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About the Author: Michael Bosworth, Co-Founder
and Managing Partner of CustomerCentric Systems
LLC, has been a consultant to TMCA and spoke at
2004 TMCA Annual Conference in Palm Springs, Calif.
Once you get agreement on anywhere from one to
four of these usage scenarios, then you’ll
ask the buyer if, with those, they could improve
forecasting accuracy. If they say “Yes,”
then you’ve earned the right talk about
your solution. Because it’s now the buyer’s
opinion—not the salesperson’s.
By executing that questioning module, and creating
feature messaging in a usage scenario format,
you can pretty much standardize the way a salesperson
is developing a buyer’s need. And by standardizing
it, it becomes internal messaging.
It’s a significant effort involved in doing
this. But you can really extend the reach of Marketing
down to where the product really does get positioned,
which ultimately is the telephone conversation
or a meeting between a salesperson and a prospect.
Creating Sales-Ready Messaging
Sales-ready messaging, to me, means what
words come out of the salesperson’s lips
that help a buyer understand what it is that they’re
buying and how they’re going to use it.
The job of creating sales-ready messaging really
becomes: defining conversations that you think
a salesperson is going to have to have, with whom,
and on what particular business issues.
Let’s use selling SFA software as an example.
I’m going to focus on one sales conversation
to illustrate how to build a messaging template
that would enable a “B” rep to emulate
the call an “A” rep would make.
We identify all the titles—VP of finance,
VP of sales, maybe director of IT—a salesperson
may have to call on. Then, for each title, we
list their most likely business goals. For example,
a business goal for a VP of finance might be:
to achieve profit projections with accurate sales
forecasting. Once that likely goal is identified,
we add some diagnostic questions—the ones
“A” reps intuitively know to ask and
“B” reps struggle with.
Creating the Messaging Template
What you have now is a messaging template
that supports a customer conversation. Next, take
your list of product features and identify the
ones that could be used to improve forecasting
accuracy. Then, put these features into a format
that makes sense to the buyers. For example, what
is it about this feature that’s going to
be helpful to the buyer? Why do they need it?
We call this creating a “usage scenario.”
Think of your product and features as verbs—instead
of as nouns—and you can begin to create
usage scenarios, too.
We use a format we call EPA: Event, Player and
Action. The Event is the business event that would
cause them to need that particular feature. The
Player is the person or thing that is going to
take Action. And then you create messaging around
that usage scenario to equip your salespeople
to describe exactly how that product feature would
help a buyer do something better than they can
today—in order to achieve the related, stated
business goal.
For the SFA software selling example, it might
look like this:
Feature: Standard milestones
Event: Grading of opportunities varies by salesperson,
district and region after making calls
Player: Customer’s sales reps
Action: Could be prompted to report progress against
a standard set of milestones for each opportunity
in their pipeline
And, here’s how that conversation a salesperson
might have with a VP of Finance would go. First,
there’s an opening question: How do you
forecast revenue today? Then I have four potential
features and four potential usage scenarios. Also
please note that they end in a question, because
to go from a seller’s opinion to buyer’s
opinion, you’ve got to ask some questions.
One of the features could be called “pipeline
milestones.” And the usage scenario or the
question is, “What if, after making calls,
reps could be prompted to report progress against
a standard set of milestones for each opportunity
in their pipeline?”Next is electronic coaching.
If I asked everyone in the room to write down
what electronic coaching was, we’d probably
get 23 different answers. But in the usage scenario,
the reps ask, “Would it help if, on demand
from any location, sales managers could access
a central data base, evaluate the status of opportunities
and email suggestions to reps to improve the chances
of winning the business?”
The next feature is historical close rates. The
usage scenario is, “What if, on an ongoing
basis, the system could track historical close
rates for each rep by milestone and apply them
to the pipeline to predict revenue?”And
finally, there’s 24x7 access, even if they
couldn’t speak to a salesperson or sales
manager, from their desktop they could actually
have a look at a given opportunity. In the form
of a question, or a usage scenario, it’s,
“Would it help if, when needing the status
of large opportunities, you could access a centralized
data base via your laptop anytime/anywhere and
review progress against milestones?”
Now you have positioned your offering specific
to a conversation with a VP of Finance about his
goal for improving forecasting accuracy. But,
to go from a seller’s opinion to buyer’s
opinion, you’ve got to ask some questions.
That, again, makes it clear to both the buyer
and seller what it is that that feature enables
them to do. So, we identify what questions our
best salespeople would ask to determine whether
or not the buyer would need these capabilities:
1. Do forecasting metrics vary by district? How
are they enforced? Do reps rush and feel pressured
to forecast numbers? Are some overly optimistic?
How do they report progress on sales to their
managers
2. Are opportunities on the forecast unqualified?
Or stalled? How do managers assess the current
status of opportunities? How do they coach reps
to qualify/disqualify prospects?
3. Do forecast probabilities vary by salesperson?
How do sales managers adjust for this? Do you
adjust the numbers you get? How? Why?
4. Can one or two large opportunities can “make
or break” a forecast? How do you track those
prospects? Would better visibility into these
accounts be helpful?
Each question, one through four, ties in to the
corresponding feature and usage scenario. So rather
than starting by leading with your offering, you
do a diagnosis with these questions first. That
diagnosis could help you know which capability
the buyer was likely to need; but almost as important,
you’d find out which ones they don’t
need. When it was time to present the offering,
you would just present what the buyer already
agreed they need.
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