Being adept at closing the sale, and every step in the process, is an important key to productivity. So, let’s examine the issue of closing, beginning with the first principle:

1. Closing is a process which always ends with your customer’s agreement to take action
As you consider this principle, you’ll realise that closing is not just asking for an order, although it certainly is that. In addition, it is a process you repeat at every stage of the sales process. In fact, almost every time you interact with a customer, you can close the interaction by asking for some agreement. Whenever your customer agrees to take some action, you have closed that step in the sales process.

Let’s illustrate this principle with a typical real life situation. Suppose you’re talking on the phone to a prospect, and he says, “Sounds interesting. Send me some literature.” You say, “Okay, I’ll put it in the mail today.” Have you closed that step of the process? The answer is no. You have agreed to take action – send some literature – but your prospect hasn’t agreed to do anything. Remember, a close always ends with your customer agreeing to take some action.

Can you turn the same situation into a close? Back to the same situation. Your prospect says, “Sounds interesting. Send me some literature.” You remark, “I’d be happy to. After you review it, will you discuss it with me over the phone, say next Friday?” If your customer says, “Yes,” you’ve closed. He’s agreed to take some action. I recently made a sales call with a sales person who left the call unclosed. The prospect was definitely interested, but the sales person never asked for any action. Instead, the sales person said, “I’ll check back with you in a couple of weeks.”

We walked out of the sales call with absolutely no resolution of the issue, and the chance of making the sale diminished significantly. Understanding this principle is crucial to closing the sale. Many of the offers and proposals on which you work are very involved, requiring a number of steps in the sales process. As you proceed through the sales process, you continually ask for some kind of action in order to keep the project moving forward. When the time comes for the final decision – the agreement to buy – that decision is often the natural, logical consequence of the decisions that led up to it.

Every interaction can and should be closed
Closing, then, is not an isolated event that only happens at the end of the sales process. Rather, it’s a routine part of every sales call. That leads us to the second powerful principle of closing the sale:

2. Every interaction can and should be closed
In other words, at the conclusion of every interaction with your customer, ask for an agreement on the action he or she will take. The telephone conversation described above is a good example of closing the interaction.

Here’s another common situation. Let’s say you’ve discussed a product or proposal with your customer. He says, “It looks interesting, but we’re not ready for that now.” You might then say, “When do you think will be a good time?” Your customer responds, “Probably around June.” You might typically say, “Okay, I’ll make a note to discuss it with you then.”

At this point, you haven’t closed the interaction, nor have you resolved the issue. Take the conversation one step further Suppose you now say, “At that point in time, will you spend a half hour with me to discuss it in detail?” You have now attempted to close the interaction by getting an agreement for action on the part of your customer. You’ve put the issue on the table, and are attempting to resolve it.

Let’s take the conversation one step further.
Suppose your customer says, “No, probably not.” You now have a decision to make. Should you probe the reasons why, or should you accept his decision? Let’s say you decide to accept his decision. The conversation has value to you in that you learnt that this proposal isn’t going to fly in this account. The early “no” was valuable to you.

You didn’t waste months chasing something that wasn’t going to happen. That’s the value in resolving the issue. Let’s now say that, instead of responding “no,” your prospect responds to your close by saying, “Yes, I think it has enough merit to spend that time discussing it with you.” You now have his commitment to spend some time with you, so you have moved the issue forward. You’re one step closer to the ultimate sale.

Implement these two principles and you’ll dramatically improve your productivity. Keep in mind that closing is an agreement for action on the part of your customer, and make it your goal to close every interaction.

Even without a formal discovery process, you know your competitor’s every weakness. You know where you are stronger, where they are weaker, and you know how you beat them and when and where you do. You don’t have to fear your competitor, but you must respect them, lest you underestimate them. If you really want to improve your ability to compete and win, study how your competitor views you. Write your competitor’s case against your product, service, and solutions.

Competing on Strengths

We spend a lot of time and energy studying our competitor’s weaknesses. That energy is sometimes better directed at studying our own competitive disadvantages.

• If you were your competitor, what would you say were your weaknesses?
• In what areas is your ability to create value for your dream client limited?
• If you were your competitor, how would you lay out a logical argument against choosing you, your product, your service, or your solution?

This isn’t an exercise designed to make you squirm, though it probably will. It’s designed to make you think about how you sell. It is difficult to compete where your competitor is strong and you are weak. It’s far easier to compete where you are strong and where they are weak.

But, by looking at your offering from your competitor’s viewpoint, you can start to decide how to mitigate your weaknesses.

Mitigating Weaknesses

There is a difference between being weaker in an area and competing where you don’t really compete. If the area where you are weak and your competitor is strong is the fundamental criteria being used to decide, you shouldn’t be competing, you probably should be disqualifying.

The ability to mitigate your weaknesses requires that you lay out a logical case as to why your strengths far outweigh your weaknesses. You can be weaker in some areas and still create far more value than your competitors overall.

• Is there a reason that you are weaker in a certain area? Does focusing less in this area allow you to focus your time, efforts, and energy in an area that is more important to your clients?
• Is the value you can create in this area so limited that even your best effort there doesn’t really produce or contribute much to the results your clients need?
• Is a weak area really something that isn’t primary or fundamental to generating results?
• Do you generate the same result as your competitors by doing something completely different?

If you were your competitor, you would frame your offering to highlight your strengths and to expose your weaknesses. Knowing what your competitors are likely to expose as weaknesses means you can address them thoughtfully and honestly. It means you can be prepared to address them and mitigate the case against you.

Not a Call for Cynicism

If you sell, you need to be honest and know that you, your products, your services, and your solutions have weaknesses. This shouldn’t make you cynical. It should make you thoughtful about how you help your clients, and it should make it easier to compete where you can win.

It should make it easier for you to disqualify yourself when your weak areas make it impossible for you to help a client. If the weak areas cause you to lose, instead of being cynical and complaining (or pulling your punches), you should sell the changes that need to be made within your own organisation. There is no one closer to customers than the sales force, and your feedback can and should shape the company’s future.

Language is studied in many well-established fields. Sociolinguistics is the study of language use in society and social networks. Psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind acquires, uses, and represents language. Neurolinguistics is the study of how brain structures process language. Today, an exciting new area of study called ‘sales linguistics’ applies aspects from these fields to the conversations sales people have with customers.

The language of decision-making

The goal of sales linguistics is to understand how sales people and their prospective customers use and interpret language during the decision-making process. The seven principles of sales linguistics are these: every customer speaks in his or her own unique language, sales people build rapport through harmonious communication, the customer will always lie, persuasion requires a personal connection, sales calls should be classified linguistically, sales intuition is language based, and the final decision made by the customer is based upon human nature, not logic.

1. Customers speak unique languages
Each person on this planet speaks his or her own unique language. All the mundane and traumatic experiences of your life have determined the language you use. Just as no-one else has had your exact life experiences, noone else speaks your precise language. Therefore, the language two people use to describe the same situation may be very different.

Unfortunately, most companies arm their sales people with a ‘one size fits all’ company sales pitch. The first premise of sales linguistics is that every customer speaks in his or her own language. It is based upon understanding the customer’s interpretation of your message and its associated psychological impact. For example, reading the word ‘snake’ might cause you to visualise a rattlesnake, a python, or a cobra. While these are all specific interpretations of the word, they all may naturally evoke fear and negative emotions. Conversely, if you raised a pet snake as a child, you probably have a positive mental association. Since the personal meanings of words can vary greatly, you may even have thought of an unscrupulous business person when you first read the word ‘snake.’

2. Rapport is harmonious communication
Unfortunately, when most sales people meet with prospective customers, they talk in only their own language about their product’s features, functions and benefits. When Heavy Hitter sales people meet with customers, they talk about their problems, plans and personal aspirations. They speak their customers’ language in order to build rapport.

Rapport is a special relationship between two individuals based upon harmonious communication. However, human communication occurs in several different forms and on several different levels. An immense amount of information is conveyed verbally, phonetically, physically, consciously and subconsciously. Heavy Hitters naturally adapt their mental wiring and language to mirror the customers’.

3. Whether inadvertently or on purpose, the customer will always lie
Sales people expect deception from competitors. However, the most damaging deceptions actually come from customers. Sales people are on a mission to learn the ultimate truth:

‘Will I win the deal?’ And they want to find the truth about winning an account as early as possible. Customers will lie to you for a variety of reasons: to protect themselves, to make you feel better about yourself, and to help your competitors. As a result, customers will say things they don’t mean and mean things they don’t say. When you ask at the end of your sales presentation, ‘Does everyone believe we are the best solution?’ even though everyone nods, the audience may include objectors who will try to sabotage your deal later on.

Lying often occurs subtly, for example, when customers overemphasise the importance of a certain feature or present an irrelevant step in the decision-making process as a red herring to throw you off the scent of the truth. Sometimes, customers will strictly adhere to their selection-process guidelines, never giving any more information to you than they say they’re allowed to give. Usually, each of these types of lies is intended to hide their personal bias toward another competitor.

4. Persuasion requires a personal connection
Sales people are paid to persuade. But what makes them persuasive? Is it their command of the facts and their ability to recite a litany of reasons why customers should buy? In reality, the most product-knowledgeable sales person is not necessarily the most persuasive one because it takes more than logic and reason to change buyers’ opinions. A personal connection must be established.

Persuasion is the process of projecting your entire set of beliefs and convictions onto another human being. It’s not about getting others to acknowledge your arguments or agree with your business case; it’s about making them internalise your message because they believe that it is in their best interests. Ultimately, persuasion is the ability to tap into someone’s emotions and reach the deeper subconscious decision-maker within that person.

5. Intuition is language based
How often have you attended a sales call with a colleague who had a different opinion of the success of the meeting? Most likely, the difference in reading the meeting resulted because one person collected more data than the other and had more experiences to compare it against. The difference in opinions resulted from a difference between the strengths of sales intuition.

The mind does not treat all information equally. Some information is ignored, some information is misinterpreted, and some information is generalised based upon past experiences. Unfortunately, many sales people edit information to support their pre-existing beliefs. Sales people with ‘happy ears’ tend to believe what they are told by the customer. Others view the world through rose-coloured glasses and will always interpret information emanating from the customer in a favorable light.

Such ambiguities and delusions are disastrous. Conversely, Heavy Hitter sales people accurately interpret information using their sales intuition. They are continually catalogueing their successes and failures based upon all the different
types of verbal and non-verbal languages the customer is communicating. They store patterns of individual and group meeting behaviour. Through their sales intuition, they are able to integrate their spoken words with the sales situation based upon their experiences with similar types of people and past sales cycles.

6. Sales calls need to segmented linguistically
Sales call segmentation is a method of categorising customer interactions based upon the psychological motives behind the customer’s use of language. Selection committee members, ranging from the CEO to the lowest-level evaluator, will adopt different decision-making roles during sales calls and sales presentations.

They can be classified into four different decision-making roles depending on how they process information, how they behave as part of a selection team, their political power, and their personal disposition towards their company.

• Information roles. Information roles are based on the type of information people believe they should gather and the unique way in which they process and transmit information. Everyone involved in the sales call and selection process has the responsibility to assess vendor information for accuracy and provide an opinion as to which solution is best. However, evaluators assume this duty with different levels of due diligence, ranging from focusing on minutiae to being big-picture oriented.
• Character roles. Character roles are based on the way people feel they should behave when they are part of a decision-making group. Just as people change their behaviour whenever they are in groups, evaluators adopt new character traits depending upon which of their colleagues are participating with them on the sales call. They will behave quite differently in front of fellow employees than when they are alone with you.
• Authority roles. Authority roles are based on people’s degree of command and their ability to dominate the group. People’s authority does not always correlate to how long they have worked for their company or have been employed in their profession. In reality, selection committee members adopt authority roles in order to influence their colleagues and the decision.
• Company roles. Company roles are based on the political power people wield and their personal disposition toward their company. People’s titles tell only part of the story about their role within a company. In the business world, selectioncommittee members take on additional company roles beyond their position on the organisation chart. These roles show their true political power and their personal disposition toward their company.

This segmentation strategy provides a predictive framework to anticipate customer behaviour. Since the sales person has a deeper insight about customer behaviour based upon past interactions, he is able to create more compelling presentations and conduct more persuasive sales calls. This strategy also serves as a communication methodology to educate and prepare the colleagues who will attend the sales call with the sales person.

7. The final decision-maker is human nature, not logic
We typically equate persuasion solely with satisfying the analytical mind. However, we are not as objective and analytical as we think, and even the most well-thought-out decision is ultimately determined by emotional and subconscious influences.

Selling requires capturing the hearts and minds of customers based on a strategy that takes into account the emotions of the decision-maker as well as the logical reasons to buy. Customers aren’t completely logical decision-makers in the real world. The decision-making process is a blend of human nature and logical rationalisation. At the foundation of all sales is a relationship between people. The interaction between these people, the intangible part of the sales process, is ultimately responsible for the decision being made. Logic and reason play secondary roles.

Customers’ inertia, the drive to ‘do nothing,’ far outweighs the logical reasons you espouse for buying your product. You can recite a litany of reasons and a laundry list of benefits, and customers still won’t buy your product. You need to package these ideas in a format that leaves an impression and creates a call to action that customers understand and that persuades them both mentally and emotionally to proceed. This requires you to establish ‘dominance’ during sales calls and gain the willing obedience of customers. From the perspective of sales linguistics, dominance is when the customer listens to your opinions and advice, internalises your recommendations and agrees with
them, and then follows your course of action.

Closing Thoughts

If you are in sales, you make your living by talking. If you were a pilot, you would attend years of flight training school and many hours of simulator training before you were allowed in the cockpit of a jumbo jet. If you were a lawyer, you would intensely study law for several years and have to pass the Attorney’s Admission exam to ensure your proficiency. If you are in sales, you need to study language and perfect your use of words because your most important competitive weapon is your mouth!

Heavy Hitter sales people are accomplished communicators who know what to say and, equally important, how to say it. Through their mastery of language, they are able to convey and decipher deep underlying messages that less-successful sales people miss. While using the same language as most sales people, they have developed an uncanny ability to influence non-believers to trust them and persuade complete strangers to follow their advice. Through sales linguistics, we can learn how they turn sceptics into believers and persuade prospective customers to buy.

Presentations are one of the most direct, intimate and personal extensions of your brand. They are the heart and soul of all sales pitches and the foundations of excellent leadership. To truly do your brand justice; to have your organisation represented in the market by confident, competent speakers; these are the guidelines to prioritise:

1. No mission statement, no presentation

Write down, in one clear sentence, the goal you hope to achieve with your presentation. If the entire talk boils down to, ‘Make my prospect see that dealing with us would be better than dealing with the competitor,’ then that is your mission statement.

Until you’ve done this, you’re not ready to begin work; what exactly would you be working on?
This guideline also minimises your workload by keeping you from developing extraneous content (See the Oxford Concise, under ‘Waffle’). If you’re focused on your mission statement from the outset, your presentation will be tighter, more professional and in line with your objectives.

2. Do the ‘who cares?’ test, then perform surgery

One of the most common errors in corporate presenting, and one which is particularly endemic to sales presenters, is giving all of the facts. Dating back to the dawn of time. One grand data dump. Kaboom!

They are not necessary. Facts are merely there to support your message; nothing more. Present all of them and your speech will become a litany of squiggly lines and incomprehensible graphs, or even worse: a history lesson on your company. Audiences and prospects don’t need every dreary dot and dash. History lessons don’t sell products. Audiences need to be told what it all means and then persuaded that your ideas for action represent their best option. Informing is only one part of your job. Persuasion is the balance. Think of information as your tool-kit. Think of messages as the structure you’re trying to build. They don’t need to see your tools; they want to play on the completed jungle-gym. That’s the interesting part.

3. Turn it into a conversation

You’ve prepared your presentation. Now prepare the delivery, because that is what your audiences and prospects will ultimately experience. A lecturing style is out. A conversational style is in. And always ensure that you’re on their side. Replace, ‘You must,’ with ‘We will.’ You don’t want your presentation to degenerate into a ‘me versus the audience’ dynamic.

Also, remember that if you haven’t delivered it out loud, it’s not yet ready for a live audience. Ever tried to tell a joke, reached the three-quarter point, then realised you’d ruined the set-up? The same can happen in a boardroom pitch with your critical point… unless you’ve practiced delivering it out loud a few times.

4. Make it shorter

Your presentation is sitting at thirty minutes? Great. Now try to get it down to twenty. The more you can condense your ideas, the more succinctly you can express them, the clearer they will be. Draw them out and their impact will be dissipated by the ‘fat’ surrounding the ‘meat.’ With effort, you can always make a presentation shorter, and it will almost invariably be stronger for it. Persuasion happens swiftly, not by the weight of a thousand words.

5. Prepare the least number of visuals possible

Think about this logically. If you were shown 35 charts in a presentation, would you remember them? What if you were shown one single, emotive image of, say, an atomic explosion, or an extreme close-up of an orange being squeezed and the juices squirting out? Think you’d remember that?

Charts and graphs are great for creating seat-zombies. Emotive visuals, which illustrate a point, are the way to go when you want them to stay awake and buy from you. And the less visuals you have, the more each image will stand out and be memorable.

I am immediately not interested. If what you sell for a living means you have to pick up the phone – either to set appointments, call prospects back, or return calls to clients, then you have to learn how to sound natural and avoid putting your prospects, gatekeepers or assistants on notice that you’re trying to sell something. And the way you do that is by learning how to sound like you’re not selling anything, and you do that by learning how to disarm prospects, sound natural yet professional, and be friendly without being phony. Use these five techniques to not only sound natural on the phone, but to also close more business:

1. Always use the prospect’s first name

I know that there are two schools of thought on this, one being that you should show respect for someone you don’t know and use either Mr. or Mrs., but I don’t agree. I think you can show respect for someone by being courteous and professional, and I think you’re going to make a lot more progress if you use a person’s first name. Here are the two reasons to do so:

• First, by using a person’s first name you aren’t immediately signalling that you’re a sales person! I mean how do you feel when someone you don’t know calls you and addresses you by “Mr.” or “Mrs.”? Also, when you use a person’s first name, you are starting the call equal, without giving them all the power.
• Second, everyone likes the sound of their own name. In fact, psychologists have found that everyone’s favourite word is their first name! By starting with that you are immediately making a connection, and a personal one at that.

2. Be polite

You’d be surprised by how many sales reps still try to trick or get around gatekeepers and assistants, and how many are even rude in doing so. Always, always use please and thank you when speaking with anyone over the phone (or in person for that matter).

Words like “please” and “thank you” go a long way when trying to make a connection with a prospect, and they work especially well when you’re trying to get through to a prospect. Examine your current scripts now and do all you can to insert the proper courtesies wherever you can.

3. Be brief

Most reps go into pitch mode the moment they reach their prospect and it’s no surprise they can’t wait to get them off the phone. I review scripts all the time that essentially read the company’s brochure to the prospect the moment they reach them.

You can turn that around and sound so much better by briefly delivering your presentation and checking in with your prospect. Try things like:

• “Briefly, (prospect), the reason I’m calling is that we’ve been working with many companies like yours, and I just wanted to see if we can help you as well. Can I ask you just a couple of questions to see if we’d be a fit for you?”
• “(Prospect), you probably get a lot of calls like these, so I’ll be brief. I’ll just ask you a couple of quick questions and if I think we can save you between 15% to 20% I’ll let you know. If not, we’ll part friends, is that okay?”

Get the idea?

4. Make a connection

This is one of the easiest of all and it’s a great way to get your prospect talking. All you do is find something that you know is affecting your other clients (like new laws in their industry), and ask how it’s affecting them as well. Try:

• “You know (prospect), a lot of my clients have told me of the changes they’re having to make because of (the new law). How is that affecting you?”
• “(Prospect), what are you planning to feature at the September trade show?”

By addressing something that they are dealing with now, you can instantly make a connection and get valuable information. Warning: you have to fit this in after you’ve established rapport, and you have to address something that is relevant to them.

5. Listen more

This may not sound like a way to sound natural on the phone, but believe me, it’s probably the most important of all. First of all, most sales reps are so busy talking that their prospect has turned off long ago. They are just waiting for an appropriate pause to get rid of them.

By listening you actually create space for your prospect to speak (and to think), and because of that you are allowing the conversation to flow. When the prospect has a chance to get their thoughts and feedback out, they feel comfortable with you. And that is the best way for the conversation to unfold naturally. Hit your mute button after you ask a question and count three 1 000s to see how well it works.

Make connections, close deals 

There you have it – five easy ways to sound more natural on the phone. The good news is that they are easy to implement, and, once you do, you’ll make more connections and you’ll close more business.
Try them today!

You are invited to a meeting with a new account interested in your firm’s services. The person with whom you initially meet is not the decision-maker. This “influencer” wants you to bring them a proposal, so that they can take your recommendations to the person who has decision authority. You properly request a second meeting to include this person; that access is denied. You are told, “they want me to gather the information.” Or, “that isn’t going to be necessary”. Or, “they are too busy”.

Or…. any one of a number of other lame explanations.

You are left with two options

You can go ‘conventional,’ meaning that you do as you are instructed, and deliver your proposal to a person who is not making the decision. Or, you can go ‘nuclear’. You can simply go over the person’s head, and attempt to access the decision-maker yourself.

Which is a better strategy? Well, that depends. 

First, let’s look at the easier, conventional approach.

If you do as you are told, your proposal will be placed in the hands of a buyer who never meets you, knows next to nothing about your company’s value proposition, has a different set of issues than your influencer, gets virtually none of their questions answered, and makes a poorly-informed decision based solely on price. Put another way, this exercise has now become a waste of your valuable time, as you have less than a 15% likelihood of a ‘yes’.

Of course, there is one nice benefit – you avoid upsetting anyone. Second, let’s consider the Nuclear Option. If you essentially ignore the request of your influencer and attempt to deal directly with the decision-maker, you will probably offend your initial contact and impede whatever slim chance you initially had of doing business with the account. That’s a big risk to take. Under what circumstances is the risk worth it?

Do you go big or go home?

The following factors tend to favour the Nuclear Option:

• A large, complex sales opportunity. High-cost, complicated decisions require your having access to anyone with a vested interest in the outcome. In such cases, you cannot serve the account properly without this access.
• The level of your initial contact. Some ‘influencers’ have more of it than others. A manager or higher-level influencer has considerably more clout than an administrative assistant. The role of the influencer is therefore critical. A person acting simply as a delivery mechanism for your proposal isn’t going to help you much.
• Your relationship with the influencer. A cooperative partner is a valuable asset; an antagonistic stone-waller is a hindrance to both you and the business that employs them.
• The competitive playing field. Are you the only option being considered, or are you up against other firms bidding for the same opportunity?
• Lastly, and more importantly, what do you have to lose? If the answer is ’nothing’, then the decision to go Nuclear is made for you.

If you decide to go Nuclear, there is a way to minimise collateral damage: begin the process by writing a ‘following up’ letter to the decision-maker after your initial meeting with the influencer. In this correspondence, review the key issues that you discussed with the influencer. Bullet and bold these items. Ask the decision-maker to review the list. Let them know that you will follow up with them on a specific date to discuss these points and answer any questions they have. Lastly, and this is critical: copy the influencer on the letter.

Yes, you may get a phone call from the influencer, and yes, the tone of the person may not be what you would like. However, if your motives are noble – and, by the way, they are – this is usually a sound, and largely safe, strategy.

Will good sense prevail?

What you are banking on – and, in my experience, what you can expect – is for the following sequence to occur:

• The decision-maker reviews your list of key points
• The decision-maker does not agree with the points shared with you by your influencer, or sees that some critical items were left out of the mix
• The decision-maker contacts you to discuss these items.

This sequence is what should have happened to begin with, because it was always in the account’s best interests to involve the other parties. When this happens, everyone wins, including your influencer. You produce a proposal that reflects everyone’s needs, the account gets a set of recommendations that are customised to multiple concerns, and the influencer is no longer solely accountable for managing the entire decision process. Finally, in those cases – and, rest assured, they will happen – where you ruffle a few feathers, it is worthwhile to remember the old Jesuit saying: “It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

It isn’t easy to develop the skills necessary to engage in a strategic dialogue with C-Level executives. But there are some things that you can do to make it a lot easier – and to enjoy much greater success when you do.

Know How You Create Value

C-Level executives are consistently short on one thing: time. They are protective of their time because they have so little of it when you compare it to the demands of their organisation and its stakeholders, or against the results that they need to produce. This means you have limited time to get your C-Level executive’s attention. You are expected to know exactly how you create value for companies like theirs, and you are expected to have some understanding of what you can do for them – even before you speak with them.

This isn’t always about research; it’s about knowing who you are, what you do, and how you make a difference. When you call on high-level executives, you don’t have the same time to build rapport as you might if you were calling on someone lower in an organisation. Someone lower in the organisation may need more time for rapport building because you are going to work closely with them should they choose to move forward with you.

You also don’t have time to fish around for ideas that might indicate some dissatisfaction. That might work if you have time, but you don’t have that luxury here. You have to know how and what you can do to make a difference. This is why I believe it is a mistake to believe that you should always enter an organisation at the top (this is, of course, a generalisation and all generalisations are lies). You must be able to ask questions that demonstrate you know where the issues are, and that you know how to increase revenue and profitability, and reduce costs (all dissatisfaction ultimately rolls up into one of these categories).You need to know how to create value and get to the point.

Possess the Business Acumen to See Th rough Their Eyes

To sell and engage an organisation at this level, you have to possess the business acumen necessary to see the business through your C-Level executive’s eyes.

You may not ever be the subject matter expert that your C-Level executive is when it comes to their business, but you had better be able to quickly comprehend the big moving pieces that you touch. You have to understand what drives their business so you can relate what you do to the business. You don’t have to have a perfect understanding, but you should know how they look at their business. There are lots of C-Level executives who will be willing to give you an education (or the rest of an education), but you have to have a basic fundamental understanding of how business works so you can keep up; this means you need business acumen.
Your C-Level executive is interested in talking about business. You have to be able to keep up.

Prove You Will Own the Outcome

C-Level executives work for all kinds of shareholders. They have their management team to serve. They have their employees to serve.

They have clients to serve. They have a board of directors to serve. The last thing in the world that they need is another dependent. To get a C-Level executive’s attention and be useful to them, you have to prove that you are going to own the outcome. This is what they want from you, and this is what they are willing to pay you for doing it. To be interesting and useful to a C-Level executive, you are going to have to demonstrate that you are going to own the outcome that you sell. They aren’t hiring a sales person to work for them; they are hiring a manager who will own the result and do what is necessary to ensure that it is achieved. Explain that you are going to own the outcome, and that you will be there to see the objective achieved.

Own the Next Steps

What you want from a C-Level executive is permission to proceed. You own the next step. All you need from them is their blessing to move forward. If they have to do work for you to move forward, it isn’t going to get done and they won’t need you. Instead, you are going to end up with unanswered voicemails, unanswered emails, and a serious sense of disappointment.

If you need information, ask your C-Level executive whom you should work with to get it. Then get the information. If you need access to people, ask the C-Level executive to forward an email that you send to the parties you need to engage with. You aren’t interesting and useful as a dependent. You are useful and interesting as someone who is going to get things done while they move on to other priorities. You have to take initiative. You do the
work.

You own the next step.

“Research has shown that providing individuals with false feedback about themselves can actually induce them to confirm it. To behave in a manner consistent with that feedback. They become the person that they believe themselves to be. Or, more accurately, the persona that they believe others believe them to be. Which in theory, of course, can be anything,” says Dutton.

He draws on research conducted during the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany. “German police feted English fans – not exactly noted for their temperance on such occasions – as being the ‘best fans in the world’. The tournament passed off without incident. Not, of course, that the compliment was genuine. You must be joking. Rather, the Germans had done their homework,” he relates.

Confirm Your Best Expectations

The key point here is that the way people perceive themselves is a key driver of behaviour – which has important implications for managers and team leaders, particularly when it comes to dealing with under-performers. If the theory is correct, then getting under-performers or slackers to believe you believe them to be capable, responsible and diligent, may be enough to actually induce such behaviour in them. It’s also useful for boosting a team’s confidence.

If they are provided with feedback that they can in fact achieve the task set out for them, they could be induced to believe it themselves and to subsequently act in a way that confirms this perception of themselves. By the same token, it suggests important things about not always focusing on the real negatives of a person’s behaviour, as doing so will only confirm their own negative belief of themselves, which in turn will drive their behaviour.

• 62% of B2B suppliers now need more leads in order to generate the same amount of sales
• 72% indicate an increase in buying cycle time over the past six months, while the buying cycle timeframe has increased over 10% in the past 12 months

Two economic downturns over the past decade have made buyers more spendthrift, and more sceptical of suppliers’ claims. Fuelled by a wealth of online resources and social networks, buyers have seized control of the buying cycle, engaging with sales representatives later and later, and further elongating sales cycles. Marketers are scrambling to address the power shift and overcome lead generation and conversion issues by delivering more content and tools over more channels to actively engage ever more empowered, sceptical and frugal buyers.

According to research by Junta42 & MarketingProfs, “engage or perish” is becoming the defining tag-line driving many new B2B marketing strategies with:

• 51% of B2B marketers increasing their spending in content marketing over the next 12 months
• Over a quarter of the total marketing and communications budget now going toward content marketing
• Nine of 10 B2B marketers leveraging content marketing as part of their marketing programmes.

Five Trends Shaping Today’s B2B Buyer

In my research with the IDC, integrated B2B marketing company, SiriusDecisions, and other partners, we have found that there are five key trends in buyer behaviour reinforcing one another to define the need for different, and perhaps even more investment in content marketing programmes in 2011 and beyond.

The organisations that recognise these significant and fundamental B2B buyer changes, and align their content marketing budgets to empower buyers, engage one-to-one, build trust, address economically focused buyers and enable sales to engage with more value will be the future winners. Let us examine each of the trends and research in detail:

1. Internet Fuelled Buying Cycles

The Internet has made more information available via more channels, and this wealth of information is being leveraged by buyers to make key purchase decisions, redefining how, when and where buyers engage, select and purchase your solutions.

In the business-to-consumer (B2C) space, the Internet has dramatically impacted how books, apparel, electronics, music, cars and other goods are bought and sold. The consumer is now in charge: researching specifications, configuring and customising solutions, getting peer reviews and advice, comparing prices, and “buying now”. In many instances, sales forces and channel partners have been disintermediated, where direct contact with the buyer has been replaced with online interaction. And the shift to “buyer control” has seen the rise of new retail channels and marketing sites with substantial competitive impact for those who embraced and leveraged
the shift, and those who lagged behind.

These B2C buyers now rely on suppliers’ websites, independent buyer guides, and social networks to help guide their decisions, and as a result, B2C marketers have had to visibly change to meet these demands. The marketer’s development and delivery of online content and decision-making tools has played an important role in fuelling and automating the buying cycle, reviews and transactions. For example, automotive sites now provide more tools than ever to guide buyer’s decisions, including customised configurators and pricing tools, competitive comparison tools, video brochures, and Facebook ‘fan’ pages.

Analysts such as Forrester and Gartner are highlighting ‘consumerisation’ of business as a key trend for the next several years, and B2B marketing is one area that will face the ‘consumerisation” change, making content marketing and interactive decision support tools more important than ever before. Evidence of this shift can be found in the IDC’s 2010 Customer Experience Survey. When asked, over 200 B2B solution buyers now felt that the most important part of the overall purchase process was supplier content, with over one third of the buyers citing this content as key to the purchase decision.

Content may indeed be king to the Internet fuelled buying cycle. IDC survey results indicate that buyers rely on supplier content more than on direct supplier engagements with technical teams, sales representatives and executives in making key purchase decisions. With a wealth of information available at the click of a mouse, buyers are doing more of their own research and evaluations online, relying less and less on vendor interaction to progress through the decision-making cycle. Sales teams are being engaged later and later in the sales cycle.

Marketers recognising this shift are providing the content needed at each stage of the lifecycle to fuel the decision-making process. Favoured Content Sources According to SiriusDecision buyer studies, the most favoured sources of content during the early stages of B2B decisionmaking are:

• White papers (64,4%)
• Peer referrals (51,1%)
• Webinars (48,9%)
• Trials or demos (42,2%)
• Analyst reports (37,8%)

In later stages of the sales cycle, analyst reports and peer referrals reign supreme.

2. Information Overload

Although buyers extensively use and rely on supplier information to make purchase decisions, most of today’s buyers indicate that they suffer from ‘information overload’ as a result of current “carpet bombing” marketing strategies.

Many of us have experienced this phenomenon, getting more content from more sources than ever before. According to SiriusDecisions, just looking at e-blasts alone, the typical buyer receives over 20 email marketing messages a week, up 32% over the past four years. And this is but one of several traditional and online channels that are proactively providing information on a daily basis to prospects. Instead of being engaged, buyers are now inundated with more meaningless product information, offers and “noise”, creating a condition often referred to as “marketing fatigue”.

One of the keys to cutting through the noise is to provide buyers with more personalised and meaningful content to transcend generic messaging and create an engaging dialogue. The power of personalisation is real. According to MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm surveys, when content is customised, buyers indicate that the content is much more effective at capturing prospect attention, and most importantly, converting prospects into buyers.

Relevance to Market Segment
The customisation of the content can be generated in different ways to be sure it is relevant to the particular persona and characteristics of the buyer, such as using:

• Visitor click activity to determine what information is presented next on the website, or what offers or content to serve
• Registration profiles to customise the online web content presented, or scheduled email blast content sent
• Interactive white paper and assessment tools that ask the customer a few questions and then tune the white paper content or customised assessment benchmarks interactively based on profile, stage in buying cycle, opportunity, pain points and need.

According to a survey by marketing automation firm Silverpop of B2B marketers, even though customisation is very effective, only 35% of marketers said they were using dynamic content today. However, of those that did, the results of personalised content have been impressive, with 93% saying it worked better for them than traditional content, and 43% reporting that it “worked great.”

3. Matter of Trust

Although buyers clearly rely on supplier content to do research and make important purchase decisions, and not having this content in today’s Internet fuelled buying cycle can be fatal, a conundrum exists where suppliers are not always perceived as a trusted source. Perhaps this is because of the overload of marketing messages received daily, or the boldness of such messages or claims, or the fact that at the end of the day the supplier is ultimately there to sell something, but the research confirms that buyers are sceptical of content produced and provided by suppliers.

Buyer survey results from SiriusDecisions indicate that the most trusted sources of marketing content information through the buying lifecycle are industry analysts (cited by 31,4% of respondents), and peers (28,7%), especially early in the lifecycle.

The influence of suppliers as a trusted source of information lags dramatically, at only 8,1% this year, an increase from 3,1% in 2006, but still much lower on the trust scale than almost all other sources. Internet fuelled buying decisions rely on creating a credible and meaningful connection to the buyer, overcoming the virtual nature of the medium to create trust. Because buyers are researching solutions
online, they cannot look a sales person in the eyes to determine credibility.

To overcome the scepticism, it is important for content marketers to provide the right content to bridge the credibility gap, including analyst reviews, user testimonials and success stories, third party validation of research and financial justifications, and cultivation of independent peer reviews and feedback.

4. Frugalnomics

According to Forrester analyst Scott Santucci, go-to-market models always change during periods of disruption, and the Great Recession has certainly caused its share of turmoil. “The more buying organisations are forced to do-more-withless they adopt different business patterns,” says Santucci.

I term the current shift Frugalnomics, where two successive economic downturns over the past decade have resulted in an economically focused buyer who demands quantifiable proof that each investment will yield a beneficial bottom line impact and provide maximum value compared to alternatives. According to Santucci, the Frugalnomics focus has significant and fundamental strategy implications. “Today, buyers are looking for business partners that will help them drive business results or outcomes – rather than bundle their products and services into solutions.”

With Frugalnomics, buyers are inclined to not make significant investments or changes, and as a result, customers need to be armed with the tools to “make the case for change”. Unfortunately, most buyers are inclined to “do nothing” during periods of uncertainty; however, there is a “cost to doing nothing”. Customers need to be armed with the tools to quantify the cost of indecision and the positive bottom line impact these changes can have. In order to attract, connect and capture frugal buyers, marketers need to produce content that raises economic interest, quantifies value, and boosts urgency at a time when it’s easier to do nothing than make a wrong investment. According to IDC research, over 90% of surveyed decision-makers now require quantifiable proof of bottom line benefits on most projects. The larger the purchase, the more formal financial due diligence is required.

However, even though financial impact analysis is required, two thirds (65%) of buyers indicate that they do not have the knowledge or tools needed to do business value assessments and calculations. As a result, over 81% of buyers expect suppliers to quantify the business value of proposed solutions. Content marketers must develop content and dynamic sales tools to engage and empower economic buyers, including research, interactive and traditional white papers, webinars and dynamic sales tools, to help quantify the value of proposed solutions, return on investment (ROI) calculators, and competitive total cost of ownership (TCO) comparisons.

5. Death of the Salesman?

Because of Internet fuelled buying cycles, sales is being invited later and later to the table, and in some cases, not at all. Buyers can now use the Internet to research and assess opportunities for improvements, find and get solution recommendations, make the financial case for change, compare and contrast competitive options and pricing, and they often make the purchase online. So what is the role of a sales person in such an empowered buyer environment, and will this lead to an end of sales as we know it?

According to SiriusDecisions, focusing on marketing costs per sales person indicates that on average companies invest a significant $43 011 per sales person, an estimated 3% to 7% of the opportunity value of the sales pipeline.  However, research by the IDC recognises that although sales enablement investments are significant, the investments may not be delivering on promises. Surveys reveal that buyers are not satisfied with the value sales professionals are delivering to engagements.

In a recent survey, 24% of buyers indicated that the sales reps are not prepared for presentations at all, 30% indicate that they are somewhat prepared, and only 29% indicate that they are well prepared. The lack of preparation has been directly shown to drive inefficient conversion, longer sales cycles, more discounting and higher competitive losses.

Over the next five years it is clear that sales has to change to meet empowered buyer needs and continue to add value to the engagement. Content marketing plays an important role in arming sales professionals with the content and dynamic sales tools to reshape the way they engage and connect with ever more frugal, sceptical and empowered buyers. Marketing needs to play a clear role to either help redefine the sales role and empower sales professionals with the content and tools needed to add value in the buying cycle, or simply remove sales from the process altogether, empowering buyers directly with the content, tools and channel to make their own decisions and buy on their own. It is likely, as we have seen in B2C, that marketing will need to both help redefine sales engagements and empower direct buying content and channels.