Holden Advisors Blog

Most sellers follow some sort of sales process. The companies for whom they work may not label specific stages or track opportunities within them; nevertheless, the process exists. As an independent business owner, I was keenly aware of how many people I needed to contact to hold a certain number of consulting appointments to sell a certain number of products. I didn’t label my stages, but you better believe I knew how to work my numbers to hit specific revenue targets. If I didn’t, I couldn’t pay my bills, and as a straight-commission sales person, those numbers, at every step of the process, mattered.

You are sitting across the table from an important influencer within your customer’s buying center. You scheduled this meeting to outline how your new product helps the customer’s teams improve performance. You present one customer value prop after another, so many in fact, there’s no way you can lose.

Okay, so managing a sales team can be tough. You have a sales team that is in the field doing all they can to hit their numbers and you’re at half-time. You’re asking, “Will we be where we need to be at the end of the year?” The question you should be asking is, “Do your sellers have a wishbone where their backbone ought to be?” The latter is going to get you the results you need.

With the media full of reported bullying incidents in politics, schools, on sports teams, and in the work place, why do so many sales professionals put up with these similar tactics demonstrated by procurement? Some bullying experiences are subtle while some are more outrageous than others – downright kamikaze!  Negotiating Backbone is imperative for today's sellers.

We are all used to the tough negotiators. Be they in procurement or some other part of the firm, these guys push, distort the truth, and apparently do anything to get a lower price – even if it puts their own business at risk.

Innovation is the key to revenue growth and a healthy stock price, right? Firms with innovative products and services can crush the competition with unique, market-leading offerings that command premium prices and develop an early market lead. So unleash those product developers and software engineers to innovate away! Not so fast, warns experts from MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. Siloed innovation can create complexity, increase costs and leave the customer with a dizzying array of salespeople and systems to deal with.

As I work, I generally enjoy having music in the background. My favorite local station here in Minneapolis is The Current, a contemporary music station with a more eclectic mix than the local commercial stations. As a service provided by NPR, The Current had a member drive in the run up to Memorial Day, asking listeners to donate money to keep the station light on advertisements, high on value. While they are quick to point out the risk of closure if they do not receive enough donations, they made it clear that if you couldn’t afford to give, that was fine, and they were happy to have you as a listener anyway.

When we train people on Negotiating with Backbone, every now and then we get the question, “Can a buyer type change at different times?” The answer we give is, “Yes, it depends on the situation.” Today I want to share a situation I went through while getting an oil change for my car.

How Well Does Your Sales Team Harvest Value?

As the understanding and communication of value matures in a sales organization, the payoff to a company’s profit increases.  This truth is widely accepted, like that fire is hot or rain is wet.  If the fact that value creation and harvesting has profit implications is no surprise to anyone, why do so few sales teams reach a level of value maturity and fewer still are able to maximize it when they do get there?

In an article in the Wall Street Journal last week, columnist Andrea Fuller detailed her journey through the frustrations of trying to find out the fees (read: price) she pays her financial advisor. Due to conflicts of interest, the WSJ does not allow reporters to invest in individual stocks, so she has a blend of mutual funds and Exchange Traded Funds (EFTs) managed by a leading financial advice firm (she didn’t reveal which one). During her ordeal, she was told she was paying a $125 fee by someone at a call center, then promptly told by her advisor that in fact this wasn’t the case; she paid no fee, but the advisor took 0.85% of her investments. When she delved further into the fees charged by the mutual funds themselves, they could only give her a ball park amount; she’s still waiting for the final answer.