“I wouldn’t normally get out of bed for 30K…” {Context: waste of time}
In sales, you must understand how to get a seat at the table of your client.
Understanding your client’s mission, vision, goals, and objectives will pay long term dividends to all.
If you are short-sighted, not only will you risk losing the business today, but you may also damage your reputation. It’s a small highly interconnected world and you never know “who knows who” and how this can impact your company or your personal brand.
Getting a seat at the table is just the start. It is an opportunity that you can lose. If you aren’t careful, not only do you lose your seat, but you may also never be welcomed back to the property.
Bird in the Hand or Not
Wendy and I sat in a room at the top of a very tall building in Manhattan. It was February 2014, and we were learning the ropes of “consulting craft” from a brand-new operation at Booz Allen Commercial.
Speaking for myself, I didn’t know the science or art behind selling. My whole life, I was taught to give not sell. It made me feel uncomfortable and I had an exceedingly tough time with it. Wendy and I made ourselves part of the new commercial team through some brute force efforts. I don’t know if we realized at the time, we sold the senior leadership team of Booz Allen Commercial on our abilities. If you want to know how we did it, that is a fun CONVERSATION. Regardless, just know, we took an untraditional path to becoming commercial consultants.
The Zen Master of Business Development and Principal was Chris Munley. He sponsored us and sought to teach us the ways of “best in class” consulting. As uncomfortable as it was for us, we were there to learn.
On this day, we were sitting up front and center, on the top floor with students who were at the top of their class. Yeah, me, Wendy and … them. Chris took the floor and shared the plan of the day. We were learning about commercial consulting with Partners who would share their success and expectations. During this talk, one of the Partners got up and told us we needed to work towards bigger wins. It must be worth his time to sign off on a project or he would reject it.
This was interesting to us. We raised our hand and asked, “you would turn away work”? To which he replied, “I wouldn’t normally get up out of bed for 30k.”
As much as I respected his resume, I wasn’t aligned with this way of thinking. Wendy didn’t care much for it either. That said, we recognized that we may have a lot to learn.
We took the training, we listened to the Partners, read the materials, and started on our journey practicing this new way of consulting. Looking for the “big one” and trying to land something that would get this Partner and others out of bed was not easy. In fact, we started to realize every “opportunity” was more like an internal fight. In one conversation, the President said to me “Howie, everything that looks like opportunity to you, looks like risk to me.” To which I said, “what do we have to lose?” He said, “more than you may realize.”
Working with Chris, Wendy and I were able to land work with Exxon. Prior to winning “the work” at Exxon, Wendy and I had a lot of experience working as Government Consultants. We did both contracting and consulting with the DoD extensively. We knew how to do that work. We knew to work hard, do our best, and good things would follow. We also had a spirit of service in our work, and we were welcomed as part of the DoD team. The commercial world was something different.
Wendy and I were consulting on Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management was so nebulous and so broad that many people didn’t understand it. However, because it was broad, it afforded us the opportunity to address many different problems. We were aligned to the energy market, but we had people wanting to meet and speak with us across various types of markets. We had a new conversation going with a large travel company Travelport. From 2014 Travelport revenue was on a steady incline but the Partner who owned this market vertical couldn’t see the value in building a relationship with them. They weren’t “something” enough. We took a risk and started talking with them regardless but at the end of the day, we needed the Partner to support us. We lost the work because we chose to stop trying. Later on, and without our help, Travelport built a KM practice, designed interfaces for employees and users, they started practicing KCS, they built new support models across the board and grew substantially until Covid hit. Not only did they spend a lot on KM, but they also needed a lot of help with Cyber, which is a core competency of Booz Allen. Another thing the Partner didn’t want to hear or realize was that right across the street, a building away and a few conversations over, lived Delta Airlines. The Partners wanted their money NOW and their big win right away. They wanted to focus their energy on specific areas of interest to them.
What mistakes were made?
What happened to these Partners?
How did Wendy and I feel?
The lesson here is, inside misalignment is costly to a company. We didn’t close a deal that we could have delivered on. We lost credibility with our teams internally and externally and we missed sales and revenue targets.
Booz Allen didn’t go out of business but many of the people are no longer there.
Network Capital ~ and Cost
We had all this training.
We read the “Little Red Book”, studied our consulting craft and “The Sandler Rules.”
What did we learn at the end of the day? What really mattered?
Sandler has a famous quote “People make buying decisions emotionally … and they justify those decisions intellectually.” – David Sandler
If we go to the root of it all, it is always all about understanding where a “person’s passion” resides. Sound familiar? If you read my posts, I’ve written a lot about understanding people.
Our network and our relationships are a place to build trust. Trusted relationships afford us the opportunity to communicate. In sales, some see the place where the door is open as a “wedge.” The “wedge” doesn’t close the deal. It allows us to interact and learn. If you use this and come in too hot, you will damage the relationship.
If you want to learn more about Sandler Rules, I’d highly suggest getting the book. Munley had us do this as required reading and I am thankful to him for this because, it fit right there with “How to win friends and influence people.”
So, it mattered because we needed to learn that OUR way was the RIGHT way in the first place. Wendy and I worked through our relationships, building trust, taking risks and being true to ourselves. This was before there was all this talk about being “your authentic self.” People knew pretty quickly what they got when they met us. We sold and funded millions of dollars’ worth of work before and we would do it again, but we needed to learn that we had to do it our way. Thanks Chris…
Three in the Bush
Without getting into “all the things”, there is one area that I’d like to address.
In recent years, I have worked with many large companies and taken many sales calls. For me, the people I like to work with present a case for partnership. If I want to buy something transactionally, I can get a business mercenary to do it or I can outsource the whole thing.
If I want to buy something for the long term, I want to build a trusted relationship with someone that understands the value to all involved.
Today, some large companies sell to so many people, they believe they can afford to choose their customers. They also may believe they are too big to fail. Have you seen any companies like this?
In my experience, the company that sells services will perform well on the market but may fail in many different market areas. The “street” won’t know the failure but the teams that are released sure will.
Why did they get released? Did they under perform in their market area?
Why did they underperform in sales? Why didn’t they meet their targets?
What happened with the sales team on licensing vs the consulting or delivery teams?
Often, we see separate teams for licensing vs consulting. They may even have different organizational leadership.
A prospect sees one name, not thirty different teams.
If there are problems with the teams internally and they manifest themselves to the prospect, this doesn’t play well. Especially, if the person you are selling is a cold to warm prospect. This means you really don’t know them that well and there is a lot of trust left to build. (Right Pahtna??)
Recently, I’ve been speaking with business leaders as part of the work I do with SIM RLF. We talk about the complexity of difficult conversations. We talk about being kind and using nonviolent communications. We also discuss the challenges today when working with large companies who purportedly act like partners.
If someone says they are a “partner” they must come as one in toto. If not, everything can be lost. One story comes to mind of a large software company that offered some licensing model that was very reasonable. Once executed, the costs skyrocketed and the consulting fees for expertise around the product delivered by the company were untenable.
In the end, the company will lose the business. They already lost their seat at the table. They just don’t know it yet.
Maybe the senior leadership is like the Booz Allen Partners that Wendy, and I met. They are looking at dashboards, numbers, and markets of interest. They are looking at their board. But the people who are selling will need to move on because they just lost the client.
At the end of the day, if you can’t see the big picture and you don’t know your prospect, your client, or your own organization. You’ll wind up celebrating this lack of knowledge with a new role somewhere else.
The question is, will you learn from it?
Do you want to snatch that bird that’s not even in your hand or be thoughtful and attract the three in the bush to land on your window?
It is always all about the people!