The Marketing Bureau

By Tom Searcy
First Published on www.bnet.com

Much like medications, bananas, and beer, buzzwords should have an expiration date. The buzzword I’m most excited to see retire from the current lexicon is the “New Normal.”

But jargon pet peeves aside, I can’t ignore the fact that we continue to be in a debilitating state of economic uncertainty, and for lots of sales folks I know, that feels like a huge wall.

Want to smash through it? First you need to understand how buyers have changed — how they think, what they value, and most importantly, what moves them to spend.

Now, they buy with the following motivations:

Certainty: Decision-makers value the certainty of an outcome over the net impact of an outcome.

Horizon shrinkage: Evaluation periods are shorter for ROI and there is a great deal of pressure for causal link rather than correlational contribution.

Fluidity: The underlying question is; “How will you, my vendor/partner/supplier, deal with changes in my market/company/clients?” Because everyone understands the speed at which things change, that means they expect their partners to be hyper-responsive and fluid.

Modularity: Buyers want their solution providers to connect to their current systems and processes like LegoTM blocks. These modules also need to size down to a block and up to a spaceship, so that you as the provider can take more or less of the scope depending upon changes in the market.

Speed: Tomorrow is unacceptable, today is late, right now is behind schedule. We live in a world where buyers yell at microwave ovens for cooking too slowly and repeatedly push elevator buttons thinking it makes the machine move faster. This pressure permeates everything.

If you are going to win much bigger sales, faster you need to make some shifts of your own. Here are four key ones:

1. Be more transparent: If your buyers want more certainty, you need to show them at a much more granular level how the donuts are getting made, rather than just showing them the finished pastry.

2. Make a better business case: Pricing is not enough to get companies to buy big. You need to show how the money works from their side. This is critical. Don’t pitch the value without doing the money math. This goes beyond ROI projections. Because of the constraints on resources, buyers need to see the pricing and terms in relationship to cash flows rather than just doing their own calculations of capital expenditures or credit lines.

3. Measure, measure, measure: Show milestones, analytics, and real-time visibility. Think of how UPS gives you the ability to check a package or how some airlines call you with the status of delayed flights.

4. Control and Collaborate: You have to demonstrate and facilitate the buyer’s sense of control. In today’s high-pressure business environment, companies look at their buyers as the failures when the vendors fall short. This is exponentially true when the buyer advocates a new vendor or solution provider.

Start right now with these three steps and you will have quick wins:

Create a front-to-end map that shows how a client comes on board, gets up to speed, is monitored for performance jointly, and how you manage change. Not just a story, or just documents, you need a clear phase map with illustrations or photos to give life to this.

Develop the one-page business case. I don’t care what you are selling — real estate, outsourced services, technology, or widgets — you need to show how the money flows, the cycle of billing all the way to the invoice level with variances if appropriate. It is very different when you show how the invoices will show up than just giving a set of numbers and expecting the buyer to get it. Dates, times, and amounts help decision-makers think in terms of cash flows.

Increase your transparency as it relates to work-in-process performance. If a client has to call you to find out what is going on with his or her project, they will move quickly to a provider who pushes the information to them real-time. You may be better in performance, but the buyers need better information and more often.

Tom Searcy is a nationally recognized author, speaker, and the foremost expert in large account sales.