Sell Like You're Playing a Par 5 - Guiding health-tech to better health

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I was reading an article in a Golf Digest this morning and read the following:

“It requires more forward thinking, more self-restraint and sufferance, risk and reward at once.”

They were talking about what it takes to play a par 5 hole well.

As I read that it dawned on me that this applies to the several conversations I’ve had regarding how to effectively manage the sales process. That is:

Customers go thru a very predictable buying process in B2B sales, particularly when they are enterprise in nature.
If we are to be effective in B2B sales, we must proactively manage both the customer’s buying process and our sales activities so that they align
- Frequently people at a the customer organization don’t know how their own organization buys (procurement process) and so they are apt to naively delude us into sales activities when they are not aligned with their own buying process. Put another way, they will ask us to do things at the wrong time. We must resist this.

Here are some of the absolute and objective realities that we can anticipate and expect in a typical enterprise, B2B buying process:

While a person may make an emotional purchase for something they don’t need (new shoes come to mind), organizations do not. They only invest in solutions to problems that are effecting their results (ROI).
- Which solution an org chooses may have emotion involved (i.e. “I like the vendor”), but they will not buy unless there is a known problem the solution addresses in a positive way
It is highly unlikely a problem is only effecting 1 person in the organization and so there will be a team of stakeholders involved in agreeing the problem is a priority for the organization to address today / now. And even if the problem is effecting 1 person, the solution likely involves multiple people.
- If the problem only effects 1 person, it won’t likely be a priority for the organization, despite possibly being a problem for the individual.
Organizations intentionally setup a buying process (procurement) to prevent 1 person from making a unilateral decision for a solution. Therefore, there is second set of stakeholders involved in the procurement process. While there may be some overlap of stakeholders, this is a different group than the stakeholders who are effected by the problem and the group of stakeholders impacted by the solution. This procurement group will likely involve (note, 1 person may cover more than 1 of these roles, but all of these roles are likely to be covered in the procurement process):
- Legal
- IT / Privacy & Security
- Finance
- Users
- Strategy
- Executive (likely person signing contract)
Each of the stakeholders all the way thru this journey will look at what’s happening thru a different lens. If we are be successful in selling efficiently, we must satisfy each of them independently based on their specific and personal ‘lens’ and needs. Examples:
- Legal doesn’t really care if there is ROI or what the problem or solution is. They only care about mitigating risk to the organization and how that’s managed in the contract.
- IT or Supply Management don’t really care about the problem or the solution, but they do care about the risks as far as privacy & security go, and ongoing support of the solution in their environment. They will contribute to the ROI calculation by informing what added costs they will have a result of the solution being in the environment.
- Finance won’t care about IT’s concerns, or even the users’ needs. They will care if there is an ROI and/or budget for this now (current fiscal year), and into the future.
- Users / Problem Owners are the ones we’re likely talking to but don’t understand what IT or Legal are worried about.
- Strategy and Executives may be doing / planning things none of these other stakeholders are even aware of. For example, if the CEO and Board are about to sell the organization, they won’t have interest in this project.
Our organizations have needs too. We must:
- Protect ourselves. Like Legal at the customer, we must protect our IP and the business. This means a contract MUST be signed assuring things like confidentiality, limits of liability, we own the IP, etc. Even if it’s for $0 for a trial, we must have a contract signed.
  - So looking back above, we know Legal and an executive will (should?) need to be involved, even if in a trial or a pilot
- Maximize our ROI. What are we committing to must be documented and have clarity as to a reasonable ROI. This is why we should prefer not to do trials / pilots without having an agreement (see above) signed as to what happens afterwards when it is successful, and that success should be defined.
  - A terrible approach is to say “yes, we can do a trial / pilot” without a commitment to what then happens afterwards. We may only be dealing with a User who wants to trial / pilot, and none of the other stakeholders are involved yet. Thus, we are only spending money and have little to no expectation for a contract anytime soon.
- Focus our resources. Why would we do the above trial / pilot and implement / ship, train, etc. when we have other paying customers waiting? There is an opportunity cost to doing trials & pilots.

So given all of these points, the (good) sales process manages both the buying process, and the sales activities to as quickly as possible move thru all of the stakeholders to satisfy each of their unique needs as efficiently as possible.

A significant “buying signal” indicating we are on the right and legitimate path is that the person most responsible for / effected by the problem is proactively working with the salesperson to proactively engage all of the stakeholders, at the right time, “Helping them buy.” If they aren’t willing to do that, and instead are saying things like “can I get a demo and a price before I take it to my boss?” or “Let me take this to XXXX” rather than involving XXX directly in the process, they are not convinced the organization will agree the problem is a priority. They are afraid of wasting the other stakeholder’s time. We should be afraid of our time being wasted as well.

Things like proposals, trials / pilots, etc. will not likely fix the fact that their organization has not agreed the problem is a priority, and perhaps worse become problems later because other stakeholders feel as though they were circumvented in the process. Some examples:

We send a proposal before others have commented on the problem and prioritization. The proposal is likely missing a lot of things in it, and we look foolish because the ‘user’ we’re dealing with hadn’t consider things they aren’t aware of. When those things surface we may need to do more in terms of the solution, but the customer now has a price in mind, meaning we may not be able to recover the additional costs of meeting their needs. Either we lose money, or we don’t get the deal and everyone feels time was wasted.
We do a trial / pilot but haven’t involved:
- IT who then gets upset not only with the user, but our organization because they had no opportunity to vet our solution for privacy and security – even for a pilot – before it got turned on.
- Legal who gets upset because we exposed the organization to risk
- Strategy who are separately working on something entirely different that will solve the problem in a different way, and others now feel time was wasted

I believe the steps or “activities” in the sales process are relatively easy. They include things like:

Scheduling meetings
Doing Demos
Creating / sending proposals
Creating / sending contracts
Negotiating

But doing these things without considering the buying process and all of the customer’s stakeholders that MUST sign-off if we are to get to the promised land of a “live and satisfied customer” is a fatal flaw.

This is not a new concept. For me it goes back 30 years and was well described in Miller-Heiman’s sentinel work, “Strategic Selling.” But it appears the explosion in entrepreneurs innovating new solutions might benefit from understand, like I wrote in another post, “This isn’t the Field of Dreams.”

Effective sales is very much like golf. The best players out there look at each pin and work backwards knowing they likely have a putt, and a chip, and perhaps a long-iron, and of course a tee-shot to start. They strategically plan from where on the green they would prefer to be taking their putt, such as past the hole coming back towards it, or from before the hole, left or right of the hole, etc. They then consider from where they would want to take their chip shot to have the best chance of being in that place on the green for the putt. And they keep strategically planning 2 or 3 steps ahead of where they are right now.

Sales is the same. Here’s to lots of birdies and eagles….