez de Planos de Vendas

Depois deste postal sobre consultores de compras, em vez de vendedores, foi com um sorriso que hoje encontrei este postal recente de David Maister "Fat Smoker Principles: Build Relationship Plans Not Sales Plans", onde se pode ler:

"A relationship plan is what it says it is: a set of activitites designed to build and deepen an asset - the relationship. The theory is that, where there is a strong asset - a strong relationship bond - there WILL BE a (greater) stream of revenues in the future. But to get there, you must focus on activities which are not designed to generate sales, but to earn and deserve the relationship.
A relationship plan, to be effective, is all, about figuring out what you could do FOR this client (unpaid) to invest in the relationship, in order to predispose the client to use you more frequently (and for more interesting things) in the future."

Ajudar a comprar, em vez de vender

Porque é que os vendedores de "hardware" tentam vender produtos?

Por que é que uma loja como o "El Corte Inglés" despeja 20 a 30 modelos de portáteis em exposição?

Quantas pessoas precisam de um portátil para as suas actividades profissionais ou de lazer? Muitas!
Dessas muitas, quantas pessoas conseguem distinguir as vantagens e desvantagens de optar pelo processador AMD Turion 64x2 a 1,6 Ghz, em detrimento de um Centrino Core2 Duo T7200 2.o Ghz, ou até de uma placa gráfica Nvidia versus uma Calistoga...

Acredito que a esmagadora maioria dos potenciais compradores de um portátil no "El Corte Inglés" não frequenta os foruns onde se discutem estes pormaiores e outros.

Os vendedores de hardware deviam deixar de se concentrar na venda, para passarem a concentrar-se na facilitação da compra. Se calçarem os sapatos do potencial cliente, veriam o mundo numa perspectiva diferente. A perspectiva de quem precisa de um portátil para resolver um conjunto concreto de problemas, ou necessidades. Perante esse conjunto concreto de necessidades aconselhariam 2/3 opções quase só com base em: estética, marca, ...

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