CEO Key Challenges for 2017
Late January 2017 we invited a group of Storm CxOs to participate in a conversation around the challenges they are anticipating for 2017. Below a write-up on the conversation.
Key Challenges in 2017
As part of this process we started with a short workshop in which we teamed up the attendees and asked them to come up with 2–3 key challenges for 2017. Going around the room these were identified as the key issues:
Q1: Dependency on/how to develop top of funnel/DemandGen
Q2: In particular how to get to the right decision maker
Q3: With limited resources — how do we identify the right market to go after
Q4: How do we measure success?
Q5: Customer are not in a hurry. How can we inject a sense of urgency
Q6: Continued pressure on discount — what advice for a pricing strategy
Q7: Noisy market, how do we stand out in 2017
Although these issues by themselves are common enough, what did stand out is that the CxOs working in very different verticals such as Healthcare, Human Resources, IT Infrastructure and Security all identified very similar issues.
At Winning By Design we believe these very same issues stem from companies using the exact same and failing approach. It is as if all companies are still going back to the same well, a well that has run dry.
Advice for success in 2017
#1 Customer Centric Selling — An approach in which prospective customers voice they do not want to be sold, and/or treated as a trophy with a bonus on their head. Instead the role of a sales organization is to assist a customer through the buying process by diagnosing and providing the information that allows a customer to make the right trade-off.
Figure 1: The experiences a customer goes through (Authentic Go-To-Market)
Organizations have to rethink how they approach a prospective customer
- Customers hate to be Qualified! As a provider you want to see if the customer is worth your time. This sets of strong emotional feelings of discrimination. Why? Because this is a one-sided process in which the customer gains nothing. You have to rethink that process so that the customer gains valuable out of a diagnose. In this case help them establish the Impact on the business, and to have a solution in place by a date so that it will impact
- Assisting the customer. When a customer promises you a P/O by Monday — Don’t call on Tuesday to ask “Where is my purchase order?”. Instead ask “Are we still on track to hit your date?”
- Never Close a customer! Stop thinking about it as closing. Both of you Commit to a plan that helps achieve success. Ahum both of you. This commit needs to be clearly spelled out as a two-way agreement.
- There is no discount in SaaS. Many providers believe they need to offer a discount to get a customer to commit. Instead think of this as price adjustments in which you receive something in return of equal/bigger value to you. Think of that 20% discount as 20% churn.
#2 Use of Impact and Critical Event: For decades we have used BANT(TM) as a way to qualify/measure a deal. Sales specialist all agree this is a completely outdated. Today we recommend companies to focus on two key areas:
Impact. There are two kinds of impact; Emotional impact such as making a promotion, and a rational impact such as improved RoI. Understanding Impact requires understanding on the business of a client. Often this falls well beyond the skill set of most Sales Development Reps who disqualify a deal on Need (outer layer). This requires training, practice and drilling.
Figure 2: It can take up to seven questions to identify the real impact beyond need, and Impact has both an emotional and rational component.
Critical Event —Your sales team needs to learn that priority is a function of time. To determine priority they need to know if there is an event on the horizon that drives the sense of urgency. As you see in the picture below, #4 is one of the ideal moments to help a customer as they experienced the pain of not having a solution before. Even more so than #2. During #2 the client never experienced the pain before and did not anticipate this to become a MUST HAVE. This requires your sales professionals to help a customer “look back” first before they look “forward”.
Figure 3: Priority is not static. It changes over time. Where is your customer on this chart?
Answers to the questions raised by the audience
Q1: How to develop top of funnel/DemandGen.
A1: Focus on customers who have gone through a past event, and whose business you can impact. Dominique Levin will provide a separate write-up on this (link to follow).
Q2: How to get to the right decision maker.
A2: Focus on asking your client if they have “bought a solution like this before”, if they have “ask what was the process”. If they say no — ask “who has?”
Q3: How do we identify the right markets.
A3: Focus on markets with past events such, and on whose business you can make the biggest impact.
Q4: How do we measure success.
A4: Measure the Impact your product has created on a customer’s business, e.g. revenue up, cost down, or improved customer experience. Or emotional impact: At Verisign they measured how many CISOs were Verisign graduates.
Q5: How to inject a sense of urgency.
A5: If a customer says I need this by x/y. Ask “What happens if you miss that date”. If nothing it means this is likely not going to happen. Alternatively you are identifying Impact “We will miss our targets” or “I will get fired.” Once you found a critical event go after similar customers who experience the same event!
Q6: How to develop a stronger pricing strategy.
A6: Don’t focus on price, focus on identifying the impact you make on a customers business. Be maniacal about asking your customers all the time about this.
Q7: How do we stand out in 2017.
A7: In a noisy digital world, consider your sales team, and the way they communicate with your clients the #1 USP of your company. Make the way they communicate stand-out; use of video, personalized snail mail messages etc.
Thanks to Tae Hea Nahm, Ryan Floyd and the team at Storm Ventures, and Dominique Levin to facilitate these conversations to raise the awareness around the transformation of sales.