13 Bold Unconventional Sales Maneuvers

1) The Intercept

The prospect is just about to buy so you could call this the perfect storm of compelling event meets multiple trigger events. Combatively, you demonstrate the value of your solution seconds before the photo finish and steal the ball aka the deal right out of the jaws of the competitor. It's risky but if you can spot a flaw or establish FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) it can be leveraged. Savvy executives can be susceptible to ambivalence and will often kick tires the hardest in the 11th hour. Many software vendors combat this with price drops but the more sophisticated play is to position your solution on value. The intercept can shorten an 18 month sales cycle down to mere weeks when executed correctly, especially if this is an existing account and the need is NOW.

2) The Hail Mary Pass (or Kick)

Lob a call into the CEO's office, make their EA your best friend by giving them the respect of an authentic pitch, and leverage this demand creation to schedule an on-site meeting between your own CEO and theirs. This takes boldness, courage and selling internally to get buy-in. The true wingsuit base jump here is to land the 1-on-1 yourself. (Combine #3 + #4)

3) The VITO Envelope

Send a plain manila envelope by courier with a one pager inside, hand addressed to the key executive and signed. Another way to execute this is via FedEx delivery to the Very Important Top Officer (VITO). They'll typically always read these because it's so rare. The letter sets-up a follow-up call. More tips on the structure of the letter in the Anthony Parinello classic. Paragraph one, WIFM, what's in it for them: move from value proposition to value creation. Lead with provocative insight and demonstrate you've performed thorough due diligence of the business issues.

4) The Neighborhood Technique

Book your ticket to a key city in your territory. Then e-mail your prospect that you'll be in the area. Schedule multiple "neighborhood" on-sites or leverage this technique to book meetings around a conference. This is most effective one week out.

5) Conference Within The Conference

Reserve a meeting room in a classy hotel across the street from a major conference. Schedule a dozen appointments over a couple days with key executives. You can leverage this to replace an entire quarter of on-sites. The executives are already there! The other ingenious method is to get a free floor pass, diagram the entire multi-level conference floor blueprint out and then strategically approach every single relevant booth moving past the greeters in front to the executives in back. Goal yourself to collect 300 business cards, shake every hand and add them all on LinkedIn with a personalized invitation; keep a running log in Evernote. (Ideal strategy for Dreamforce and OpenWorld).

6) Head To Head Pilot

If you truly have the better solution, challenge the incumbent to a fulfillment duel. Commence bake-off: may the optimal solution that drives the greatest efficiency win! Make sure you agree upon fair success criteria and eliminate any inequities or handicaps. It must be an apples to apples comparison in your apple pie contest.

7) The Full Blown Referral

Bold move but put their key decision makers directly in touch with your biggest client. YouTube video testimonials can be a fall-back. Believing is seeing!

8) The Reverse RFP

Build an RFP criteria document that realigns your strengths based on the selection criteria and question-set. Offer to provide prospects free consulting on the RFP process to ensure they are asking the right questions. Tip the scales in your favor.

9) "Your Baby Is Ugly"

Candidly level with them on what is broken by diagnosing their problems before hand. Be honest about how dire the situation is. Nobody likes to admit their "baby is ugly" but in business, it's refreshing and highly 'Challenger Sale' to respectfully call out the elephant in the room of a missed quarterly target, flawed network architecture, broken website or fatally flawed SFA.CRM implementation. Hint: read between the lines of the annual report.

10) Walk The Halls

With an existing account, literally take a desk in their office, post-up for a day and get to know everyone in the building. Walk the halls and hang out at the water cooler. Without exaggeration, I've seen this technique work selling into finance where relationship building is still crucial, especially in key account management.

11) Be Over-The-Top Remarkable

I saw a top sales executive out-dress everyone in flawless suits, ties, pocket squares and shoes you could see your reflection in. Peacock much? Well, that was his thing and he authentically owned it. I saw another salesperson who was an expert at swing dancing who would clear the middle of the dance floor at company hosted client events. Another way to be remarkable is to recommend an idea that is fundamentally transformational to their business model. Push the envelope. Be willing to leave bright shiny collateral behind, like a massive poster board with a Vizio diagram of your latest collaborative brainstorming session. #unexpectedvalue Brian Lipp writes in,

A colleague once sent a cake to a CEO to land a meeting with 'we can help you eat more cake' on it, had engaged the EA beforehand, it worked.

12) The Ensemble Close

Be the conductor of the symphony. Despite the size and stratification of this global firm, a top performer at a software automation company won huge deals by looping in almost every conceivably party in the selling organization, even the CEO and CTO. Much to the chagrin of lower performers, so many stakeholders on both sides were invested in the deal, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy it would close and the deal even grew mid-closing! That guy always got the top performer award at every kickoff. (Not so coincidentally, he was also the aforementioned King of Swing!!)

13) Ghost Protocol

One of the people I am mentoring is achieving amazing sales results and in my view it's because he has gained the trust of his own CEO to the point where he is leveraging the CEO's LinkedIn account. This takes significant trust from the CEO but is a great example of achieving maximum support internally as you then go into the marketplace at the highest possible level with an 'insight' and VITO-style of approach. Another mentee unleashed a ghost army via a stealthy B2B lead gen startup that leverages an AI engine to effectively generate a dozen warm C-Level intros per week, skyrocketing fresh pipeline so sustainably, it's temporarily supplanted the need for hiring an analog inside sales team to augment it!

Strategic selling is about engaging early at the most senior levels and some of these tips can help in that regard. But if you're late to the dance, many of these ideas may spark ideas to execute before choosing to simply qualify-out.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Skydive Lillo

 

The Business Case For Social Selling – Why You Need To Get On Board

Without doubt, there is a problem in B2B selling. Gartner Research believes 85% of interactions between businesses will be executed without human intervention by 2020. Buyers are clearly in control today and in many B2B sales organizations only 40% to 60% of sales people meet or exceed their sales targets.

I believe that 30% of B2B field sales people won't have jobs in professional selling by 2020 and this will be due to their inability to adapt to the forces of commoditization and disruption to deliver the necessary value to funds their roles.

Inadequate management is a key contributor to poor sales performance and sales managers need to focus on coaching and driving the activities and behaviours that create success in their teams. According to Jason Jordan, co-author of Cracking The Sales Management Code, 83% of sales metrics being reported in systems such as CRM cannot actually be managed. Sales people need guidance to become truly consultative and create the right conversations and value for both customer and employer. According to Corporate Executive Board research, 95% of buyers expect insight from the seller yet 86% of sales people fail to differentiate. Forrester research findings state that 85% of sales engagements fail to meet buyer expectations.

Sales teams need to step up and execute at a higher level and when they do, the results are transformative. According to Corporate Visions research, 74% of buyers choose the seller who first provides insight and value. The best sellers don't talk about themselves, what they do and how they do it; instead they establish their credentials before a meeting to instead focus on why the conversation is important and what can be achieved for the customer supported by a strong business case.

The biggest issue for sellers is therefore securing meetings with the right people at a point in time where they are able to shape requirements and help set the agenda. When leads come to the sales organization it’s then very difficult to exert the right level of influence and that’s because buyers are typically 57% (Corporate Executive Board) to 70% (Forrester Research) through their change and procurement process. According to IDC research, 75% of buyers research the seller before meeting or agreeing to engage.

The key to influence is obviously early engagement yet a Harvard Business Review article highlights that 90% of decision makers never respond to cold outreach and according to Corporate Executive Board research, 97% of cold calls yield no result.

The corollary of the negative statistics is in research conducted by C9 Inc who found 7 times more pipeline and 11 times more revenue (36 companies and 9,000 sellers) with those who embraced LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool. LinkedIn themselves analysed a cross section of new and existing sellers who increased pipeline by 45% and the probability of achieving their sales targets by 51% simply by improving their standard LinkedIn social selling index (SSI) scores.

According to Steve Richard at Vorsight, “In B2B selling only 3% of your market is actively buying at any given time, 57% are not ready and 40% are poised to begin.” Importantly, their buyer’s journey begins online and this is why social selling matters.

Social selling also matters because social buying is a reality – we live in the age of massively empowered buyers. Our customers can research and commoditise what we offer with just a few clicks. They can assess our assertions of value and then introduce competitors with ease. Sellers therefore need a framework for attracting customers through strong personal and corporate brands that enable early engagements of influence. Individuals as well as corporations need social strategies for complex business-to-business (B2B) selling where, according to CSO Insights, there are on average 6 people involved in the typical buying decision.

Before we explore social selling it’s important to again understand that those who spam, push, annoy, narcissistically drone or aggressively sell are unfollowed and disconnected as quick as a click. Connecting to someone new and then immediately seeking to sell is a serious mistake. I define strategic social selling for business-to-business (B2B) as follows:

Social Selling Definition: The strategy and process of building quality networks online that attract clients and accelerates the speed of business and efficiency of selling, as achieved with personal human engagement through social listening, social publishing, social research, social engagement, and social collaboration.

On a foundation of a strong personal brand I have identified the 5 pillars that enable the best results in social: 1) Social Listening/Monitoring, 2) Social Research, 3) Social Content Publishing, 4) Social Engagement and 5) Social Collaboration.

In my definition, technology is merely an enabler but can be leveraged to create truly incredible results with the right strategies. Obviously, social initiatives are supported by the use of technology and social platforms but it’s really all about human connection and interaction to provide real value through insight or assistance with relevant content and conversations.

Social platforms, especially Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google have driven the era of personal brands and a new reality of transparency. The days of being able to project a manufactured persona are gone… people can quickly uncover the reality of who you are, how you operate, how well you’re connected, and the value you offer… all before you ever get to say a single word on the phone or face-to-face. Social proximity is a real factor that enhances or undermines potential connection, often without the seller ever discovering how their network (or lack thereof) helped or hindered their efforts.

Your social strategy will depend on what you’re seeking to achieve and where your market is but don't fall into the trap of becoming busy in social without having a strategy for both connection and content. For example, think about the reasons for posting in LinkedIn Publisher or creating Facebook pages. Are you seeking to attract and build an audience platform? Are you wanting to evidence your credentials? Are you wanting to provide insights and credibility to support your new business meeting requests? Are you wanting to proactively deal with potential objections you could encounter? Are you seeking to associate yourself with admired brands and thought leaders? Are you perhaps chipping away at commonly held myths about your disruptive solution set to cause a sea change? 

Social selling is a strategy, not a set of technologies. Most importantly, you need to know exactly who your target audience is and what insight or value you can provide before they would be interested in what you sell. Once you know what you’re seeking to achieve and have defined goals and metrics, then you can design your strategy and action plan to cascade down to the individual elements.

The business case is simple. Those B2B sellers who consistently improve their LinkedIn SSI scores increase pipeline by 45% and the probability of achieving their sales targets by 51%.

Click here to get your LinkedIn SSI score now with links explaining how your score is calculated by LinkedIn

SSI is the new KPI for B2B Sellers

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website:www.TonyHughes.com.au.