May 18, 2004

The disconnect that's killing your software sales: 7 steps to getting sales and marketing on the same page

by Gordon Graham, SoftwareCEO

Mike Bosworth of CustomerCentric Systems has probably sold more software and trained more high-tech salespeople than anyone else on the planet.

His earlier book, "Solution Selling," helped thousands of sales executives refine how they sell complex products like software.

His new book, "CustomerCentric Selling," takes his ideas to a whole new level. One of Bosworth's major themes is getting sales and marketing to work together effectively. This issue still plagues too many software firms, where these teams view each other with suspicion or downright hostility.

SoftwareCEO invited Bosworth to lead an online seminar on April 8, where he shared some valuable insights on how to overcome this disconnect that can devastate a software company's results.

How do you know if you have the disconnect?
Just ask your VPs. They know.

You know you've got it if your VP sales says something like, "Marketing is irrelevant!" or "Marketing wouldn't know a qualified prospect if they met one!"

You've got it if your VP marketing says something like, "Sales aren't using our collaterals! In fact, they're making their own!" or, "We send tons of qualified leads over to sales, and they fall into a black hole!"

If you've got this disconnect, what can you do about it? Here are seven steps to healing the rift that Bosworth shared during his seminar.

Step #1: Acknowledge the real issue.
"In most of the companies we deal with, the CEO is a reluctant referee between sales and marketing," says Bosworth. "The CEO doesn't understand the real solution, so he's forced to just manage the relationship between his two VPs."

Bosworth thinks this disconnect is a structural and training issue, not a personality conflict. Simply replacing one or both VPs does nothing to solve the problem, as many CEOs have discovered.

"The real key to tying separate silos together is process, not personalities," says Bosworth. "Most people do want to work together, they just don't know how. If you can show them how to have a meeting of the minds and agree on what their sales people really need, the conflict quickly disappears."

After all, marketing wants to be relevant. They want their collateral to be used. Sales certainly wants to get good leads and close business. So the motivation is there. What's missing is the knowledge of customer-centric messaging and selling that Bosworth spells out in his book.

Step #2: Redefine Marketing's role.
Probe a little deeper and your VP sales may say something like this: "Sure, marketing is up at 30,000 feet writing white papers and doing market research and designing the next trade show booth.

"But they're not doing anything to help my new 28-year-old salesperson have a meaningful conversation with a 55-year-old C-level executive about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology that he doesn't understand to solve a problem he's never been able to solve."

And when those sales calls fall flat, so do your revenues.

What's the alternative?

"Marketing should be the first step in the sales process, not the last step in the development process," suggests Bosworth. "The key is to work back from the customer, instead of ahead from the product. That's why we call it customer-centric selling, instead of the normal product-centric approach."

This shifts marketing's emphasis from research and strategic planning to more tactical efforts, like creating demand for today's products today. Bosworth admits his process deals only with tactical marketing.

All those vital strategic decisions about naming, branding, pricing, bundling and feature sets are still the domain of marketing (or at least product marketing). But many of these will have to be re-visited after the rift is healed, and marketing begins to operate in different way.

Step #3: Agree on what makes a lead.
Leads are the most common touch point between sales and marketing, and probably the biggest sources of conflict between the two. It will defuse a lot of bad feeling to get the two groups to agree on what precisely constitutes a lead.

Bosworth suggests this definition:
{Name/function/company} is curious/interested in how we helped {Function/industry/company} solve a problem or achieve a goal.

In action, that looks like this:
{John Doe, VP sales of XYZ Software} is interested in how we helped the {VP sales of a software company} shorten his sales cycle from nine months to five.

In other words, the role of (tactical) marketing is to create interest from a person with a specific job title about a successful result in another company, likely in the same sector.

The role of sales is to use that interest as a door opener to engage the prospect. What salesperson would turn up their nose at a lead like this?

Step #4: Reframe how you think about selling.
After sales has a lead in their hands, what do they do with it? Get out there and sell, sell, sell! But let's face it: Traditional selling stinks.

"When we ask people what they mean by 'selling,' time and again they say 'persuading,' 'convincing,' 'getting someone else to do what you want,' 'overcoming resistance' or 'handling objections,'" says Bosworth. "Selling has really got this negative stench around it."

There's no doubt about that. Nearly everyone thinks of salespeople as aggressive, pushy, manipulative, untrustworthy, lying, cheating bastards. Are those the kind of people you want dealing with your customers? Or determining the future of your software firm?

"At the core of the work we do to help companies integrate sales and marketing is reframing the concept of selling," says Bosworth.

This is where "customer-centric selling" comes in. By this, Bosworth means, "helping a customer visualize using your offering to achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need."

He repeats this mantra over and over, since it's so often forgotten in the mad rush for software profits.

Step #5: Codify your sales process.
"If you've noticed the top 10 percent of all the sales people that you've ever met, they're consistently over quota. They sell intuitively, and can never say how they do it. The other 90 percent of all salespeople need a structure and message given to them to be successful," says Bosworth.

"We want to architect how that conversation between the 28-year-old and the 55-year-old should go," says Bosworth. "For marketing to be relevant, we have to teach them how to help that 28-year-old make that sales call."

But that's impossible without a defined sales process. And here comes a chicken-and-egg dilemma.

Marketing wants to support sales. But first, marketing needs sales to codify its best practices. But sales doesn't know how, because all its top salespeople (and the sales managers who were top salespeople before them) come from the intuitive 10 percent.

Beyond this issue, Bosworth says to expect a little resistance getting there.

"The #1 enemy of codifying any sales process is the VP sales," Bosworth says. "That's because whenever his numbers don't measure up, and the CEO and CFO try to hold him to account, his way of dealing with this has always been to say, 'You don't understand sales!' He instinctively knows that with a documented sales process, that excuse is gone forever."

Step #6: Prepare sales-ready messaging.
Remember our definition of a lead?

"Sales-ready messaging" creates a framework for steering the conversation with any lead. Knowing the buyer's title or function, along with their interest in a particular result achieved in another company, the salesperson can match what his offering can do with that lead's business issue.

(Not without a lot more probing, of course—and that's where the Top 10 Sales Tips later in this article come in.)

Bosworth's advice is to ask yourself: What predictable conversations do our salespeople need to have to sell, fund and implement our product or service? Then start planning how to steer those conversations.

To get started, set up a table with a job title on the left and a business goal on the right. Each title can have numerous goals. For instance:

     Title               Goal

     VP finance       Reduce the cost of sales

     VP finance       Achieve profit projections

     VP finance       Perform more accurate sales forecasting

Then, map the relevant capabilities of your software onto these goals. Ideally, you can find a success story from some VP finance who achieved each of these aims. And then re-state each goal according to Bosworth's EQPA formula.

He sums up this formula like this:

Event: What circumstances would cause a specific title to need a specific feature of our software?

Question: Always ask, don't tell. You want to start a dialog, remember?

Player: Who or what will take action to respond to the event?

Action: How will the buyer use the feature, in terms that relate to their title?

For instance, after each sales call (Event) would you like (Question) your salespeople (Player) to be promoted to report their progress against a standard set of milestones (Action)?

Develop one detailed question like this for each business goal for each title your sale force calls on. Then link it to a substantiated success with another customer with the same title. All of a sudden, your 28-year-old has something that makes the 55-year-old sit up and listen.

Without sales-ready messaging, Bosworth believes, companies are just trolling for early adopters, for buyers who can put together their own vision of what your software can do for them.

"But, 80 percent of the market is not capable of creating their own vision," he says, "so to sell to the mainstream market, you need to do it for them with sales-ready messaging."

Step #7: Reconsider everything else you do.
Adopting a customer-centric selling model isn't a quick and process. It will likely mean reconsidering everything else your company is doing in sales and marketing.

For instance, this approach may work well for a one-on-one meeting with an executive, where you can listen for his problems and tailor your message specifically for him. But what about advertising, direct mail or the Web, which are by bound to be more generic?

No problem, says Bosworth. After generating your EQPA formulas for different job titles, marketing can use the very same goals, problems and needs to go fishing for prospects. He says you can use this approach for any type of lead-generating system: direct mail, email, advertising or your Web site.

So how would you create an advertising campaign to reach, say, CFOs who are likely prospects for your software? "With the help of this approach, you could run an ad in CFO magazine that goes something like this:

"'The top three issues we're hearing from CFOs are these...' and then list them. 'If you want to hear how we helped our clients deal with these issues, come to www.oursoftware.com,'" says Bosworth. "If you're fishing for curiosity and they're curious enough, you lead them to a Web site."

"Once marketing gets this idea of customer-centric selling, they naturally go back and re-examine all their existing collateral, Web sites, white papers and sales training," he says. "And then they re-do them."

Top 10 sales tips
No session with Mike Bosworth is complete without a steady stream of sales tips. Here are the Top 10 we picked up from his recent online seminar.

These tips are intended for sales of large systems that involve a committee on the buyer's side. But they apply to almost any selling situation that involves a sit-down meeting between a sales person and a decision-maker.

Sales tip #1: Stop giving presentations.
Today's classic sales call often involves a few minutes of aimless chit-chat, followed by the salesperson dimming the lights and cranking up their projector. But does this really work?

"The PowerPoint thing is a little out of hand," says Bosworth. "I think the laptop should be left in the trunk for the first call on any senior executive."

Few presentations are effective because they rely on the "spray and pray" approach: Tell them about 50 features and hope five might "stick." If they're still awake when you finish, that is.

Sales tip #2: Start having conversations.
"After working with many salespeople, we came to understand that the best sales calls are conversations, not presentations," says Bosworth.

And the best conversations are not about last night's game or how good/bad/indifferent the weather has been. They're about the nagging business issues that directly affect your prospect.

Using sales-ready messaging, this conversation can start like this, "I don't know about you, but many CFOs I've spoken with have told me they're concerned about..."

This kind of opening instantly establishes a salesperson's credibility, and signals his willingness to have a meaningful conversation.

Sales tip #3: Stop giving opinions.
Nobody likes someone else doing all the talking. Yet most salespeople hog all the air time. They talk non-stop and bombard their prospects with a barrage of unsubstantiated claims and hype.

"There's a huge credibility gap when a salesperson just spews product knowledge," says Bosworth. No wonder everyone feels uneasy when they're being "sold": It's a monolog where they can't get a word in edge-wise.

People love to buy, says Bosworth, but hate feeling sold.

"Most people resent having a seller try to control the conversation. We don't even like our loved ones telling us what we should do, much less a salesperson that we've never met before."

Sales tip #4: Start asking questions.
It's always more effective to ask intelligent question and discover what business issues concern the buyer. Asking questions doesn't seem like selling to either party, and it means the salesperson naturally yields the floor.

"The best salespeople have learned to leverage their expertise by asking questions, not providing unsolicited opinions," says Bosworth.

"Developing these questions for various job titles gives a salesperson both 'artificial intelligence' to help get on the same wavelength as the executive he's speaking with, and 'artificial patience' so he doesn't rush into prescribing before he has diagnosed."

Since marketing has prepared a matrix of EQPA questions with one for each appropriate title, your sales force can now help buyers see how to use your offering to achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need.

Sales tip #5: Focus on solutions, not relationships.
"Any salesperson who doesn't understand how to relate their offering to the business needs of their clients falls back on building the relationship," says Bosworth. But that won't often help them land a sale, especially a big-ticket sale.

The best way to start a good relationship is to solve a business problem for your buyer. They will think fondly of you after that.

This can mean saying something like, "Here are the four problem areas that our offering has helped customers with. If you have any of those problems, let's talk. And if not, I'm perfectly willing to leave."

Imagine a world where every salesperson operated that way! Our impressions of the profession would be vastly different.

Sales tip #6: Don't lead with products.
In any sales situation, curb your natural instinct to start talking about how great your software is. Instead, listen for the client to start articulating his own goals, problems or needs. By using sales-ready messaging, you can detect which parts of your offering appeal to him, and which leave him cold.

"Most software salespeople bring out their product far too early in the sales cycle," says Bosworth. "We believe the product should stay in the trunk until you've diagnosed the current situation, presented some usage scenarios, and the buyer has actually responded to some of those scenarios."

At your next meeting, you can bring out the product, but only demo the features that actually engage the buyer. If you do this too soon, you risk appearing pushy and impatient, just like those lying, cheating salespeople we all know.

Sales tip #7: Lead with business usage.
One sure symptom of marketing and Sales not being on the same page, says Bosworth, is when new salespeople are given "training" that stuffs them full of feature lists, without relating them to any business use or benefits for those features.

A new salesperson will stumble through many calls caught in another huge disconnect: the gap between what they heard on their training and what they hear from their prospects. Since no one in marketing has connected the dots for them, they have to do it themselves, and not everyone can.

The truly intuitive salespeople—the natural 10 percent—do manage to figure out how to relate their offering to the business problems of their clients. In most companies, they do this by supplementing their normal sales training with picking the brains many other people in the company.

After asking questions to draw out the prospect's business issues, these salespeople use their added knowledge to paint a vivid picture of what their prospect could DO with the software. They help their buyers see how it could help them achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need they have articulated for themselves.

This kind of salesperson isn't manipulating anyone. They're helping their clients in a consultative way, and building an unshakable vision of the value of their offering.

Sales tip #8: Use verbs, not nouns.
"Most salespeople in software firms today are trained by product marketing people to talk about the product and what it will do," says Bosworth. "But this is actually dis-empowering the sales process."

When a salesperson boasts, "Our robust and integrated SFA application will dramatically improve your forecasting accuracy!" they are begging their listeners to ask a simple question in response: How?

If your product is a disembodied "It" that can do so many wonderful things, the next logical step is to start talking features. This is the product-centric approach.

But your prospect isn't thinking like that. He's thinking: "What can I do with it?" He wants to hear a story about someone who used your product to achieve a goal he can relate to. Use verbs, and inject human content into your conversation with stories.

Sales tip #9: Seek out business people, not users.
"You are delegated to the level you sound like," says Bosworth. "So if you start talking about features, you are quickly ushered out of the office of a C-level executive and shuffled off to the IT manager." Or even worse, to users with no buying power. They'll be happy to watch your demos. Just don't expect them to sign any POs.

Bosworth reminds us that for every prospect, at least three or four sales people have that company in their sales forecast. A sure way to win what he calls "a silver medal" is to respond to an RFP and help a low-level buyer round out their obligatory three quotes—after they're already made up their mind not to buy from you.

Sales tip #10: Send a follow up letter after each sales call.
This letter or email is a significant part of Bosworth's model. In it, you carefully summarize the conversation you had with your prospect, and the potential they saw in it. You must help them articulate how they realized they could achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need with your offering.

"This is a critical part of the sales cycle. When the buyer sees their vision clearly outlined on a piece of paper, they will generally forward it to every other significant person on the buying committee," says Bosworth.

Bosworth points out that your salesperson isn't there to influence the discussion when the buying committee meets. But helping his contacts serve as your champion by actually putting words in their mouths—or at least down on paper—puts your firm way ahead of any competitor who didn't do likewise.

The benefits you will see from customer-centric selling
Once the disconnect is healed, you'll likely see faster sales training, fewer resources wasted on poor prospects, shorter demos, and more accurate forecasting.

"And there's a dramatic improvement in start-up time for new sales people," says Bosworth. "The old way, they had to fumble around by themselves for six to nine months before making their first sale. Now, the first week after they're hired, they're out making great calls and documenting those calls. And they most often make their first sale one sales cycle plus one week after they're hired."

Are there any companies too small to benefit from this process?

If there are, Bosworth hasn't met them. In fact, he says many principles of customer-centric selling can work on a shrink-wrapped product box or a Web site. If anything, the problem is the reverse. If your company is bigger than $200 million and the CEO isn't hands-on, he says the change process gets much tougher.

"Without the executive leadership mandating that we're going to get both sales and marketing on the same page, it's a lot harder."