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Human Resources Personal Development Sales

Know Your Product/Service Through the Customer’s Perspective

Part Three of a Five-Part Series.

You need solution acumen (product or service…applied to the customer situation) to craft win-win solutions.

Previously, I introduced perspective: knowledge or insight that expands a customer’s understanding of one or more business issues. When a seller provides perspective, they apply customer-valued(not just any) insights and expertise about unanticipated outcomes.

Then, I introduced a three-legged stool: the three foundational areas of expertise a seller should possess:

  1. Business Acumen...The focus of part two. Basically, this type of expertise equips you evaluate a prospective customer’s (or any company’s) operational efficiency and effectiveness, then identify value gaps.
  2. Solution Acumen.
  3. Customer Acumen…Where we will go in part four

Today’s topic:  Solution Acumen

First of all, solution acumen is waaaaay more than simple product knowledge. I’ve met sellers who are experts on their products/services, but have only a vague inkling why a customer might care.  Consequently, they have product knowledge without solution acumen.  Ultimately, here’s the source of the disconnect:

Customers don’t buy our products or services.  Instead, they buy results. That is, they buy outcomes our products or services deliver into their lives and businesses.

Importantly, solution acumen means that you can articulate a relationship between properties of your offer and customer-valued outcomes. Knowing your product or service is something.  Knowing all about how your product or service adds value to a customer is everything.

In addition, the price they’ll willingly pay for your solution depends on clarity, certainty, and desirability of those outcomes.

Ultimately, profitability happens when you provide more value for your customer than it costs you to produce. You can only price profitably in two ways: by accident, or by understanding – and pricing to – your customer’s outcomes.  To achieve the latter, you need solution acumen.

What Solution Acumen Typically Looks Like:

Generally, solution acumen comes in degrees.  As sellers go from basic product knowledge to full solution acumen, here are some of the identifying characteristics:

Basic solution knowledge includes:

  • Specs, performance…information a subject-focused persona wants to know.
  • Available product or service options. At a basic level, every seller should understand how their offer can be stripped down, augmented, and/or bundled.
  • Commercial policies.  Similarly, basic-level  knowledge includes ordering procedures, lead times, implementation basics, pricing, available discounts, and the like.
  • Competitors: An essential understanding includes basic competitor profiles, product descriptions, etc.

Intermediate-level offer knowledge might look like:

  • Typical configurations offered, even configurations commonly purchased for specific segments.If your company has developed a standard “small business package”, this mid-level knowledge has been institutionalized.
  • Commercial policies: Above basic level, understand discounting flexibility, how the pricing exception system really works (how the game is played in your company), have complete knowledge of any implementation process, how to expedite orders, etc.
  • Competitive differentiation. In this area, sellers can articulate competitive differences, and confirm/gauge strength of customer reactions to those differences.

Advanced knowledge, aka Solution Acumen is outcome-based, and is characterized like this:

  • Applications/use cases have been modeled, and all affected buying personas’ interests can be articulated.
  • Sellers can map competitive differentiation to customer outcomes. As an aside, my value networks are one way to do this.
  • Ability to brief implementation teams with persona-specific outcomes identified during deal pursuit. A key part of solution acumen is delivering on world-class outcomes after the sale.
  • Additionally, sellers move beyond descriptions of outcomes to quantifying them (measuring outcomes in monetary terms) with prospective customers. Also, instead of mastering the ins and outs of discounting, sellers master upward pricing flexibility: understanding attainable price premium and the required customization in order to fairly and legally price at a win-win price premium.

How Solution Acumen Shapes Perspective Selling

Solution acumen enables sellers to build connections between their offer and customer-valued outcomes. To see how, look at the Venn diagram below:

Customers have value gaps, shown on the left oval.  That is, they have unmet needs and aspirations. Suppliers differentiate themselves through unique capabilities. With solution acumen, sellers’ capabilities are expressed in customer terms — outcomes,– so that customers overlap the two ovals.  Any overlap represents where sellers can provide value. Only in this overlap is where sellers perspective welcomed.

Solution acumen increases as sellers more clearly translate the right-hand oval from “we provide ____” to “you achieve _____”. In fact, this is why solution acumen is so important.  As a result, sellers who clearly articulate a cause/effect relationship between offer/outcome become trusted business advisors.

With perspective, sellers can add to the overlap by:

  1. Proposing new possible outcomes,
  2. Framing the customer situation differently…in a way that promises a better outcome
  3. Framing the decision differently…again, to yield a valued outcome.

Remember, customers don’t care about all of your capabilities, even if they are unique to your offer.  Until they can clearly see one of your capabilities enabling a valued outcome, you risk showering them with irrelevance. For this reason, “perspective” outside of a customer’s desired outcomes isn’t really perspective at all.

Solution Acumen: One Key to Perspective Selling

Remember, because customers buy outcomes, perspective sellers need to articulate them.  Optionally, sellers can tell stories, give fresh insights into a customer’s situation, ask questions to get the customer to consider new issues for themselves…in any combination.

Solution acumen is not the ability to explain seller capabilities as features and benefits.  Instead, it’s the ability to translate their product or service into customer outcomes, then to extend single outcomes into follow-on outcomes.

In conclusion, solution acumen is what connects the seller’s offer to customers’ value gaps.  While some sellers can do this naturally, most need help.  To do this, I help sales organizations revamp their sales materials and product training materials to establish high-level solution acumen organization-wide.

Feel free to comment below or to share this article.  If you would like to talk about building the solution acumen of your organization, let me know.  I’d love to help you build that organizational capability.

To your success!

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Best Practices Sales Skills

You Need Both: Sales Process AND Sales Methodology

In the sales performance space, there are those who think sales process and methodology are the same thing, and those who realize they’re different. If you couldn’t tell which side of the debate I’m on, they’re different, and do different jobs.

Some of the confusion is that both are kinds of process, although methodology isn’t always as predictably sequential.

Process:  Selling Activities.

The term selling process refers to the actions a selling organization takes along its selling journey. These steps might include (but might not be limited to):

  • Prospecting
  • Qualifying
  • Needs Analysis
  • Demonstration
  • Proposal
  • Negotiation
  • Close and Implementation.

When these are detailed sufficiently, people throughout the selling organization know what deliverables they need to support the process at what times, what documentation is expected, what resources are typically required, and much more.  Process grows into a “playbook”.

Notice that these are seller-centric activities.  Once your company builds its sales process, this are a great way to track an opportunity pursuit through your funnel or pipeline.

Today’s CRMs are mostly built around processes.  They usually come with a generic process provided, and one of the first thing a company needs to do is define their process in that CRM.  Manager dashboards will also be boilerplate at first.  It’s commonplace to track selling activities like calls made, emails sent, lunches bought, demos scheduled, and more.  Once you have management reports and analytics defined and refined, sales managers can track a lot of activities really efficiently.

There is one thing missing from sales process:  the customer’s buying process.  Tracking only selling activity fulfills the great promise of  CRM when:

  • All customers buy the same way
  • Every customers is equally engaged
  • All customers have the same needs
  • Customers respond equally to the same “value messages” (a term I really disrespect.I’ve blogged on this before, and am likely to do so again in the near future).

Every sales professional knows what doesn’t happen when they keep churning through a sales process while a customer has not progressed through a buying process.  Methodology solves for that.

Methodology: Selling Behaviors (which engage a buying process.)

Sales methodology consists of trainable, coachable, trackable selling behaviors that engage a customer in a buying process.

It’s easy to measure process, like number of telephone dials (especially with CRM/phone system integration). Measuring number of quality conversations is hard.  Don’t do either in isolation.

Ironically, I hear sales leaders tell anyone who will listen that they need to measure quality and not quantity…while looking at sales process analytics.  The reason that they’re achieving the results they may be because they’re measuring activity.

Methodology…behaviors…keeps the sales process aligned with the buying process.  Methodology behaviors might look like (but might not be limited to):

  • Understand the buying process being used
  • Understand all of the buying personas.
  • Planning and executing meeting plans to uncover all needs, all desired outcomes, and the value of all of those outcomes to the various personas.
  • Building a case for change, including adding personas where your value warrants.
  • Cultivating internal support for a proposal.
  • Aligning demonstration, then proposal points to persona outcomes.
  • Building the value case
  • Facilitating any customer change management, and setting implementation up for success.

Because every customer buys differently, methodology tends to be less rigidly sequential.  The customer buy process drives methodology, but should generally track with a well-designed (that is, customer-centric) selling process.  For example, change management appears prominently near the end of a sales process, but methodology should have uncovered individual persona outcomes and developed supporters of the change all through a pursuit.

Process vs. Methodology:

 First, I should point out that by “vs.” above, I don’t mean that there is an either/or choice.  You need both.  The “vs.” is because I want to contrast the two to show why you need both.

Process vs Methodology Table

Process organizes and orchestrates the complex web of selling organization activity around selling and delivering the company’s offer.  Methodology organizes the selling organization’s effort to facilitate a customer buying decision.

Sales process is measured by activities, which can be measured by any current CRM system I’ve ever heard of.  Methodology is about selling behaviors; only a few exceptional CRMs track behaviors, although most can be modified to do so.

Sales process, as simple activities, can generally be learned and mastered via a straightforward “knowledge transfer” class of training.  Methodology involves behavior change, and requires some element of coaching to lock in behavior change.

Process adoption and compliance results in selling efficiency, whereas methodology focuses on building customer-perceived value of your offer.  Great methodology drives customer value, which makes selling more effective. Efficiency and effectiveness can both drive up sales, but in different ways.  Efficiency might mean churning more prospects through a low close-ratio process each month.  Effectiveness could mean increasing the close ratio.  They aren’t mutually exclusive. They are synergistic.

Don’t Confuse the Two.  Don’t Limit Yourself to Either/Or.

I hope that you found this compare and contrast article useful.  Process and Methodology are both worthwhile pursuits. I help clients with both, and they feel different.  Please comment below, or contact me directly if you have any detailed questions.

To your success!