An excerpt from my latest book

As I said a week or so ago, I'm busily writing a manual for enterprise sales people. Here's another excerpt, this time from the Introduction.

If you are an Account Director that’s responsible for selling to large organizations, you’ll be well aware of the traditional challenges involved in closing a deal.

You have to build strong and lasting relationships so you can get meetings with the people who can make a buying decision. You need to do so in the face of what is ordinarily quite considerable disinterest, sometimes even open hostility.

You have to make sure you get enough things in front of your customer that your pipeline is deep. You need a deep pipeline to ensure you have enough headroom to allow for the inevitable collapse of most of what you propose.

When you have, finally, got a deal on the table, you have to negotiate shrewdly in order to make sure you maximize your margins and extract the most value possible from your customer.

And in the end, ultimately, you then have to supervise every aspect of delivery, making sure you balance your costs so you do the minimum amount of work possible. You do the minimum you can get away with because that makes economic sense and maximises your margin.

That you do all these things in spite  of the fact that they don’t help your customer makes the relationship part of what you do completely, utterly false.

Nonetheless, some of you do quite well. My observation is that only the cleverest, most charismatic, of enterprise salespeople fall into this category.  You are great actors, able to delude customers into thinking that you actually care about them. Whereas the reality is that you think firstly about your number and what you have to do to make sure you hit it.

Whether you are a good person or not, this sets you up to lie in every interaction with your customer. You don’t care about what they’re trying to achieve, you care about what you have to achieve.

I’m not critising you, mind. The way organisations are structured presently, both on sell and buy side, you are forced to behave this way because it makes the best economic sense.

But the question I’m asking is this: what if things were different. What if you truly made the customer the centre of your world? What if, actually, you stopped lying in your interactions with them?

The Great Lie of the Sales Relationship

“Lying?”, I hear you ask?

Yes, lying, and here is why I make the challenging proposition that most enterprise sales people are extremely skilled at acting out the lie of their work.

Consider again the list of things enterprise sales people do with which I opened this chapter, but this time do it in the context of a real relationship, lets say with a personal friend.

You have to build a strong and lasting bond so you can get the meetings you need to pitch in the face of disinterest. A real relationship is never founded on disinterest - it is based entirely on common interests. Your friend is a friend because of the commonality.

You have to get enough stuff in front of your customer to ensure you have a deep enough pipeline to sustain deals that don’t go anywhere. In a real relationship with a friend, you’d never do this. A real friend would come to a mutual agreement about some course of activity - just the one - and would follow it jointly with you to an outcome. Friends support each other, they don’t play a numbers game to ensure they get to a personal outcome.

You have to negotiate shrewdly to extract the maximum value from your customer. If your customer was a friend, you’d be more interested in giving away your stuff, because you know that your friend would return the value as a natural consequence of friendship.

And finally, doing the delivery, you spend all your time making sure you spend only that amount of money you need to keep things on the straight and narrow. That’s cheapness, in the context of friendship. Imagine telling your friend you’re going to spend as little on them as you can get away with! Doing the minimum possible is a long way from going the extra mile, which is what a true friend would do.

Of course, enterprise sales is not friendship, but you can see how the activities of the enterprise salesperson can easily get really false.

You can’t on the one hand say you are successful on the basis of the relationships you build, and then go on to do everything that would normally bring a relationship to its knees. That’s why the best enterprise sales people are such great actors: they can make a customer believe in the relationship whilst simultaneously optimizing the outcomes for themselves.

I'm still seeking enterprise sales horror stories from either the buy-side or the sell-side. Right now, I'm looking for anything that has to do with mismanagement of evidence (ie, when case studies or customer references, or POCs have gone wrong), and blow ups when vendors have pitched "innovation".

The final book will likely be out in a couple of months.

Comments

[Duncan]

Whilst I appreciate what you are saying here, I guess the question is, how is what you describe any different from other commercial business relationships where one party is "selling" goods and services to another? My own bank "claims" to have my best financial interests at heart, but I have to temper this with my knowldege that they will do the absolute minimum they can get away with to keep me as a customer (and they know how hard it is for me to move to another supplier).

[charger]

how is what you describe any different from other commercial business relationships where one party is "selling" goods and services to another? My own bank "claims" to have my best financial interests at heart,
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