Sales is a noisy and confusing environment. Success can be elusive if you take your eyes off the ball - and there's so many to chase. In previous posts, we talked about the threat of multitasking your time away, discussed the importance of applying the 80/20 rule to intensify your focus, and even covered how to make change stick when you decide to implement a new behavior.
Now that you're focused, intentional, and empowered, it's time to talk about just what you should be doing. In this post, we get down to the essence of how and where you should concentrate your efforts to win client acceptance of software solutions.
There are distinct areas to address- in the right order- when securing client acceptance. There's nothing magical about them, but when you're unaware of them your sales pursuits will run out of gas or stall indefinitely (if you've been selling for awhile, you know what I mean). When that happens it's a sure sign that you're not viewing the buying process from the perspective of the three levels of client acceptance. They are:
- Emotional Acceptance
- Logical Acceptance
- Political Acceptance
More than anything else, as sales professionals we are trying to get clients to accept our solutions on these levels. (these were also the risk factors from Building Trust in Selling.) This framework will guide your efforts under a wide range of conditions. Seen another way, think about any sales roadblock you've come across and it ought to fit into one of these three areas. Methodically addressing these levels of acceptance builds momentum like a steamroller (and those are hard to stop).
Emotional Acceptance (People buy on emotion...)
First, you've got to get clients excited about your solution. This is about grabbing their attention and building their interest. When selling product development software, I told stories to help the client understand the impact that enterprise software could have (stories are great attention-getters.) Here's an example:
While working in Australia I visited a museum that was an entire restored Australian gold mining town. The docents explained that miners dug for gold in one of three ways: they panned in streams individually, worked in teams of 4-6 to carve out deep wells, or formed mining companies of 30+ people to construct tunnels.The more collaborative the effort, the greater its reliance on technology- panning vs. digging vs. mining, and the higher its return. Mining companies *literally* made a ton!
(Here comes the analogy that builds interest.) In your product development operations you've made a significant investment in tangible, intangible, and human assets. To reap the greatest return on this investment, you must synchronize the workings of people in several diverse and distributed functional groups. But without advanced collaboration technology these people are just working alone- panning for gold, isolated in shallow streams of knowledge... while the competition is constructing a mine and digging the gold out from underneath you.
Whenever I told that story, clients could not sit still. They had to know more. Although you might find it uncomfortable to take this tact, you've got to get people's attention before they'll even bother to take interest in your solution, let alone make a decision about buying it. Tell a story, connect over some common experience, or discuss how current events & trends are impacting their business (and what you can do to help). Paint a vision that gets them excited, requires their involvement, and matters to their business.
Logical Acceptance (... and rationalize with fact...)
Second, once they are emotionally on board, you've got to convince their rational minds that your solution makes good business sense. This is about the client allowing you to educate them about your solution. They will be asking themselves:
Do I understand how the proposed solution will generate value?
Are the problems it proposes to solve important to our business?
Is this
solution the best answer to these problems?
Put your the pre-sales technical and business consulting resources to good use answering these questions. If you can bring in proprietary methods for value definition that your competitors can't match, so much the better. Check out articles in the Software Business Value category for ideas.
Political Acceptance (... to stand up to scrutiny.)
Third, once you've got your champions heading the right way, you've got to help them jump their internal hurdles. This is about the client deciding that your solution is the right one. What they're wondering most of all is:
Will this solution help me succeed?
Can I get the relevant stakeholders to agree? What competing agendas exist?
Is this the right vendor to do business with?
You'll want to bring in the big guns now: client visits, reference accounts, case studies, and success stories. The fewer of these you have at your disposal, the more likely that you'll be forced to discount your price in order to reduce the client's risk on the solution (and your untried company).
Realize that every new person brought into the decision process will also go through all three levels of acceptance, so the clearer your value proposition, the easier your champions can sell internally for you and take the load off your shoulders. Hit all three levels of client acceptance with everyone you meet and your products will fly off the virtual shelves.
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