Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 Time: 2 p.m. ET Duration: 60 minutes with Q&A Presenters: Mike Schultz, President, RAIN Group Author, Rainmaking Conversations Patrick Cahill, Principal, beep! Directed Voicemail & Rally Point Webinars "I can’t believe they didn’t see the value!" "I can’t believe they didn’t buy the whole package!" "I can’t believe they think they can do it themselves!" "I can’t believe they didn’t buy!" You think your ROI case is compelling, that you’ve differentiated your offerings from your competitors, and that you’ve established yourself and your company as experienced, but the buyer doesn’t buy (or doesn’t buy from you). So how do you convince buyers to buy? Get them to see what they didn’t see? In our newest research, we studied more than 700 buyers, who represented a total of $3.1 billion in annual purchases, to find out what the winners of actual sales opportunities do differently than sellers who come in second place. In this webinar, our own Mike Schultz, President of RAIN Group, will cover the key components of building desire and ultimately inspiring buyers to take action based on the preferences buyers indicated in the research. Patrick Cahill, Principal of beep! Directed Voicemail and Rally Point Webinars, will join Mike to provide insight into how your lead generation, nurturing materials, and approach can best position you to initiate more conversations with buyers. Click here to register (limited seats available).      

How you run a sales meeting depends fundamentally on who set it. Imagine for a minute you’re the COO of a mid-sized manufacturing company. You’ve been reading quite a bit about how to decrease costs in a supply chain. You do a little research and find supply chain consulting firms. You call a few that happen to be in your area and set up a series of sales conversations with them. In this case, you’re the buyer. You are driving the demand. Soon, a partner from one of the firms comes to your office. After pleasantries, he says things like: "So, what’s on your mind?" "Tell me what’s going on that brings me here today." "Before we get started, is there anything in particular you’re hoping to get out of this meeting before we’re done?" Then the meeting gets underway...      

When buyers buy something, one of two things must be true: 1. They are required to buy. 2. They want to buy. In the former, they have no choice. Get sued, hire a lawyer. Buying = required. The lawyer doesn’t need to convince the buyer why to buy legal services in general, only why to buy them from them. In the latter, the buyer has a choice. Buying = desired. They don’t need to buy, but if they want it badly enough, and have the money and authority to buy, they buy. Since the buyer isn’t required to buy when sellers drive demand, sellers must be able to take their priority of making a sale happen, and make it the buyer’s priority to make a purchase happen. It’s not that easy, though, because you’re nowhere near the buyer’s priority list when you start.      

It’s 4 PM on a Thursday. You’re about to meet the CEO of a large company you’d like to win as a client. The conversation starts as you walk into the office, approach the CEO, stretch out your hand, and say, "Nice to meet you, Jill. I’m Steve Webb." Fast forward 7 months later. It’s 3 PM on a Wednesday. You head into the office. Jill gets out from behind her desk and says, "Good to see you again, Steve. Here’s the signed contract for the initial $1.2 million. Let’s get started." Suffice it to say, a lot has to happen between "hello" and "let’s go." Yet two things are true. 1) This is how it happens. And, 2) how to lead sales conversations, influence your prospects to want to buy, buy from you, buy a robust solution, and pay full price for it confounds many people. But it doesn’t have to...      

Talking about the differences between men and women is a tricky thing. But we need to deal with tricky things if we want to be good sales managers. The recently published book, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, has a nugget of knowledge every sales manager should know. As the title suggests, it’s about the science behind why some people win and others struggle. This is not a sales book, but some of its findings relate to sales and have implications for how to manage a sales team. (Note: for detailed, sales-specific research on what makes a sales winner, take a look at RAIN Group’s recent research report, What Sales Winners Do Differently.) While Bronson and Merryman’s book covers a variety of topics, it’s what they have to say on risk and its implications for sales management that deserves attention, especially the surprising results when comparing men and women. While the authors struggled to accept these findings at first, the science pointed to differences too large to ignore.      

Most of my clients want to have better meetings with senior executives. Meetings that feel like conversations, not pitches. Meetings that build deeper relationships. Meetings that uncover more ways in which they can help their customers. Behind closed doors, when I ask what’s holding them back, many will tell me things like, "I don’t feel comfortable," "I have nothing to offer to them," or "I’m not at their level." Selling to the C-suite can be difficult, and getting a first meeting can be a real challenge. But in my experience, the most difficult part is not getting the first meeting. It’s getting the second one. Or the third one. It’s keeping the relationship going...      

In our 5 Keys to Maximizing Sales with Existing Accounts report, we noted a number of different ways that organizations can shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to maximizing account growth. Compensation alignment and accountability are two big ones. In our Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management, we found that high performers were more than twice as likely to have compensation and reporting structures aligned to support account growth. And, as well, high performers were much more likely to hold teams accountable.      

Ask 100 sellers at 100 companies why their customers buy from them, and you're likely to hear 100 answers with the same underlying theme: the value we provide. Sellers describe their value to us in a number of ways: we get results. Our relationships are very close. They get from us what they've always wanted (but never gotten) from other companies. We bring innovative solutions to the table. And so on. Pretty obvious, right? To win sales you have to maximize value. In practice there's no denying that sales winners are much better at getting buyers to perceive maximum value than the rest. In fact, in our research, only one factor—"overall value was superior"—was of top importance to buyers in all of the categories we studied (e.g. how winners win the initial sale, what drives repeat business, what drives referrals, etc.). Before you can learn how to communicate value, however, you need to understand some key concepts about value.      

How many times have you left a sales meeting and thought, "I should have said that..."? Or, during a meeting, as you listened to what a prospect was saying, you thought, "That's not right; he will be making a big mistake if he goes down that path," but you never voiced your opinion? Or, perhaps even more dramatic, you got the sense, "This guy is holding something back. I need to get to the bottom of this." But, again, you said nothing? In all of these examples, what usually keeps you from saying the things you want to (and should) say is a strong need for approval from your prospects. You want to be liked, and in some cases loved, more than you want to close the deal. Research1 that includes more than 500,000 sellers estimates that 47% of sales people have a need for approval to the extent that it can limit their ability to ask tough questions, disagree when appropriate, and advocate for a point of view that may be disruptive to the status quo.      

Lots of people lament the commoditization in their industries. They’ll say things like, "Buyers see us as commodities." Interestingly enough, the truth is lots of buyers agree. Now, given what I do, I’ve been a part of actually watching many buying processes from the buyer’s side and the buyers often say at the end, "Of the five companies we’re looking at, I actually think that three of them are well suited to do the work, but we still have to pick a winner," and, at least in my observation, the winner is not always on price and, in fact, it’s not usually on price. So what is it then that makes one company stand out enough to win the business versus the others that are also vying for it?