As I said a week or so ago, I'm busily writing a manual for enterprise sales people. Here's another excerpt, this time from the Introduction.
If you are an Account Director that’s responsible for selling to large organizations, you’ll be well aware of the traditional challenges involved in closing a deal.

You have to build strong and lasting relationships so you can get meetings with the people who can make a buying decision. You need to do so in the face of what is ordinarily quite considerable disinterest, sometimes even open hostility.

You have to make sure you get enough things in front of your customer that your pipeline is deep. You need a deep pipeline to ensure you have enough headroom to allow for the inevitable collapse of most of what you propose.

When you have, finally, got a deal on the table, you have to negotiate shrewdly in order to make sure you maximize your margins and extract the most value possible from your customer.

And in the end, ultimately, you then have to supervise every aspect of delivery, making sure you balance your costs so you do the minimum amount of work possible. You do the minimum you can get away with because that makes economic sense and maximises your margin.

That you do all these things in spite  of the fact that they don’t help your customer makes the relationship part of what you do completely, utterly false.

Nonetheless, some of you do quite well. My observation is that only the cleverest, most charismatic, of enterprise salespeople fall into this category.  You are great actors, able to delude customers into thinking that you actually care about them. Whereas the reality is that you think firstly about your number and what you have to do to make sure you hit it.

Whether you are a good person or not, this sets you up to lie in every interaction with your customer. You don’t care about what they’re trying to achieve, you care about what you have to achieve.

I’m not critising you, mind. The way organisations are structured presently, both on sell and buy side, you are forced to behave this way because it makes the best economic sense.

But the question I’m asking is this: what if things were different. What if you truly made the customer the centre of your world? What if, actually, you stopped lying in your interactions with them?

The Great Lie of the Sales Relationship

“Lying?”, I hear you ask?

Yes, lying, and here is why I make the challenging proposition that most enterprise sales people are extremely skilled at acting out the lie of their work.

Consider again the list of things enterprise sales people do with which I opened this chapter, but this time do it in the context of a real relationship, lets say with a personal friend.

You have to build a strong and lasting bond so you can get the meetings you need to pitch in the face of disinterest. A real relationship is never founded on disinterest - it is based entirely on common interests. Your friend is a friend because of the commonality.

You have to get enough stuff in front of your customer to ensure you have a deep enough pipeline to sustain deals that don’t go anywhere. In a real relationship with a friend, you’d never do this. A real friend would come to a mutual agreement about some course of activity - just the one - and would follow it jointly with you to an outcome. Friends support each other, they don’t play a numbers game to ensure they get to a personal outcome.

You have to negotiate shrewdly to extract the maximum value from your customer. If your customer was a friend, you’d be more interested in giving away your stuff, because you know that your friend would return the value as a natural consequence of friendship.

And finally, doing the delivery, you spend all your time making sure you spend only that amount of money you need to keep things on the straight and narrow. That’s cheapness, in the context of friendship. Imagine telling your friend you’re going to spend as little on them as you can get away with! Doing the minimum possible is a long way from going the extra mile, which is what a true friend would do.

Of course, enterprise sales is not friendship, but you can see how the activities of the enterprise salesperson can easily get really false.

You can’t on the one hand say you are successful on the basis of the relationships you build, and then go on to do everything that would normally bring a relationship to its knees. That’s why the best enterprise sales people are such great actors: they can make a customer believe in the relationship whilst simultaneously optimizing the outcomes for themselves.
I'm still seeking enterprise sales horror stories from either the buy-side or the sell-side. Right now, I'm looking for anything that has to do with mismanagement of evidence (ie, when case studies or customer references, or POCs have gone wrong), and blow ups when vendors have pitched "innovation".

The final book will likely be out in a couple of months.

"The Lever" (def): A mystical, invisible handle you can pull to get crushed by a safe. A device often used in popular culture, especially in cartoon shows featuring comical adversaries and their booby-traps.

The top five signals you should pull "The Lever" include:

1. You have just been in a three hour meeting you thought was concluding. Then some bright spark pops up with three items of "any other business", each of which will take another three hours. Because they are more senior than you, smile sweetly and resign yourself. While you're waiting for the cobwebs to form and your beard to grow, you pull "The Lever" because being crushed by a safe is more stimulating than the alternative of propping your eyes up with matchsticks.
2. The startup time of your laptop is longer than that needed to get through the items of "any other business". When you question this, you are told everything is within the SLA. You pull "The Lever" to get crushed by a safe because the alternative is to make so many cups of tea you'd cause the local water pressure to drop in the pipes.
3. While you're waiting for the laptop, but before you pull "The Lever", you are confronted by a sales-guy who has a proposition so good you'll be "dying to hear about it". You pull "The Lever" and get crushed by a safe because you'd rather die without hearing about it.
4. You discover one morning that "The Lever" has been decorated with gold gilt and now has a sign attached inviting you to pull it every time you've achieved one of your goals. Someone senior has determined that a public display is a great way to motivate, so you pull "The Lever" to get the public display of being crushed whilst putting yourself out of your misery at the same time.
5. The top reason to pull "The Lever", however, is you discover the person with the "any other business", and who thinks that slow start up times are OK, and who decorated "The Lever" are the same person. Even knowing this, you go and pull "The Lever" to be crushed by a safe because you know if you fail to do it this time, they will next dream up a Button-That-Dumps-You-In-The-Piranha-Pond and conceal it in the "on" button of your slow-to-start laptop.
   

I do a lot of meetings with vendors. A lot of meetings. And, as you'll know if you've been reading here for any amount of time, I'm of the view that many of these meetings are (frankly) a waste of time. Not all of them, by any stretch, but a very sizable percentage.

I'm beginning to come to a realisation about this. Vendors who have always been vendors (i.e., they have never worked customer side) are usually quite poor at understanding the real issues customers face. They say they understand, but I don't think they really do.

I have no other way to explain the behaviours you get from them otherwise.

Anyway, I also do quite a few speeches to vendors giving the "customer perspective". Almost always, people come up to me afterwards to say that they didn't realise X, or hadn't considered Y, and that my material was really interesting.  I like to be candid in those talks, so I usually don't pull punches.

Anyway, since I completed The Little Innovation Book I thought I'd try to do something constructive about the vendor thing. Therefore, I've paused One Big Thing (my next innovation book for people who have only one shot at getting things done) and decided to write an insiders view of the enterprise sale for vendors. I don't really have a good title yet (suggestions welcome).

It'll be another short, 30k word work, split into commute-readable chapters.

So you can get an idea of where I'm going, what follows is an excerpt from Chapter 2, which is about the falsity of the relationship selling model.

I open the chapter by reproducing an exchange between an Account Director and myself in one company I worked for. It was a technology vendor, one that mainly sold bits of commodity tin. Here is part of the analysis I follow this with:
The second point of note from the exchange I had was the Account Director, whether it was deliberate or not, was setting up an adversarial situation inside our organization.

When IT (for example) has made a decision on something that is disadvantageous to a vendor, it is a fairly normal reaction to scramble to find someone with more power that will re-balance things back in the vendor’s favour. There are strong economic motives for doing this, of course.

When a deal goes the wrong way, the potential loss of revenue can be huge. That is revenue that has to be made up elsewhere, and means that new deals have to be put on the table quickly if the Account Director is to make up their number at the end of the year.

From the perspective of the Account Director, trying to stop this happening makes excellent economic sense. For most selling organizations, the number of opportunities to make the number is essentially finite. Wasting any of them can have drastic consequences for end of year compensation.

Then, too, it may be that there is a real belief that the customer is making a mistake. In this case, in the name of the “doing the right thing for the customer”, you often see this behaviour occurring.

Whether or not the vendor is actually attempting to set up an internal confrontation, doing so is another example of the falsity of the relationship sales approach. In a true relationship, vendors would never dream of putting their partners in a situation where they are in the middle of a fight. Friends don’t do that to each other.

But the economic basis of relationship selling makes it very difficult to avoid. Faced with the certainty of a significant loss of money, or possibility of putting a relationship into a place from which it cannot recover, most Account Directors are forced to choose the latter.

After all, if they are good enough at their jobs - acting (that their primary concern is customers, not their targets) - it will be possible, given enough time and effort, to convince the customer that they really do  have their best interests at heart. A brilliant Account Director can make the choice of money over relationship time and time again and get away with it. Poor Account Directors, on the other hand, do so only once before they get thrown out by the customer.

Setting up adversarial relationships in accounts is an overt case of a much more common behaviour, known internally to the buy-side as “divide-and-conquer”. Vendors, usually with pretty good intentions, go around to as many people as they can making their pitch.

There will be a pretty varied reaction to this. Some people are open to a new proposition, and will be supportive. Most will be disinterested. And some will be openly dismissive.

By seeing as many influential people as they can,  vendors are able to maximize the opportunities they have to create a groundswell of demand for their offer. Indeed, this truly is a numbers game, because with enough meetings, it is possible to sell anything to a large organization by virtue of the fact that sooner or later, there will be enough people wanting it that a purchase is inevitable.

Divide and conquer is hated by the buy-side, because it creates a situation where things happen that are outside the strategic frame. The result is many smaller deals going on, which can add up to significant overspend over time. In one company I worked for, there were twice as many software licenses purchased as there were people in the organization.

This is demonstrably bad for the customer, and demonstrably very good for the vendor, of course. It is yet another example of where a decent account director will almost always trade relationship for revenue.
I'm planning to have the full book out in about 3 months. I'm still looking for any vendor horror stories - from either the buy or sell side - which can add some spice. I'll keep your identities and organisations confidential if you wish.