It is fair to say that if you wish to be among the sales elite, you have to know more and know it at a higher level of competency than ever before. Selling into complex accounts is truly a highly skilled and information-intense profession.
Just like any highly skilled profession, one must not only master skills, you must also understand the principles upon which success is built. In major account selling, the most important underlying principle is the following:sell the problem before you sell the solution.
In major complex sales, the problems the customer is looking to solve are multifaceted. They’re this way for multiple reasons: different customer players have differing perceptions of the problem, problems are multidimensional, implications are difficult to assess, and the consequences of inaction are significant.
This means the salesperson must first and foremost focus on understanding the complexity of the problem. The simple proposition is to sell the problem before you sell the solution. Three steps can get you going in the right direction.
Understand the business context. The first step in selling the problem is to understand it in the first place. It’s difficult to do if you don’t have a working background of the customer’s industry and company and if you don’t recognize how this background can shape the nature and urgency of the problem. For example, has the company been around for a while and they’re looking to reinvent themselves, or are they a startup that is growing exponentially and looking to go public in a year? The same problems in these two business scenarios have different implications and consequences.
Stop jumping in too soon and talking too much. A second reason for failing to understand the problem is jumping in too soon and talking too much about the solution. When this happens, you not only fail to sell the urgency of the problem first, you present a solution that is inadequate because you have an incomplete picture of the problem. You simply miss the mark and thereafter are in a backtracking mode with the customer. Here’s the solution: ask, listen, then talk. Most people would be better off if they did more of the first two and less of the third.
Develop a shared vision of the consequences of inaction. It’s always a good idea to remember that in major accounts two sales are going on simultaneously. One sale is about whether you can persuade the customer that you are better than the other guy. The second sale is about the customer arriving at the conclusion that the problem is worth solving. If the customer decides it isn’t, then you lose the sale to a no-decision.
This second sale is why it is so important to sell the problem first. One big step in that direction is to help the customer see the consequences of inaction. When you are dealing with very complex problems in dynamic business environments, it’s rare that the customer has a comprehensive and quantified sense of the consequences of maintaining the status quo. This is a big deal, and the lack of doing it is often why big deals are lost.