Giri Fox

I have attended far too many brainstorming sessions which have not been framed to make them useful. The science is in. Brainstorming doesn’t work.

When and why you need ideas

In sales, we will want to come up with creative ideas to grow our accounts, penetrate new ones, grow the business, invent new offerings and so on. In fact, if you want growth for a company, you should you use the Alchemy of Growth (1999, p52) framework from Mehrdad Baghai to do a comprehensive search for opportunities.

For an individual sales person this model is not as useful. Instead, read on about brainstorming.

Basically, the first place to look for growth is at the bottom of the stack. It’s the closest to what you are currently doing. He offers seven degrees away from the current state, each of which is a perspective which could identify growth.

Baghai’s model predates the excellent work from the Business Model Generation team, and does not have anywhere near its robustness, but I still find it useful for its simplicity. If you have exhausted growth in degrees 4 through 7, you should consider more drastic reinvention and for that purpose read up on the #bmgen model.

On better brainstorming

Two common situations for a sales person to want effective “brainstorming” are account planning and business-unit planning (such as during a sales off-site meeting).

One key point to avoid:

• traditional brainstorming, where everyone gets in a room and is told to come up with whatever ideas they can, no matter how crazy, and that no-one should criticise one another, does not work.

McKinsey suggest you use a facilitated structure, which I agree with, where you define specific limits and constraints on the participants. This is so important. Otherwise, you get ideas which simply cannot be implemented within the realistic parameters of the company.

The seven steps to better idea generation are:

1. Know your organization’s decision-making criteria and do not deny them
2. Provide focused questions to consider
3. Choose a mix of people and consider group dynamics
4. Conduct multiple, discrete, highly focused idea generation sessions in small groups
5. Frame the exercise properly and have them focus on a single idea for 30 minutes
6. Wrap up by highlighting a few of the best ideas but do not discard the rest
7. Follow up with participants quickly afterwards

The long reads about why, and what works, are well chronicled in a superb essay from the New Yorker. The McKinsey article is shorter and pragmatic.

By using these seven steps for your next planning session, you will definitely get a better outcome.

For example, if you cannot normally sell a particular service offering in certain countries because your firm does not have a legal entity those countries within which you would want to sell it, that becomes a constraint which any brainstorming should propose solutions for. This is as opposed to denying the reality and not working through the issue, and creating impractical solutions. It might seem obvious but the point is that traditional brainstorming generates ideas which are not actionable. By requiring that constraints are considered, you may analyse alternative commercial paths to market such as partners, licensing, export and so on.

The first two steps are particularly important because they frame the idea generation session, and are notable departures from the traditional brainstorming methods which we know do not work.

I came across two particularly good articles on how to interview and screen a sales person.

The first by Dave Kurlan provides an insightful list of 10 behaviours you’d want to see, and 10 bad ones too. He likes it if candidates:

• talk concisely versus ramble
• distract him from the interview strategy
• push back and challenge me without starting an argument.

Read the rest of the article over here.

The second article is by Lee Salz, it’s longer and it’s really superb. He lists seven screening techniques to use, including a few I’d forgotten about. Each is explained in some detail. The seven are:

1. be really clear on the profile of candidate you want
2. always be recruiting, keep your eye out for possible hires
3. reverse interviewing, where the candidates meets a peer-to-be and asks questions
4. standardised interview questions
5. mock sales call
6. online assessment or personality profile
7. asking them to write a mini business plan.

I think that asking the candidate to put a plan together is a great idea. Someone who is really keen on the job may well have done it already. I had a number of interviews before winning my role to look after Cisco’s relationship with BP in the UK, and had prepared a 90 day plan as part of my interview preparation. It helped me think clearly about the role.

A mock sales call is a great idea. For a solution sales environment, I’d suggest you stage it as an initial meeting with a client, as if the candidate is taking over a patch, where the client already deals with your firm but has been frustrated with service delivery and has to reduce their IT spend. The candidate therefore has to perform discovery, which should expose how well they can diagnose and prioritise findings.

Read the full article here.

Recently I was explaining solution sales to a colleague who works in operations and I highlighted that a solution sales person should genuinely care about whether their proposed solution will actually work in the client’s environment. This was to contrast the degree to which a solution sales person should involve themselves in fit, operational readiness and implementation, with the degree required in simpler sales situations.

Solutions need to work, and need to be architected for success, for two driving reasons: 1) winning the sale by competing on ease of  implementation, and 2) future sales.

To elaborate, I’ll talk further on the solution sales method of the path of least resistance and share a model which I’m using to improve the perception of value at Cisco.

On the degree of solution fit

The most overt example of how solution fit is a competitive strategy for solution sales comes from the riskiest competition situation: a tender (or RFP or RFQ). For the purposes of illustration, I’ll not discuss the hugely important topic of influencing a tender or avoiding it altogether or of being ‘column fodder’, and presume that the tender is a genuine and fair exercise to find the right supplier.

Imagine a client has released a tender with a series of technical, operational and commercial requirements for the procurement of a bespoke software solution. The respondents requirements will be rated on degree of fit, some of which will be mandatory; acting as gates for consideration.

The responding companies will need to provide a solution which satisfies those requirements, and it is in the degree of compliance, or over-achievement, that the company competes. Their sales team needs to balance the costs of compliance with the competitive benefits gained. Judgements need to be made to distinguish (a) those items which are mandatory but not particularly important to the client, from (b) items the client will weight more heavily and upon which the company can distinguish itself.

The sales team needs to take a similar view to operational and commercial items. Unfortunately, many multinational IT vendors’ policies make the legal platform a very difficult competitive space. Some smaller vendors can compete through simply accepting terms and conditions (particularly from government) which their larger competitors cannot. The number of non-compliant or ‘to be discussed’ items that are flagged by the vendor’s legal department correlates directly with a negative rating from the client.

Operations are similar. If the proposed solution fits like a glove into the operational environment of the client, and really nails the issues of training, systems integration, documentation, knowledge transfer and warranties of fit, then the client will factor in a lower cost for its implementation.

Thus, the sales teams will be pushing the operational, delivery, legal and commercial representatives of their company to be as compliant as possible with the client’s requests. They should understand the importance of the requirements to the client, and to the competitive situation. They should know what their competitor’s weaknesses are.

If the final proposed solution — in its fullest sense, including its technical fit, commercial, legal, operational aspects — is easier to implement, then that vendor will have an edge.

Thus in turn, you can see how the best solution sales people will dig right into the details of the full solution and improve its fit with the client in order to compete. The result is a solution which presents the path of least resistance to the client.

Client’s perception of value

The client of a services supplier becomes more valuable over time, for reasons such as referrals and the reduced servicing cost of the client due to the mutual learning experience of service delivery (summarised on wikipedia). Retention of that client is important.

Clients buy results. A simple example is that if you have your car repaired, it doesn’t matter how good the customer service was, with coffee and newspapers or a courtesy car, if the garage can’t fix the car on time.

Though, what happens in many service-delivery organisations is an overly narrow view of the service from an internal perspective, with insufficient measurement and understanding of the results from a client’s perspective. There are probably loads of statistics and measures on staff utilisation, profit, and hopefully customer satisfaction, but likely to be fewer measures from the client’s perspective.

To start answering the question on how to improve the client’s perception of value, you need to appreciate how a client buys services, which is where this service productivity model¹ comes in useful.

Key to this model is the fact that clients have their own operating processes which continuously run in parallel and interact to the service provider’s own processes. For the model’s service process, the provider may develop some element of the final service solution in isolation (A), some in concert with the client through meetings and interactions (B), and importantly the client’s operating processes are continuing to run in isolation (C). Thus the provider’s work in isolation indirectly effects the quality of the output whilst the work the provider and client perform together influences it directly.

A key point is that the client’s perception of quality is influenced by how well the service provider interlocks with them, not just how good the finished reports look, or how clever the engineers might be when anaysing a problem at their desk.

Thus a provider can improve the perception of quality by improving the exchange of information between provider and client, and crucially (but not seen as often) by improving how effectively the client consumes and gains from the service they received.

This requires that the service provider thinks about how the client will use the outputs of the service, and helping them take advantage of that service. Some examples include joint metrics; program management offices with mutual risk and issues registers; matching provider SLAs to the SLAs between the client and their customers; and business analysis which does not stop at the door of the provider, but considers workflow all the way through to the client’s customer.

Solutions sales involves thinking that chain all the way through.

This might require that the provider’s organisation has to change its metrics and processes in order to report value back in terms which matter to the client — by measuring results the client cares about — but that outcome will increase loyalty and thus the likelihood of retention.

1. Gronroos 2007, Service management and marketing, Wiley.

Broadly, you can categorise what is being sold on a continuum between services and product sales. Within service sales there are further distinctions you can make. A new sales person who is asked to sell commoditised products like PCs or laptops will firstly need to understand the product characteristics, and it will take them some time before being able to distinguish their product from a competitors, and then further time before enunciating how it matches the particular requirements of a buyer. An accomplished product sales person will try to understand the client’s requirements and explain their product in the client’s terms. A poor sales person will not.

To use a crude example, the refills for a household stapler are completely commoditised and standardised, so there is no expertise required to sell them. They’re marketed, then stuck onto shelves.

Sadly, I have seen a few product sales people try to sell their high-tech infrastructure product as if it’s not so much different to a stapler refill: a laptop for example being described only in terms of specifications.

Less commonly discussed is the phenomena that services or solutions sales people can describe their service in the same way: through its specifications and metrics, as opposed to describing it in relationship to the client’s requirements. One reason this happens is that sales management and marketing do not generate material which translate the service offering into anything more meaningful than a statement of work or service description document. The value translation is left to be sales field, which in some cases might require a greater degree of analysis than the field has time for.

The right mindset for solutions sales person is to understand their client first, their company’s capabilities second, and their off-the-shelf service offerings last. The sales person then looks at their own company through the eyes of the client and works out what’s relevant or whether a bespoke service can be created which satisfies the client’s parameters.

A great product sales person does this too, but it’s less common. The best product sales people at IBM do it right. I remember in around 2001 the mainframe sales leader in Canberra (now called z series) was remarkably good at working out what a client really needed in order to engineer a product and service bundling that was meaningful to his government clients. And he was truly selling big iron.

A product sales person can fall into the trap of thinking their sale, and the relevance of their product, is only within the dimension of it satisfying the technical spec. The other important elements which should be considered are:

• integration of the product into the client’s existing infrastructure
• how will the change be effected, are there any compatibility risks which need to be determined and remedied, and if so by who
• rollout, imaging, reverse logistics and any relevant data security issues on returned equipment
• the actual change action from a user’s perspective of migrating from an old device to a new one
• the design and testing of configurations for infrastructure devices
• how the final installed equipment is handed to operations, what documentation they require, who will write it
• operational maintenance procedures, knowing how to repair and restore failed devices.

If the client is allowing visibility into these elements, then the sales person can present a much more compelling and integrated story if they address each of them in the proposal. If the client is keeping the vendor at arm’s length, because the procurement department is handling the deal like a commodity purchase, then of course you have a different scenario for discussion another day.

The point here is that a good sales person will not think of the hardware specification, but of the lifecycle that hardware will proceed through when the client buys it. They’ll describe the solution in terms which show an understanding of the client’s needs, and that’s a step towards solution selling, rather than flogging products.