Somehow, there seem to me to be a couple of fundamentals to customer engagement:

• Get the customers to talk about themselves, what they do, and what they want to do.
• Talk to customers about what they want to talk about.

People like talking about themselves and what they do.  They like to have an audience that is genuinely interested in them.  They listen to things they are interested in.

If it’s so easy, why is it so difficult for sales people to do?  I think there are a bunch of reasons:

• The same rules apply to us, we like talking about ourselves, we like talking about what we do.  What makes it worse, is that we’ve been professionally trained to do this, so the urge to pitch, present our products, talk about our solutions overwhelms us.  We take over the conversation and put our mouths into autopilot.
• We’re goal directed and focused on winning deals.  Part of what makes sales people great is the overwhelming desire to win–to close the deal.  Point us to a customer, we’ll charge ahead, 200mph (330+kph for some of you).  We want to achieve our goals.
• We’re time pressured, we have more to get done than we have time to do it.  We jump to action, trying to move deals aggressively through the funnel.  The talk button gets pushed, and we go.

Focusing on what the customer is interested in and talking to them about that is the secret to customer engagement.  When we let the customer talk about their issues and goals, when they can tell us their problems, when we probe to understand how these issues impact them, we engage them.  Think about when someone has done this with you.  Suddenly you think, “Here’s a person interested in me and what I have to say,”  “Here’s someone that really wants to understand my point of view,”  “Here’s someone who is telling me things I am interested about–that can help me.” 

Things change when we’ve engaged the customer.  We get into conversations where we are really listening to each other.  The relationship deepens, trust levels go up.   

Engaging the customer makes our job of selling much easier.  First, the customer has laid out a road map for us–they’ve told us what they are trying to do, what alternatives they are considering, how they will make the decision.  All we have to do is respond to what they’ve said, demonstrating our solution is superior to all other alternatives.

Engaging the customer isn’t really that difficult, it’s putting them first, being interested in them and what concerns them, and encouraging them to talk about it.

For those of you that don’t know the inner workings of the team that writes articles for Sales Bloggers Union, each month we choose a topic.  I’ ve committed to write a post on that topic somewhere between the 16th of the month and the end of the month.

It’s 6:17PM, PDT, June 30th, I’m stumped….so you can see my problem.

I don’t want to let you, our loyal readers down, I don’t want to let my colleagues down, I don’t want to fail to meet a commitment.

It’s all very odd to me, as a person who is never at a loss for a metaphor, analogy, story, or pun, not being able to write about it makes me very uncomfortable.  When I’m uncomfortable, I tend to try to figure out why and fix it.  If you don’t mind, I’ll think out loud about this topic.

I know metaphors are critical, they help us connect with our customers, the people we work with, our families and friends.  They enable us to take complex thoughts  and ideas, and translate them into things people understand.  They help us put meaning to what we are doing.  They help us connect–not only intellectually, but emotionally with others.  Somehow it seems metaphors make us more comfortable, they’re safe—otherwise, why would we use them so often.

Great metaphors get people excited.  They can help people envision something new–something that solves their problems–something that makes them happy.  Great metaphors also seem to engage and inspire people, they can help people imagine themselves in a situation, they can help people seize ownership and charge forward.

Another strange thing about metaphors is while they are stories, they are not real, somehow the right metaphor makes it what we are talking about more real to the person we are talking to.

But why do we need them so much–not just in selling, but in our work and community lives?  Sales is not about facts and data–those are important and can never be disregarded.  Sales is about finding problems you can solve and helping customers solve them  (and for that privilege, they pay you for the solution).  But unless you are Mr. Spock in Star Trek, these are insufficient for our success.  At it’s core, I think metaphors are about connection and imagination.  It’s our ability to use metaphors that have meaning to our customers that enables them and us to be successful. 

I don’t know how to talk about metaphors in sales, I just know that we can’t be effective unless we use metaphors in sales.

It’s 6:53 PM PDT, June 30th, I’m looking for the right metaphor to end this article.  My good friend, Daniel Waldschmidt gave me an idea about “adding extra icing to a sweet enough cake…”   It’s a little obscure and a little inside,  I think I’ll stop here and thank you for letting me think out loud.

The mark of the best professionals I have ever met is they can never learn too much.  They actively look to develop themselves, learning new skills, developing new capabilities, continuously improving.  They recognize the world is changing and maintaining their leadership position mandates constantly learning and adapting. 

The highest performing professionals also look at their development very broadly.  They just don’t participate in the annual sales training workshops their companies sponsor.  They read widely–not just on sales, but also on a variety of business and other topics, they read and participate in blogs and other social media, they attend industry events–seeking to learn more about their customers, they learn from their peers.  The highest performers are constantly looking for an edge, actively seeking every resource for their own development.

It’s funny, when I conduct a workshop on some sales topic, I can always tell the top performers.  They are the one’s that probably have the “least” need to attend and participate.  Yet, they are the one’s most actively engaged, they challenge me, they ask questions, they jump to do the exercises, taking each opportunity to try something new.  As a facilitator, I never have to worry about challenging them, they are creating the challenge themselves.  I can also tell the dinosaurs and low performers.  Those are the one’s that just don’t want to be there, they already know all they need to know and can’t understand why they should take the time.  They are the one’s too consumed in reading email on their Blackberries, to even hear new ideas.  They are the one’s that don’t participate in the exercises.  I don’t worry about them too much, I know their management will declare their extinction soon.

But the most important part of this discussion is our customers.  Our customers are changing the way they buy, they face many new challenges to their businesses and are actively seeking new ways to grow or become more efficient.  It is an opportunity for sales to provide real leadership, but the only way sales can do that is if the sales professional has invested time in learning, developing, and exploring new ideas.  Our customers have no time for the same tired product pitches.  They are looking for ideas and innovation.  Sales people who don’t invest in their own development will never be able to provide those new ideas and innovations to their customers.  If they won’t invest in themselves, their customers will never invest in them!

Sometimes, however, no is the right answer for the customer.  There are those times when we are really reaching, our product is not a great fit for what they need.  We try to twist and manipulate to change the customer assessment, to shift their requirement, or even make the customer believe our product can do some things it really wasn’t intended to do.

Sometimes we no the deal is not a great deal for us or the customer, but stubbornness, pride, or attachment to the deal keeps us investing more time and resource in pursuing the deal.  We don’t want to admit we have a bad fit, we don’t want to admit defeat, we have so much of ourselves invested that we can”t let go.

Sometimes, when the answer is really no, we keep going, because we don’t have enough other deals to work on.  We hope that “magic” will happen, and the customer will wake up some morning, completely change course and now we are going to win—and yes, the tooth fairy does exist.

As sales professionals–we have to be business people.  We shouldn’t accept defeat easily, we should develop strategies to help the customer understand we create the best business value.  At the same time, we need to value our time–we need to focus on those deals that are ours–those deals we should win, deserve to win, and have earned the right to win.  We can’t afford to waste our time on bad deals.  If no is the right answer, we need to get to no as quickly and efficiently as possible, investing our time someplace else–working on other deals, prospecting to find new deals.

There is nothing worse than spending weeks and months, then getting to “NO” when we knew much earlier that would be the answer and we would be unlikely to overcome it.

If “NO” is the right answer–get there quickly, get out and go find an opportunity to get a “Yes!”

It’s not a bad model, but too often, even though the deals are qualified–that is to say, the customer is going to buy something, they are bad deals for us.  In this economy, it gets worse, there are so few deals that a qualified opportunity is someone, anyone, who has answered the phone.  It’s fine to do this if all you are after is more activity.  But that’s not what we want, we want to sell more, we want to book more business.

To me, the easiest way to sell more is to disqualify more.  Focus on the deals that are in your sweet spot, the deals that are really your deals.  You already know what that means.  They are not:

1. The deals where we think the force of our personality, or the compelling argument we can make, will overcome a customer with no real need.
2. Those deals that we only meet a small number of the requirements, but we hope we can convince the customer we are the best.
3. Those deals where the customer is happy with the incumbent and sees no reason to change.
4. Those deals where the only way we will win is to be the cheapest competitor–by a big margin.
5. Deals in an area where we have never had any success  (there are some caveats to this), and we’re hoping to be heroes, getting our company to completely change what we do to address this new niche.
6. Deals with bad customers—customers who will be such a support burden, that all we will get is complaints, and in which we invest too much support.

All of these may be real deals—but they’re not yours, they are probably someone else’s.  Focus on the deals that fit your company’s capabilities, are in your sweet spot, and where you have lots of credibility and references.  Fill your pipeline with those deals, watch your win rate skyrocket!

This need to sell drives us.  We spend hours prospecting, trying to find new opportunities.  We spend hours working on deals, trying to beat our competitors, seeking to get the customer to choose us.  We spend hours convincing resources in our own companies to support our efforts to sell to the customer.  This “need to sell” focuses us during all our waking hours, and probably causes a few nightmares, while we are asleep.

This is a problem, though. Regardless how strong or compelling our need to sell is, until we find a customer with a compelling need to buy, our efforts are wasted.  This simple change in perspective, provides profound improvements in results.  Not only do we connect with customers where they are at, focusing on their needs, but we focus ourselves on higher quality opportunities.

Focusing on your customers’ needs to buy is the fastest, most reliable way to satisfy your need to sell!

I have been the beneficiary and victim of bad incentive plans, and I have victimized sales people with bad incentive plans.  I thought I would tell a story about victimizing a team of sales professionals, creating chaos and disorder through a bad plan.

I was running the sales organization for a large high tech company.  We had very technical products, most of our sales people were electrical engineers and, to be honest, we were all a little nerdy.  I assembled a team of sales managers, a few sales people, my controller and a consultant, to design the incentive program.

I set some guidelines, I wanted people to be incented to a fast start for the year, I wanted to have balanced performance across several categories of products, I wanted to incent over quota accelerators, and a few other things.  They met for a few weeks, designed a program, simulated it to make sure it wouldn’t violate our budget, and presented the final commission plan to me.  Here it is:

Pretty cool!  (Remember we were an engineering oriented company.).  I looked at the equation, and gulped a little.  Some of it made sense, I saw the Fourier series and started to get a little confused, and I was really concerned about the imaginary numbers (the last set in the equation).  But I figured, it’s sales, there has to be an imaginary number or two in the calculation.

The team presented it to me, they had a 127 nice PowerPoint charts that showed me they had incorporated all the design parameters we wanted, that it would motivate the performance and behaviors we wanted and reinforced our key strategies for the year.  They convinced me it was the right commission plan.  I guess I was too embarassed to admit that I really didn’t understand it, so we published it at our sales kickoff meeting.  Always the cheerleader, I told them how fantastic it was, I went through the design principles, it only took me 57 charts to explain it.  I concluded with the mantra of all sales executives presenting the commission plan:  If you hit or exceed your numbers, you’ll make a lot of money!  Boy I wish I were on a plan as rich as this!  (Isn’t that kind of the obligatory statement we have to make?).

There was a little rumbling and complaining—but isn’t that a sales person’s job, we always have to complain about the new commission plan.  They went back to their territories and went on about their jobs.  After a few months, I started wondering, why aren’t we seeing the behaviors we wanted.  We had wanted a radical shift in what they were doing, but they seemed to be doing the same things they were doing before.  What was wrong?  Here we were 30% of the year had passed, and we weren’t getting the behaviors and focus we wanted.  The overall numbers were OK, but some of the key things we wanted them to be doing weren’t happening.

Well, it doesn’t take a PhD in Math to figure out what was wrong—-well, in hindsight, actually it did!  Maybe that was the problem.  We had made the commission plan so complex, the sales people didn’t know where they should spend their time.  As they saw potential opportunities and tried to make that calculation all of us do (What’s my ROI on investing in this opportunity?), they couldn’t figure it out.

Our error was the plan was way to complicated.  It wasn’t clear what they should be doing and where they should be investing their time.  They couldn’t look at each deal and say, “Am I doing want management wants me to do?  Am I selling what they want me to sell to the right people?  Am I investing my time in the right opportunities?  Will I get the return on my investment in this opportunity that gets me the commission I want.

Perhaps, this case was extreme, but it’s not unusual.  Too often, I see management putting in place plans to do everything–and they end up doing nothing.  We have to have absolute clarity about what we want our people to do.  We have to know how we want them to behave.  We have to translate the few critical things into a commission plan that is easy for them to understand.  As they look at an opportunity, they ought to be able to say, investing in this is what my management wants me to do and will get me the commissions I want.  People do what we measure them on and what we pay them on.  Are we incenting the right behaviors and is it so simple and crystal clear that people can easily execute it?

Write me if you want to know what we did to fix this mess!

I’m getting my schedule ready in anticipation.  I think of the teams–all aiming to be part of March Madness.  Actually, they started months ago in their training.  Their seasons are just starting, each building a record of wins–hoping to develop a track record that enables them to qualify and compete in March Madness, each hoping to be in the final four.  Each team has to focus both on today–practicing, competing, and winning.  Each team has their eye on March, they know what they do today lays the groundwork for March. They are looking at their January and February schedules, preparing and strategizing for the teams they will compete against, knowing those performances impact that great event in March!

Oh wait—this is supposed to be an article about sales, sorry I got diverted.  Let me get back on target and talk about sales.  But isn’t what the NCAA basketball teams are going through similar to what we as sales people are going through?  Don’t we have to balance both our short term goals—winning every deal that we are competing for today, but laying the ground work for the deals we know we need to win in January, February, March, ……

Our success today impacts our ability to be successful in the coming months.  We need to focus on closing business today, our companies need it, our managers are looking for a great year end.  However, we need to keep an eye on the future.  Are we doing the right things today that enable us to compete and win in March?  For us in sales, this means looking at our prospecting, account development, territory development, and qualifying.  Are we identifying the opportunities today that enable us to be in the game in  March? 

Teams that do great in December, but fall apart later in the season don’t get to the final four.  Like those teams, doing great this month, having a strong end to the calendar year, doesn’t mean we will continue to do well.  If we aren’t identifying and developing the opportunities that will close in January, February, and March, we won’t be in the game.

The only difference between sales and NCAA Basketball, is that for us, after March Madness, comes April Angst, May Mayhem, June Jamming…..  While closing deals today, we have to lay the groundwork for the future.  Do you have a strategy that will get you to “March Madness?”  Make sure you don’t have just a great December and fall apart for the rest of the season.