I had an economics professor named Father Hohmann.  He was a Jesuit Catholic priest with short white hair that still managed to be unkempt, a smoker’s gravelly voice and a wicked Boston accent.  He approached the principles of macro-economics by contrasting the commodities of “guns and buttah”.  He was also fond of saying “econawmics is nawt an exact science”.  Well neither is sales and it’s all the customer’s fault.

Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with members of the finance team asking me, “how can we get the sales team to bring orders in evenly over the month or quarter?”  Those pesky customers!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve frustrated engineering by emphatically agreeing to a product roadmap only to change direction at precisely the wrong moment as they diligently executed their detailed plan to deliver the original feature-set on time and on budget. Those pesky customers! The finance and engineering folks are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do and what they’ve been trained to do.  If it wasn’t for customers, businesses would run much more smoothly.  Wait a minute…

So what should sales be doing?  Well, to morph the  words of German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke a bit, “No business plan survives contact with the customer” and sales needs to be comfortable with the chaos at the front line.  Too many sales people simply act as a communications wire between the company and the customer, that’s not selling.  Sales has to broker a middle ground that in the end results in the best outcome for both parties.  Picture Tom Brady (American football quarterback, similar to scrumhalf in rugby) at the line of scrimmage with the play clock ticking down and the defense disguising their plans by moving and changing as each second ticks by.  Tom doesn’t panic, he’s not surprised by what the other team is doing he expects it, he’s comfortable even energized in his role.  Under intense pressure, he finds the right compromise between what the other team will give him and what his team is capable of and he executes.  If you aren’t comfortable at the intersection of success and failure, even thrilled to be there, managing the chaos under pressure, sales might not be for you.  Because that’s the job.  And it all starts with a relationship with the source of the chaos, those pesky customers.

A few years back I was in an uncommon position as the “economic buyer” for pretty big CRM replacement.  Because we were swapping out a system that was at the core of our business, we spent most of our time focussing on how the new system could handle many complex internal processes.  We worked closely with the chosen vendor, negotiated fair pricing and told them we were ready to place a pretty large order at the end of their fiscal year.  At the last minute, quite innocently, I introduced change by asking them for pricing to include their channel portal capability so that we could share data with our partners.  The quote came back in the high tens of dollars per partner per year, which when multiplied by our tens of thousands of active channel partners over doubled the license costs!  Stop the presses, surely this must be a mistake.  The vendor sales team, on the brink of victory, rushed back to their product management team to validate the quote.  They came back with this logic: the cost per partner per year was less than the margin earned by either the partner or the vendor on just one small deal.  Comparing this to the annual value of the portal, it seemed like a fair price.  Sounds reasonable and maybe it was, but when multiplied by tens of thousands of units, my perspective as the customer was that the price was doubling just so I could use my own data, this would not fly in the real world.  To their credit, the vendor sales team read the situation, worked to represent the customer view to their business folks and found a pricing structure that increased the size of the sale but not close to double, all before the clock ran out.  They had the necessary relationships, could communicate the nuances of each side’s perspective and, most of all, could present a vision of a win/win long term partnership.  Well done!

One last thing.  Too many sales people quote the old saw “the customer is always right” when working internally to respond to questions and objections.  Well guess what? The customer is not always right!  In fact, the customer doesn’t even want to be always right.  They want to learn.  They want vendors to challenge them and to bring the perspective of a domain expert to the conversation.  They want to hear about new ways to solve their most vexing problems and they want to be told, in a convincing way that’s backed up with facts, why an alternative approach might be better for them in the long run.  Like why it might be better to let engineering finish the cycle they are currently in and then add their new requests ASAP after that.  Those pesky customers appreciate being part of tough business decisions that in the fullness of time, will be better for everyone. Tweet

Image by Vince Vassallo via http://vincevassallo.blogspot.ca/

Please comment.  It would be great to have a conversation about selling and to hear a funny story or two.  I will moderate but the good news (for all of us) is I have a day job in the real world.  So if I don’t reply instantly, feel free to talk amongst yourselves until I get back ;-).