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The Executive Summary The Executive Summary

Position. Message. Sell.

Value sales coaching for the world's trusted advisor sales teams - not CRM monkeys

Position. Message. Sell.
CRM Monkeys vs Trusted Advisors

I spend a lot of time with sales teams - and almost all of them make the same mistake.

They open with who they are, what they sell and why they're qualified - then wonder why the buyer has set himself on fire and jumped out of the window.

Complex deals start with the client's problem, not your product features - most of which would help more insomniacs than customers (unless you're selling sleeping pills).

Somewhere between 55% and 70% of senior buyers say sellers fail to articulate value clearly.

Up to 60% of lost deals fail because the value case was too weak for anyone to sign off on.

And while three-quarters of B2B sales teams claim to practice value-based selling, fewer than half report they know exactly what it actually is: a bit like the UK government's growth strategy.

The Mindset Shift

But imagine a world where clients asked to come to you. Instead of sending endless Arctic-cold emails and gritted-teeth 'hope you're well's' to people you've never met, you sit in a comfortable armchair, listening to your client's greatest problems.

That would have to mean you had built some type of standing in the world. Some kind of story went before you.

A position.

It comes down to a brilliant word that CRM systems cannot even see: trust.

High-value deals are bought by senior buyers who demand to know the people they're buying from.

It sounds terribly old-school and odd, but if they spend millions of pounds with you, they actually want to be able to trust you.

And what's even odder is those purchases rarely happen at the click of a mouse button, but in person, supported by a lot of written content.

Yet - the CRM way tells sales teams to behave like process monkeys. Click this button, move that client to the nurture column and collect a banana at the printer.

The sellers then wonder why there are committees, gates, blockers, procurement, risk, security and legal. And that's before incumbents and competitors play silly buggers with pricing and 'skin-in-the-game' offers.

What is this 'trust' word you speak of?

About 13 years ago, I wrote a value-sales programme for 300 top partners at a Fortune consultancy on how to win major deals.

It was brilliant fun.

But what credentials did I have to do that job? Why me?

I was a journalist and I knew their audience well: Chief Information Officers of the world's largest companies. But to me, they were just people who had business problems. I think interviewing all those CEOs had really allowed me to not worry about big job titles and status. It gave me permission to break down the bullshit.

I investigated the consultancy's challenges, found the problem and held up the mirror to the 300, giving them a fresh perspective on the way they engaged clients, spoke about themselves and put the value proposition across.

I marked their homework, pruning through pitches, decks, executive summaries and papers.

I found typos of client names, ego-statements galore and a lot of product name drops baked with sea containers full of waffle.

The CEO asked me to go hard on the team - so I did, showing them how to think about their clients differently. I reordered their thinking, focusing on new ways to position their best people with brilliant ideas, content and workshops that could demonstrate their genius on their clients' problems.

I put a few noses out of joint, but the data was hard to argue with.

The biggest problem they had was they felt they didn't have permission to approach pitches in a different way. These guys were all on multi-six figure salaries plus big bonuses from big contracts, so that wasn't an excuse in my book. It just needed to shift.

I showed exactly where they were fucking it up. Deals worth more than £100m were being lost on poor spelling, copy-paste approaches and lazy listing of credentials. Basic comms in my book.

Now of course, I insultedcritiqued them in a very charming way, but more importantly, I showed every single one of them how to stop making a mess of their most important bids by writing and speaking to CIOs like a trusted business partner, not like a CRM technology sales monkey.

And some simple communication techniques didn't hurt either - especially when it came to the awful presenters standing in front of awful decks.

Apparently, this is now called Sales Excellence - but from my point of view, it's called communication basics.

Now you may laugh - and some of my clients do - but you would not believe the power of a good letter written from a CEO to a CEO. Not an email, but a brilliant letter written on beautiful paper.

Anyway - I digress from the workshop I am trying to selltell you about.

Once I saw the 300 had taken this on, I was then invited to check their most valuable deals worth more than £30m from that moment on.

And that's how I became good at advising on deals, messaging and as they call it - sales excellence. It's also how I became a commercial director from being a journalist.

It is always about the story and the relationship. Everything else is process.

The Trust Model

The Trust Model below should help you to see what kind of sales approach you have. Most technology companies sit in the Geek quadrant: expert problem solvers, weak relationships.

Geeks are great. Sales people can take them so far, but trusted advisors can sell geek work at massive scale.

Your network is everything. If you don't sow the seeds now, you will have wasted the opportunity.

The Trust Model measured engagement vs capability. But now we need to add much more safety as a key enabler to complex sales wins as buyers focus on risk avoidance instead of growth.

The Offer

A one-day workshop tailored to your business, your propositions and team. I will personally come to work with you, your team and the live deals you're running with in your pipeline.

Every person in the room leaves with a rebuilt message they can use immediately, positioning themselves as thought leaders in their own right - along with the tools they need to go-to-market trusted advisors.

This only works for companies that want to shift their approach. If your sales team is dominated by wheeler-dealers who just want meetings and deals, it's not for you.

If your company is looking to change the way you go to market, you can apply to have the workshop delivered at your office on the form below.

You'll learn:

Who is Dan?

I'm Dan Ilett. I write this newsletter and jokes aside - it would be my honour to help you improve the performance of your sales.

I was an award-winning journalist who wrote for the Financial Times, the Economist Group, The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, CNBC and many tech publications. Following my time advising on sales excellence, I became a commercial director for Virgin Money and Thomas Cook Money, heading financial services business lines.

I've personally advised IBM, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Equinix, Microsoft, Cognizant - a good number of banks - governments and advanced engineering companies on go-to-market, proposition and commercial performance.

The Growth Blockers research programme, now in its fourth year surveying 250 CEOs, consistently surfaces the same finding: the constraint on growth is the quality and clarity of how a company communicates its value. That research is what the Story Sales Method was built on.