Are you doing the right things? Are you doing things right?
Selling methodology and selling systems need to adapt quickly to accommodate changing business strategy. Product management priority should focus on portfolio responsiveness, where the portfolio is your collection of product, services and solutions. Marketing’s magic of messaging must adapt to changes in buying patterns and market needs. Sales can often be a bottleneck between the multifaceted vendor portfolio and the complex customer world.
Forrester Research asked 299 executives about sales meetings. These business and IT executives told Forrester:
- What makes a meeting valuable is when a sales person understands MY business issues and can clearly articulate how to solve them.
- Unfortunately this doesn’t occur very often. IT executives say this occurs 13% of the time and business executives say this occurs only a meager 11% of the time. Ouch.
For companies, innovating new products and services is not enough – companies must engineer product portfolios and customer messages for the customer outcome. There are 6 attributes to engineer into an outcome:
- Understanding the desired end state to be achieved
- Comprehend the needs of the executive owner
- Connect with a high level customer initiative
- Achieve measurable results
- Identify and involve impacted stakeholder
- Deliver outcome over a life-cycle
New way of thinking: Customers don’t want your stuff, they want outcomes! When engineering for outcome, alignment to the buying lifecycle is often too late. The customer has figured out the buying process and critical market opportunity or market momentum may have been lost. The optimal approach is alignment to the customer’s problem solving lifecycle. The time when the customer is becoming aware, concerned and assessing the problem puts sales and product portfolio consideration into the right conversation.
Outcome selling is the next step beyond customer centric selling. To be successful at outcome selling sales, marketing and product management must all be well grounded in customer centric selling. This is major shift away from the tradition, outdated 4 P’s (circa 1950): Product, Place, Promotion and Price. It is a transformation into 4 new P’s of Outcome Selling: Problem, Pattern, Path and Proof.
- Problems that the customer actually has and cares about
- Patterns in problem life-cycles, addressing when, where and why they occur
- Path to success for customers to investigate, compare, test and purchase
- Proof that the results, outcomes and value are real (references, milestones, proof points)
This is an excerpt of a keynote address presented by Scott Santucci, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research called “Recalibrate Your Selling System by Driving Results for Customers.” This was presented at the Forrester Research Technology Sales Enablement Forum 2011 in San Francisco in February.