bSelling from the Top Down (and bottom up)

When we first developed bSelling Opportunity Management Software we had a choice: Focus on bottom-up or top-down issues.

We chose bottom-up first: Make the software easy and fun to use, and useful to the individual sales rep.

Almost immediately, our early adopters made us very aware that as much as they loved what we already had, there were burning top-down issues that needed to be addressed asap:

1. How can the sales manager get an effective overview of all open opportunities?  And then drill down.
   
2. Similarly, how can an individual salesperson get perspective of all his opportunities in order to better gauge where and how to focus effort?
3. How can a sales manager customize the qualification process to fit her team's needs?
4. How can a sales person or manager share insights with other team members, or present a pitch to clients?

We listened and have carefully crafted some exciting new features, again blending visual flair with smart functionality:

Better overviews: The bSelling Opportunity Explorer

The bSelling Opportunity Explorer is a new dashboard that shows every open Opportunity and positions it graphically based on its qualification percentage -- the likelihood of success as determined through the bSelling flip-card based Qualify tool -- and the expected Amount in $ from a successful close:

Click to view a larger image

The size of the bubble shows how much effort the rep. has been devoting to the opportunity.  Hovering on an opportunity identifies it and gives precise numbers.  Clicking opens up bSelling for that opportunity.

Overview

Looking at the overall distribution gives an at-a-glance overview of where all opportunities are at, and where the effort is going.  The four quadrants are labelled to assist interpretation:

1. Excellent: The upper right contains the best-qualified, highest amount opportunities
2. Safe bets: The lower right are well qualified, lower amount opps
3. Pie in the sky: The upper left contain the high amount, not yet well qualified opps
4. Poor: The lower left contains poorly qualified, low yield opps

Reading the patterns

With very little practice, certain patterns should start to leap out as meaningful:

• In the image above the line of small circles on the vertical axis are unqualified opportunities.  Why haven't they been qualified yet?
  
• Large circles in the left quadrants reflect opportunities where a lot of effort is going in without much progress.  Some of the "pies in the sky" may be worth persisting with (for a while), but the "poor" opps need to be quickly qualified across or dropped.

For the individual salesperson this overview can be a powerful tool to help manage his pipeline.  For the manager, it allows her to see how the team as a whole is performing, and focus action where needed.

Customization: Tailoring the process

The bSelling Qualify Tool adds rigor and guidance to qualification by asking the salesperson to flip through virtual card-decks that rate all the important factors associated with an opportunity.

It is now possible with bSelling premium to customize this standardized tool across a team or organization to meet a preferred methodology or to cater to specialized needs:

And here's an in-depth overview.

Sharing: Exporting to PowerPoint

Sales and account managers often need to report on key opportunities to executives and other non-sales colleagues.  To illustrate their understanding of an opportunity and to help their audience understand the client contacts' perspectives, bSelling premium now includes a convenient "export to PowerPoint" facility in the Diagnose Pain tool.

When pitching to a customer, diagrams prepared in Present & Sell can be turned into a sequence of PowerPoint slides in the same way.

Conclusion

bSelling remains fun and friendly, but has grown more power-packed.  

It blends bottom-up advantages (usefulness, simplicity, fun) with top-down virtues (overview, customizability) and communication (visualization, PowerPoint export).

We'll keep refining it, and can also further customize to meet more specialized needs.

Provocation-based Selling (and Provocative Writing)

Who doesn't love a controversy?  Want to get noticed?  Provoke!  Capture attention!

The trick is to follow up with something that hits the spot lest you alienate your suddenly alert audience.

One way to provoke attention is to insult a big-name.  In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review -- In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers -- the authors (including Geoffrey "Crossing the Chasm" Moore) slam the generic notions of consultative selling and especially solution selling (as opposed to the more specific Consultative Selling and Solution Selling®) either through ignorance or in a straightforward grab for attention.

The only problem -- as Keith Eades, CEO of SPI correctly points out --  is that they have done so to a large extent by over-simplifying Solution Selling,  and  then  comparing their "new" approach to a whittled down husk: 

Whereas solution-selling salespeople listen for “pain points” that the customer can clearly articulate, provocation works best when it outlines a problem that the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to. -- from the article

But Solutions Selling has a powerful way to think about where your customer is at, before getting into "pain points":  Levels of Need*: 

1. Latent need: Unaware of a need that could be satisfied by purchase (perhaps they are unaware that there's a problem, or in denial, or resigned to coping with the status quo)
2. In pain: Aware of the need ("in pain"), but unaware of how your offering can help
3. Vision creation: The prospect has a vision or a "Solution", ideally including your offering. 

A key part of Solutions Selling is to move the customer upward through these Levels of Need.  The article mis-characterizes Solution Selling as simply asking the prospect about their pain (i.e. jumping in at level 2 - In pain), while correctly pointing out that during a downturn many more people will tend to be at level 1 because they are doing their best to make-do with much-reduced budgets and discretionary funds.

A key part of "provocation-based selling" seems to be to provoke a response by forcefully articulating a problem that the customer has, get them to acknowledge it, and then make a bee-line to the person who has the authority to do something about it (and who can release funds to purchase).

This is all good Solution Selling, just in slightly different terms.  In classic Solution Selling one would first try to stimulate the interest of a contact with a Reference Story, typically describing a person in a similar situation to their current one and how you were able to help that person.  Hopefully the contact will respond by either confirming that (s)he has similar issues, or -- equally good -- say something like, "No, we don't have those problems.  This is what's really bugging me ...".  Either way, you are engaging and on your way to level 2.  While exploring the prospect's pain, you should also be finding out who else is affected (i.e. who else you need to speak to get a fuller organizational picture of the pains, and also who can authorize a sale), etc.   [I have a fuller summary of Solution Selling here.]

The authors of the HBR article have a good point to make: That during a downturn a forceful -- or provocative -- approach may be a good way to jolt prospects into thinking about what can be done to improve their business, including alerting them to problems that they may be reluctant to address.  They suggest a mixture of fear -- "if you don't do something you're doomed" -- and hope -- "but we can help you get through this".  This seems like a good approach, provided you have accurate information, and can pull it off without alienating your prospect by coming across as arrogant: "I know your problems better than you"!

So "props" to the authors of In a Downturn, ... for being provocative, and thereby garnering some attention for the important issue of jolting people out of latency during a downturn.

My guess is that the authors feigned ignorance of Solution Selling etc. to whip up controversy, and that's probably a good thing!

* Austhink's add-on to SalesForce crm -- bSelling Opportunity Management -- augments SalesForce's contact information (which is a bit more Miller-Heiman-esque out-of-the-box) with a Level of Need field.  Naturally, we also do pain points!

To Customize is Cool

It's cool to customize! It practically has the word "customer" in it, so what's not to love?

Seriously: When prospective customers see the Qualify tool -- part of Austhink's bSelling add-on to Salesforce crm ...


they say two things:

1. Wow!
2. Can I customize it?

The "Wow!" reaction is because here is a tool that really helps the salesperson with a vital but difficult task -- sales qualification -- in a fun way. It provides useful feedback -- an overall percentage, and sensible concrete ways to boost the score. Ok: Most of the wow is because of the fun factor and groovy way it plays (like flipping through photos on a Mac).

The second reaction -- the wish for customization -- is natural. Although at Austhink we believe that the out-of-the-box system is quite generic, sales teams do of course vary in their terminology, types of customers, and overall slant sales.

So, I recommend a suck it before you salt it approach:

1. Try out the generic version (that comes with the free version of bSelling) on a few opportunities to get the feel for the process. Just pick a neutral "card" if a factor doesn't seem to apply.
   
2. Make notes about where the terminology needs revision, which "factors" don't apply, and which (if any) are missing.
3. Upgrade to the premium version of bSelling and make use of our soon-to-be-released customize feature.
4. If you need extra help, we can arrange consultation!
   

The customize feature allows your company to change the wording, options, factors, and weightings -- i.e. everything -- of the Qualify tool to tailor it to fit your unique situation. Just like the tool itself, it looks great, is fun-to-use and it has a game-like feel. Here's a sneak peak:


Each line represents a deck of cards in the tool, and each block represents a single card. The length of each line represents the weight of each factor. You just click on a box to edit some wording (shown), or click on an end box to stretch or squash a line (to make a factor more or less important compared to the others). Other operations are similarly simple.

By the way: If you think of the Qualify tool as a level in a game, the customization tool is like the level-designer that allows an obsessed user to design new game levels for their friends to play. In this case, the customization tool allows the sales-manager to tweak (or totally revamp) the qualification process to fit local conditions, and better monitor (and mentor) the sales team.

We are about to trial the customization tool with a select group of beta-testers -- email me at dan@austhink.com if you want to give it a whirl -- and the first version should be available in the next week or so.

First web-based product released: bSelling

Last week we -- Austhink Software -- released our first web-based product, bSelling Opportunity Management, an add-on application to the web-based Salesforce CRM.

Yay team!

Here are some brief notes about the product (a visual tool to enhance the performance of sales teams), its placement (as an add-on to Salesforce CRM available through salesforce.com's AppExchange), and the development experience (using Adobe Flex + Django talking to Salesforce).

The Product
The best way to get a taste for this add-on, which helps the salesperson to better Qualify (i.e. estimate the percentage chance of closing the deal) , better understand the customer's pain(s), and ultimately pitch more effectively to the customer's needs -- is to check out the 2 minute (approx.) introductory video:

bSelling video

For non-sales people, here's my distillation of Solution Selling, one of a family of consultative approaches to sales -- along with SPIN, Strategic and Consultative Selling -- that bSelling is intended to support.

The Placement
Austhink's Softwares previous products, bCisive and Rationale were PC-based and intended to create new markets: Rationale for improving Critical Thinking in education, and bCisive for applying Visual Thinking to business.

For our first web-offering we decided to pick a more targeted application -- consultative selling -- and apply our visual approach more narrowly. This enabled us to go from "let's port bCisive to the web" (a daunting undertaking on account of the size of the pre-existing product) to "let's port the bits of bCisive that will help with consultative selling" (a smaller and more customer-centric) undertaking.

We aimed from the outset to put the resulting application on Salesforce.com's AppExchange, as a way to make bSelling visible to our chosen market segment, and to offer easy integration with the leading web-based CRM.

Development Experience
We accomplished this with a team of 3 in just over two months, admittedly making use of some initial work on a web-port from last year, plus our accumulated experience from bCisive, Rationale and some earlier non-commercial web-based projects, most notably Aaron's side-project, Path of a Hero.

We found that Adobe Flex / AS3 gave us the graphic power (and portability across browsers) that we wanted for the front-end, with our architecture hanging off a slightly souped-up version of the PureMVC framework. We use Django / Python / MySQL for the back-end and use AMF3 / PyAMF to get fast communication between the back and front-ends.

The big unknown for us was integration with Salesforce CRM. It turns out that their APIs and docs are pretty good, and we were able to embed our app as a web-page in their S-Control.

Now, it is possible to build apps entirely on their force.com platform, but we chose not to because:

• It required a steeper learning curve
• We had a pre-existing technology investment
• It would couple us completely to their platform

On the negative side this meant that we had to subject ourselves to a nerve-wracking security review. This involved submitting our organization's written policies plus go under attack from their review team. It was certainly "an experience", a bit liking going back to University for another exam, but their liaison was helpful in guiding us through the process, and we achieved a provisional pass first time (much relief).

One note for start-ups: There is normally a $US5000 application fee for the review (annual!). The two ways to waive this are to develop directly on the force.com platform (i.e. inside the Salesforce sandbox), or to supply a free version of your app. We went with the free version.

Compared to the security review, the final review was less demanding.

The Future
We are putting the finishing touches on an "export to PowerPoint" feature for the paid version, so that a salesperson can grab some snappy visual slides to supplement customer presentations.

Naturally getting the word out is paramount -- thanks to AppExchange we've already had some people checking out the video and installing bSelling-- and we look forward to responding to customer feedback with further refinements. To this end we have set-up UserVoice to help out with this. The AppExchange infrastructure requires people to leave details, so we will also follow up (selectively and politely) with some of the early adopters to find out worked and what didn't.

Beyond bSelling on Salesforce we are also look at integrating it with other online platforms (SugarCRM is an obvious candidate).

And beyond that lie other applications in Sales and other business verticals. We aim to apply our skills and technology to create other "Enterprise 2.0" apps, but in these -- ahem -- challenging times we need to be strategic about picking off targets.

Distillation of Solution Selling

A few months ago we did a training course on Solution Selling, and yesterday I bought the book. After reading the introduction -- a bit more to go! -- thought that it would be a useful exercise to try to describe its essence in my own words:

Origins
Solutions Selling is a codification of smart sales practices by Mike Bosworth dating back to 1983. Originally Bosworth went straight from College to pursue a career in the technical support at Xerox corp., before it was suggested that he try his hand at sales, which he did (at first reluctantly). The book was published in 1995.

A Consultative Approach
Rather than foist your product on an unwilling (or even willing) prospect the Solutions Selling approach encourages you take the buyer's perspective and work with him or her in a non-pitchy way. By the end of the process a decision to buy should be a "no-brainer":

• the customer should feel ownership of the resulting solution
  
• the value should be evident to the customer how the purchase leads to enhanced capabilities
• these enhancements should be quantifiable, so that the purchase price is justified to other people in the customer's organization
  
• the customer should feel personally empowered by the experience and the result
  
• the personal relationship with the salesperson should be perceived as positive

Applicability
Solution selling lends itself particularly well to large complex offerings. For example

• Service and product combination
• When you compete on customization and/or integration
  

However, the principles can be applied on smaller scales as well, exercising judgment about how much and which parts of the process to apply.

Theory
Let's divide prospective customers into groups / stages:

1. Not in target market: No need for your offering(s).
2. Latent need: Not aware of a need that could be satisfied by purchase
3. In pain: Aware of the need ("in pain"), but unaware of how your offering can help
4. Vision creation: The prospect has a vision or a "Solution", ideally including your offering

The key is to be aware of where the prospect is between steps two-to-four, and not get out-of-synch. with the prospect. Classic example: There's no point trying to tell someone that they need your product if they don't perceive it that way.

Examples:

1. If the prospect is in group 1, go after someone else rather than try to sell them something they simply don't need. Better to steer them in the right direction and build trust and respect for the longer term.
2. If the prospect is in group two, use appropriate questioning to get more clarity, but also to move the prospect toward a clear perception that they have a real need (which would move them into group 3)
3. Quantify the pain, find out who else in the client organization is affected (and go talk to them), find out who has the power to buy, find out which hypothetical capabilities would enable them to address their pain
   
4. Two possibilities: They are already heavily leaning towards a competing vendor's vision / offering (you need to realize this, and use FUD to un-sell them and get them to come over to your vision -- "re-engineering"), or use what was learned previously to put forward a jointly-developed vision that they know will give them real, quantifiable value.

Application
The actual Solutions Selling methodology explicitly fleshes out how to do it!

It includes lots of advice and tools including a detailed and distinctive nine-block vision processing model.

Challenges in putting it into practice
Naturally, Solutions Selling is not a panacea (silver-bullet):

In a freely available McKinsey & Co. report (registration required), Solutions Selling: Is the pain worth the gain?, the following points are made:

Unfortunately, our discussions with over 60 solutions sellers suggest that three out of four companies selling solutions fail to see sustainable economic impact.

They suggest that some possible keys to getting Solutions Selling to work well (my emphasis):

First, you have to understand how a solution is positioned in terms of two key variables, customization and integration. This positioning drives the basis of your competitive advantage and - most crucially -the "pain/gain" trade-offs you need to understand.

Then, you have to execute quite differently from a standard product-based go-to-market model in at least the first two - and preferably all - of five key dimensions:

1. Create distinctive solutions value propositions using customer business metrics, not product price/performance metrics.
2. Radically change the selling approach, and if necessary, the sales talent.
   
3. Price solutions based on total business value delivered, not component features.
4. Align the entire organization, not just sales, with the solutions opportunity.
5. Maintain control of all aspects of implementation to ensure end-to-end value delivery.

Solutions selling is not for everyone. But for those who understand and can implement these imperatives, there is tremendous upside.

Comment: The essential dimensions, one and two, on my reading amount simply to properly applying certain parts of Solutions Selling properly (as distinct, I suppose, from paying lip-service).

However, this may not always be simple. The report suggests that on average 2/3 of salespeople with a background in product-centered sales are unable to successfully make the shift to Solutions Selling. They recommend that "stars" be recruited from other areas, suggesting that star-sellers are either:

• Already doing things similar to Solutions Selling (so the shift is smaller),
  
• Are more adaptable than regular salespeople in terms of trying a different approach, or
  
• Will be successful independent of the methodological approach adopted by the sales-team!
  

Conclusion
Solutions Selling is a consultative sales methodology that reminds me a bit of the Getting to Yes school of negotiation in that it aims to move away from negative relations between the two parties (e.g. adversarial, distrust, fear) towards cooperative problem-solving to seek out win-wins.

It has repercussions for the individual salesperson in that it encourages a specific systematic approach, but promises improvements in:

• efficiently deciding which opportunities to pursue
• improved client engagement
• better professional relationships and reputation

leading to conversion-rate, sales figures and referrals. For the organizations that successfully embrace it, better sales performance is anticipated, but the following are needed:

• Suitable organizational alignment with suitable offerings and pricing
  
• Sales and other staff to execute on the approach (or at least most of it)

Granted organizational alignment, it stands to reason that certain organizational initiatives can increase the likelihood of individual and company-wide success when adopting Solutions Selling (and similar approaches):

1. Training
2. Mentoring
3. Recruiting
4. Technological support (tools that make the tasks easier, help apply essential parts of the methodology appropriately)