The following are excerpts from is an interview by Jaki Adams, Partner and Chief of Operations for the OverDrive group of companies. In this one, Jaki interviews Sales OveDrive’s CEO on this important topic of just how one engages in a new revenue opportunity.
Jaki: Today we will discuss how to engage in a new revenue opportunity with Bob Howard. Bob is the CEO and founder Sales OverDrive. Bob brought me into the company almost 18 years ago. Since then we have worked together on wining and managing a large number of client engagements, si I hope that readers find this interview helpful.
Jaki: Bob, the topic we’ll discuss today is how our one can engage their target market, specifically potential buyers, into engaging conversations and ultimately becoming clients o theirs.
Bob, I think you would say that over the years we’ve worked together, very few companies have a repeatable process or really any game plan to bring prospects into an engaging relationship. So today can you give our audience some practical concepts and ideas on how to do that and the tool that our team uses to map the inner circle?
Bob: That’s right, Jaki.
These days everybody wants to have more fruitful conversations with prospects. But so often what we find is that the sales professionals are not well prepared to have these conversations or know how to conduct them. So before we discuss mapping the inner circle and other tools, it’s important to have a plan for the conversation, i.e., who are we calling? What will be talking about? What is likely to be the listener’s attitude given their position with their company? And with what issues are they likely dealing? And what concerns they might have related to the offering you will be positioning in on the call, to name a few.
So that means you need to know something about the company, of course. Surprisingly, on so many of recorded prospect conversations I listen to, the sales folks seem to know very little about the prospect’s business and have no plan for the call. As a result, any number of opportunities to understand the prospect and develop meaningful relationships are missed altogether and are mistakenly categorized as “no interest”.
You know I always say that the best way to promote your business offering is not by speaking directly to its strengths, etc., but by virtue of the quality of the question you ask. We have a lesson-set on that.
While most have a script around the attributes and advantages of their product or service, few plan around actively listening to their prospect. That plan should be built around specific outcomes for the conversation. And I have to say as you begin to map the inner circle it’s important to find out a number of things. “Who’s Who” in the political landscape, who are the influencers, whose decision it is it to make, who will be affected by the adoption of your offering and how best to move the sales forward.
Secondly, understanding and validating whether the prospect has goals and objectives or “Key Agendas” that align well with your offering and whether they have the resources to implement your service or acquire your product.
Thirdly, does your prospect organization have the motivation to do something and move your sales initiative forward right now. So many times I see sales folks failing to engage and purse conversations with the wrong person or group of people. While it’s normally necessary to have a number of conversations with various people in the prospect organization before the power influence grid and inner circle decision making process is understood, those conversations will need to be crafted with that person and their role, objectives and motivations in mind.
Jaki: Then what does a conversation sound like and what is a good structure for the conversations?
Bob: Yes, if we divide the conversation into 3 categories or groups of questions that can determine very quickly whether we have a prospect that will move forward or not.
The first is validation that the company may have an interest in doing something that pertains to your product or offering, i.e., there may be good alignment of this type of application or product you offer and perhaps an agenda to study it. The first question might go something like this: Jaki, you know we’ve noticed that your company has been looking at XYZ offerings that improve profitability as have some of our clients/customers. The productivity increases have proven to be quite great. Are you seeing this in the market as well and do you have any agendas that are focused on looking at this?
Jaki: So validation is the first step as to whether the prospect is ready, right?
Bob: Yes. The second category has to do with pain. This one is missed most often. Here you’re trying to understand whether there is a pain or pinch point – something that is hindering them from meeting their objectives or key agendas in one or more areas of their operations – one that is severe enough for them to to act or be open to a new idea you have as to how to solve the problem, leading naturally to how your solution has helped others and how it aligns with or solves that pain.
Jaki: Can you elaborate a bit more on that and how to testing for those internal pain points?
Bob: I’d be happy to. I think one of the things lot of people are discovering is that a pain or need is related to some business process in an organization. You can almost always tie the pain right back to one or more the prospect’s business processes. And if your product or solution impacts that business process or processes (it could be several that are creating the pain), then you have a nice opportunity to create a prospective scorecard as to the financial, staff turnover for example or other measurable impact your offering can make on a going-forward basis.
So explore the pain and what processes it relates to with a set of questions around whether they have pain that springs from the process that you product or service can impact or improve.
You can say something like this: “Jaki, are you experiencing difficulty getting data that is actually predictive of the revenue your team is likely to produce this quarter?” You might also ask “Do you currently have a way to track data and to know where you’re best opportunities are in the sales pipeline?” Those are couple of exploratory questions on a the relevance and accuracy data their CRM is producing.
With questions like this, your prospect is given the opportunity to be cathartic about this and often several other issues bothering them. Just as in marriage counseling, this cathartic “getting it out” puts them in what I like to call “The Give-Back Mode” where that trust builds and the prospect (though they might not realize it) feels the urge to give back to you. That can take the form of guidance as to how you can sell the decision maker or the giving you the sale more quickly.
Then you can repeat the cycle with additional questions to which you need answers. This builds “relational currency” which you want, especially in a complex or difficult sales scenarios.
Jaki: Very interesting. Would you talk about the third step that you mentioned about testing?
Bob: Yes, that really has to do with the prospect’s motivation to proceed with finding a product or service that solves those process issues(s) and therefore the pain you identified. In any organization there are people that you would tag as decision makers, those who are the influencers and those I call the facilitators – those who are not buyers and really don’t have the ability to influence but they are willing to move or facilitate the conversation along the decision making path inside their organization because they are simply helps oriented or, as often, wish to gain currency (some influence) within the organization – especially if they are trying to make their way in the organization.
So when you explore, it’s not only 1) to determine whether they will or will not have the motivation to move forward to do something about that pain they shared with us, but also 2) to find out if they’re one of the right people with whom to converse. Here you can ask a question like the following: “Given that you have this issue, would you be interested in exploring… or What if you could accomplish X by Y date, or What if we can improve your profitability by 30% this year?” The answer to questions like these will tell you whether you have one of the right people.
If they say no, not interested, that’s usually not the right person – or you haven’t told the enough to see the values you bring and that’s a different execution problem we address elsewhere. If they say yes, you can continue the dialogue as follows: “What are the obstacles and impediments along the path to improving your business now… and “what concerns do you have about adding our solution/product in this area?”
Jaki: I see. Bob, can you talk about what’s beyond planning and testing and how you engage in mapping out this inner circle and developing those dream relationships.
Sure. A common question relates to engaging with people with different roles in the organization as it relates to your offering. First, the Users of your solution will have different question, objectives, resistance levels and fears than their managers and of senior management. In as far as crafting the questions, we have a nice template we can provide anyone dealing with this issue. That is available by sending in an inquiry and ask for it and I or one of us will send it to you and walk you through it with how to use it in greater detail. Simply click on the following link https://www.salesoverdrive.com/contact/
I think everyone knows that in larger organizations and more complex pursuits, you’ll have to speak with a larger audience than just one or two people. So identifying their role in the organization as well as their role in the decision making processes (often different) is pretty important.
So let me talk about the inner circle and the power influence. Obviously to maximize velocity in any sales pursuit, we really need to know who the people are in the organization are who can make the decision and those who are influencers, as well as those that can help us move the conversation along – the facilitators I mentioned. So let’s envision the power influence grid with four quadrants. The upper two quadrants contain those people that have positional authority, CEO, CFO, Chief Operating Officer, or other C-level or division-level chief, the ultimate decision maker, or that group of people that you know or are ordinarily the right people.
In the lower quadrant are those who do not have decision authority but they could influence the decision. This could be the executive assistant, a bright engineer or anyone that has influence over the decision making process. These people are sometimes pretty hard to identify. For example, there are two technical people in our own organization that don’t show up anywhere in the org chart or our websites, but without whom we won’t make a decision when it comes to technology.
So let’s say your particular application would be used by people who don’t have influence. Let’s say a company is hiring a senior sales executive for a hundred million dollar enterprise. You might think that just from the organizational chart, the VP of HR would have a lot of influence in the decision but often that’s not the case. So sometimes you’ll have people that look like they have the right title to be decision makers but they actually don’t even have influence. These are in the PN category – Positional authority but no influence.
Then, there are those who don’t have positional authority or influence – those in the NN category. Let’s say you’re selling a piece of fabrication equipment that to go into manufacturing, electronics manufacturing operations. Those might be engineering or production staff that will be looking at or using the equipment. So there will be some with no positional authority or influence.
Therefore, you will want to populate the power influence grid as you develop relationships in the target organization. You’ll find that most of the people you speak with will not have influence and those you might least expect, will have significance.
Jaki: Got it. So it’s really important when are mapping the inner circle to look at the people and their roles in an organization. And by engaging and hopefully asking good questions you can determine whether they have, as you describe, that positional authority or that influence on the decision making process or if they don’t have either of those. So for those who want more information about mapping the inner circle, can they go to sales overdrive, find this tool?
Bob: Yes, this tool is available on request as well as the other tool I mentioned.
If you are reading this, I do hope it has helped to you. Feel free to contact us and we will be happy to help you in nay way we can.
Jaki: Thanks very much, Bob.