Picture a sales person that you think is bad. Do any of these descriptors strike a chord?
Cheesy, crusty, dated, disconnected, clueless, or cringe factor 10
Why do these descriptors come to mind?
If you can’t picture a bad /outdated sales person, beware: Maybe it’s you.
Everything evolves and changes — nothing stays the same. As technology sales people, we should be more aware of this than our peers in other industries. Yet while our customers have changed how they purchase technology, many of us are still using our old-school tricks to sell.
Let’s be honest — selling has evolved. The last big breakthrough was solution selling. It had its place and was an elegant next-gen progression from feature selling and product selling. However, as far as I am concerned, if you are still approaching your customers with a solution selling mindset, you might as well be wearing a beeper on your belt.
Today, you have to sell documented, quantifiable business outcomes to your customers, and you must be able to prove that you can create cash flow. It is no longer enough to describe the attributes of how a solution will help your customer, which is kind of like describing the water to a drowning customer.
It is as simple as this: Instead of a laundry list of product attributes, you have to be able to take your customers’ current situation and convert it into cash flows that quantifiably show how your product or service will drive revenue, control costs, or increase margin.
Let’s compare methods.
The old-school method would include an approach similar to this: “We know you want to get more customers, and we have this wonderful email and social media application that will automatically brand and insert your messaging across the entire Internet. There will be so much more brand awareness that people everywhere will know who you are. Because they know who you are, they will understand your brand, what you are all about, and they will want to buy more from you.”
In cash flow selling, your approach would sound more like this: “We know that for every email campaign, you get a .2-percent response rate. Of that .2-percent response rate, we know that 80 percent of them turn into a sale. Your average sale is $982, and your average margin per sale is 28 percent. So, if you put our solution in and run the metrics out across four campaigns a year, with a customer base and target base of 800,000, you will convert X, your revenue will be X, and your margin will be X.
“Additionally, when you look at the cost of our solution and run it through a discounted cash flow model, and we put in your cost of capital and run the net present value on it, it will cover your cost of capital at 8 percent, drive an internal rate of return of 52 percent, and will pay for itself in four months.”
Which do you think your customer would rather hear? A conversation about brand awareness and how it could improve sales, or a conversation that includes projections of how they will improve cash flow while they cover the cost of acquiring your products?
If you get the right metrics from the right people, you can build cash-flow models that will work. Much like solution selling, this is the elegant evolution of sales. It is very sophisticated, and it is a great way to get customer attention above all the noise they currently hear from your competitors.
Just as you would replace that old beat-up beeper with a Smartphone, you need to constantly evaluate, update, and possibly replace your selling methodology. Learn how to sell with a cash-flow model and watch your business thrive. Keep in mind, however, that cash flow will become table stakes.
Like all sales methods – from door-to-door sales to product and feature selling – cash flow also eventually will evolve into something better – maybe it will be the requirement that you tie into shareholder value and project how your products and services will drive and improve the basis points of the stock.
Keep yourself and your sales team relevant by being willing to stay up on trends and learn new methodologies.
What do you think will be the next big thing in sales?
