Do you ever properly analyze your CRM system? I’m not just talking about leads, opportunities and pipeline value, but the detail around why you win and why you lose? Every CRM system I have worked with (and populated I’m not afraid to say) had loads of closed leads or opportunities with “Called 3 times, no response”, “they are happy with their current supplier”, “not interested” or similar. The painful truth in many of these cases is that you just haven’t done enough to make it worth the buyer engaging to find out more, whether it be lack of research, inability to provide a compelling enough offer, or you just tried to sell into a company that will never have a need for the product or service you are offering (again poor research). In most cases, why on earth would a buyer not want to look at alternative offerings if for no other reason than to keep their current supplier on their toes?
As sales professionals we always try and differentiate the products from the rest of the market to add value, whilst purchasing teams will try and commoditize the products they buy. As an old colleague of mine once said “purchasers only ever really want to talk about price”. This is not always true, they lead you to believe that, but they care about a whole lot more.
Over the past decade, with the adoption of strategies such as “The Challenger Sale” model, sales teams have learnt to move from the “bow tie” to a “diamond” sales model, where instead of a purchaser talking to a sales person and vice versa, whilst sales and procurement always own the relationship the interaction between supplier and customer should be far more involved from an organizational perspective.
Some of the best accounts and teams I have worked with used this approach to great effect, this not only forged a great relationship between the two companies, but helped reduce the risk of having one person from each side carrying all of the responsibility. How many times have you seen a sales person walk to a competitor and suddenly, regardless of any restrictive covenants, soon after some of their accounts follow them. It happens because the rest of their organization wasn’t nearly invested enough with the customers organization.
Purchasing teams care about price, of course they do, but they are also reliant on the products they buy also being the fit for purpose and also the best available within reason, they rely on their technical and operational colleagues to provide confidence that this is the case, so why would you as an organization not engage with your customers wider team to give them the information and security they need to use your products, but also to provide direction for the development of new and improved solutions.
At the Clay partnership, we have decades of experience from both sides of the table and work with our clients to help develop the customer relationships to ensure that we provide more than just a product to customers and their customers see them as more than just a product provider. Moving from a supplier to a partner is a far more powerful way of securing long term customer relationships and also helping to understand the future needs of the market.
This is not complicated, it should be simple, we work in the background, with our customers to make them the heroes, not us.
Get in touch to see how we can help you make the change.
