The New Rules to Selling to Extremely Busy Executives
Presentation overview and key highlights
When speaking of extremely busy executives, Jill Konrath refers to them as ‘crazy’ busy – in other words, they are so busy they are actually going nuts.
Understanding the ‘crazy’ busy executive
- Super-busy people cannot give you more time. You have 5 minutes. You might not believe you can understand your client in 5 minutes, or break down what you are offering. Tough luck – that’s all you have, so you need to find a way to make it work.
- These are the people where opportunity lies. If you can learn to sell to them, within their time frame, you will be successful.
- These are the people that are asked to do more in shorter timeframes and with fewer resources. They are under pressure!
- Particularly today, customers are being cautious. They aren’t adding employees, and if someone leaves, they aren’t necessarily being replaced. Everyone is doing a little bit more.
- People are overwhelmed by complexities and changing priorities. You need ease the burden, not add to it, particularly when these are the people thinking “I just can’t add one more thing to my plate.”
- NOTE: When you sell something, whether it’s a product or a service, you are asking the client to change. Why should they change though? This is what they are asking themselves. And unless you can answer that question for them, you won’t make the sale.
- Ask yourself: What do executives need more of? Generally they need more time to get away, think and strategise. They need time away from daily operations. Can you help them achieve this?
- How will you change what you are doing so that you can sell to crazy executives?
Preparing to sell to crazy busy executives
- Before you make contact, know the following:
- Who is this person?
- What does their day, week, month entail?
- How many people demand time from them every day?
- How many areas demand their attention?
- What will make them pay attention?
- Remember: You are sending them a message. To ensure that they don’t disregard, ignore, or worse, delete your message, you need to ensure it’s the right message.
- You are walking into their very busy lives and asking them to:
- Take the time to listen to you
- Add more to their plate
- Make a decision
- NOTE: Crazy busy people are delete-happy. According to a US study, it takes the average person 2,7 seconds to decide if they will read, delete or forward an email to someone else. How much can you read in that time? That’s how long you have to grab someone’s attention. We trash emails as fast as we can because it’s one less thing on our to-do list.
- When you can’t get people on the phone, or they won’t return your calls or emails it can be very discouraging, particularly if they seemed interested in what you were offering. You need to remember that these people are also feeling overwhelmed. It’s not a numbers game, it’s an effectiveness game.
The SNAP method
- Each point below is important in itself. But they come together to help people make snap decisions (ie in 2,7 seconds). Know what they are to combat them.
- S: Simple. Simple or complex? A person who is overwhelmed needs simplicity, and this is judged in a split second.
- N: iNvaluable. People do not buy from you because you are nice. You need to be invaluable – give value, not waste valuable time.
- A: Alignment. Is what you are selling aligned to their business? You need to let them understand where that alignment is immediately – not at the end of a pitch.
- P: Priority. People can only handle one priority at a time. Always look for what is most important to them right now.
SNAP rules
Decision one: Access – will they let you in or not? The SNAP rules will help you ensure that they do.
- Keep it simple. Get attention now! To do that you need to keep things as simple as possible. Limit email attachments, don’t send anything complex or hard to decipher. Deciding to change is tough enough. Make this easy to achieve.
- Be iNvaluable. Your customers need you to be an expert. Knowing about your procurement or service is not being invaluable. You have to bring something personally, so that you aren’t just selling value, but you are bringing value. You are being evaluated against everyone else. You need them to not want to look elsewhere.
- Always align. Is it aligned with what they want to achieve? To answer this, figure out what they want to achieve. What are they doing, how and why? Also, SHOW THEM HOW YOU ARE ALIGNED EARLY ON. Don’t make them work to figure it out. Often sales pitches leave the meat for the end – get it right up front instead. Show people why they should be paying attention to you.
- NOTE: You are the differentiator, not your product or service. 80% of the perception of an organisation is based on the person you are meeting with. (And, as a manager, CEO, are you investing in your sales people?)
- For sales leaders: You cannot only hire A players for sales people. There are not enough of them. You need to hire people with talent and develop them into A players. The only difference between top and average sellers is choice: what they choose to be. Invest yourself in helping them make the choice to be a great seller.
WORKSHOP
The mind meld
- You need to see things the way your customer sees them. This gives you power.
- The most basic form of functioning is learning something, and then applying what has been learnt. True success lies in three higher levels of thinking: analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Most people do not look are what they have created to determine if it’s good, not because they are not capable of doing so, but because they just didn’t think about it.
- You need to evaluate what you are doing from your client’s perspective – and then change it to do better.
- Example of teenagers: teenagers are constantly evaluating their parents (esp what will freak them out) and adjusting their behaviour accordingly. Only 1 in 7 sales people use this same skill. As a sales leader you need to help you sales staff do just this!
The buyer’s matrix
- What is really important to the people you are calling on?
- NOTE: The more you know about your customers and can talk about what’s important to them, the better for everyone. Why? Because you are creating conversations that matter.
- The selling process is simple:
- Find prospects (qualify them)
- Do discovery
- Do probing questions
- Propose
- Demo
- Close – BUT, you need to ask where they are in the cycle and adjust accordingly. Don’t force a buyer into your cycle!
- Decision paths follow a clear trajectory: From status quo, they enter the path to initiate change, then options are selected, and finally a new status quo is established. There is always something wrong with the status quo, BUT, clients have generally learnt to live with it, which is easier than change. You need to give them a reason to change.
- Look at the customer’s perspective: what is their process for change? What is their decision process? Are they totally satisfied, reasonably satisfied or not satisfied? What will get them to the point where they are thinking, we need to change? And who are the people involved in deciding to make that change? Ie, who has to say, ‘yes’?
- You need to help your team work on their process: get them engaged as soon as possible; decide which tools to use; assist your salespeople in moving through the stages.
- Trigger points: You can change an organisation’s priorities if you know what their triggers are – and you will get your foot in the door faster.
- Find something that happens externally, and see how it impacts your customer, and let them know – with a solution!
Using tools
Sales people need tools, and it’s up to the sales leader o provide these (and salespeople themselves to source relevant tools). The goal is to have tools that can help a sales person solve issues.
- Informative tools (helpful, informative, educational)
- Articles
- Reports
- Books
- Studies
- White papers
- Webinars
- Checklists
- Assessment tools
- NOTE: these should be something really helpful – NOT ANOTHER BROCHURE. That’s what websites are for.
- What training do your people need in order to become a differentiator?
- What does the business need in order to become a differentiator?
Helping execs make decisions
- Start with determining the trigger event: what is it? How can you ‘trigger’ it?
- Design a value proposition based on:
- Your buyer’s matrix
- Business drivers
- Movement (ie budging people from their status quo)
- Give actual figures: eg. “We will increase your operational efficiency by 3,2% in six months”. This shows movement – can be up or down, but need to show movement!
- Get rid of:
- Gracious intros
- Company interview
- Self-promoting puffery (any words your competitors could and would use)
- Technical tripe
- Creative crap
- “How to” stuff
- What you should do:
- Establish credibility. Always first reference any referrals. This keeps people listening, particularly if they see something familiar. You could also reference a news event or anything else that makes you relevant.
- Pique curiosity. Focus on business info, not your company info. Preempt the “so what” that your audience is thinking. You want to start a business conversation about critical issues and how to solve them. You want to create a captive audience.
- Have a gracious close.
