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| This is a weekly column transcribed from my Radio Show. The "Top Story" is the major discussion each week in which I address in great depth and detail, aspects of selling that are pertinent to your job everyday. |
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Today we've got a topic that I am really excited to talk about. It's something that came up just last week with one of my really good clients. They asked me to put together a two-day seminar on the technique of advanced key account sales-strategy workshop. That's a long word. What we simply mean is that there is a difference in selling to major accounts or key accounts than in selling to the rest of your account base. And that's what we are going to talk about as our main point of the show today.
Before we do that, there's something else that has been on my mind the last couple of days. I've talked before on the show about the success triangle, and that is the first leaping-off point as a sales professional. Even before you start thinking about selling skills or key accounts or asking obligating questions or any of the myriad of topics that we talk about on this show, the success triangle is the first place you start when you look at your sales career. The success triangle is having product knowledge at the base, attitude on one side, and skills - planning, selling, communicating, listening - all those types of skills as the third side of the triangle.
One of the attitudes that I am very much a fan of is persistence. I talk about belief, enthusiasm, and persistence. Persistence is usually the one that salespeople have the least amount of comfort with. Quite to my surprise, it's been one of the techniques that I've used over the years to be quite successful in my career.
I was thinking the other day about this. I'm working with two really good clients who these days I'm having a hard time connecting with. They're busy; I'm busy. And as I leave voice mails and send them emails and tell them I'm going to follow up, I always wonder if my client base, or anybody's client base for that matter, ever is concerned about when salespeople cross the line from being a persistent person, which is good, to being a pest, which is bad.
That reminds me of my own experience. What do you think is the most number of times I ever called a prospect before I got the appointment to get the business? If you guess ten, that would be a good guess, but it would be wrong. It's thirty-seven.
I had identified a very key potential client. In fact I had two referrals into this particular client. I was one of the people who helped train all the stockbrokers that helped bring this company public. I knew the story; I knew what was important to this company; and I had heard about the reputation of the President/CEO, that he was hard-working, dedicated, had a lot of irons in the fire, and was a very committed, enthusiastic guy. That was one referral into that company.
The second referral is that the person I bought life insurance from also sold life insurance to this guy. And the life insurance person that I bought from was also someone that I trained, and that person had attained a very high level of success with a very well known insurance company. So that was a second referral into this company. I also knew he was the decision-maker.
I called him, left a voice mail, and he didn't call me back. I waited a week, I called him again; I waited a week, I called him again; I waited three days, I called him again. Each time I had something fresh to say on the phone. I waited three weeks; I called him again. I called him back in a week. I waited again. I called him again. I waited again. I called him again. And I kept track of all my calls. He hadn't returned thirty-seven of my phone calls over about a seven month period.
On the thirty-eighth dial I was leaving one of my standard or not so standard messages. "Hi Greg, this is Warren Wechsler with Total Selling Systems. As you know, I'm the person who helped train all the stockbrokers to bring your company public years ago. I trained so-and-so who is your insurance agent, and is also my insurance agent. Blah, blah, blah."
I'm about through my third, fifth, eighth sentence on my voice mail, and he picks up the phone. "Hello, Warren?" he says.
I said, "Yeah?" I was almost stunned because I had left all these voice mails and not ever had one returned.
He said, "What are you doing next Thursday at two o'clock?"
And what do you think I said? I said of course, "I'm meeting with you next Thursday at two o'clock, Greg!"
And he said, "That's right."
It's a good thing I didn't say I had no idea, right? Anyway, I went out and met with the guy. I showed up in this large conference room. There were all these people around the table. "This is my VP of Technical Support. This is my VP of blah, blah, blah. This is my Senior VP of that. Here's my CFO. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
He's sitting at the end of the table with a door behind him, and I'm way at the other end of the table where they had saved a seat for me. Imagine this. I'm at one end of the table. He's at the other end of the table. I've never met this guy, and only left five hundred million voice mails for him. Along the sides of the table are all these very important people from his company.
He stands up after he makes the introduction. He looks at me, he looks at them, and says, "As long as Warren does everything that he's told me on the phone and that I've shared briefly with you - you've all seen his materials that I've handed around to you - and as long as what he talks about is within the budget that we agreed on before he stepped into the room, do whatever he says."
Then he got up, turned around, left the room, and closed the door behind him. The rest, shall we say, is history. I got the order on the spot after about two hours. After a year and a half of working with them, I kept calling Greg back to keep him posted, keep him informed about how well we were doing. He never returned another voice mail.
The moral of the story is not "isn't Warren great" because I'm not. I'm just an ordinary person who sometimes does extraordinary things, which is what salespeople do. But I'm telling you that story because it amplifies that if we are persistent in our efforts, and we never cross the line to become a pest, then it's good to be that type of person that pursues things to their proper end, especially if you have a strong belief that you can help these people, that you can be of service to them.
When I start talking about key account selling and major account selling, you're going to see that sometimes there are going to be obstacles or opportunities to practice this type of persistence that I just told the story about.
The reason that key account or major account selling is the topic today is that one of my clients just called me last week from Minneapolis and asked me if I had any special programming for what they called strategic key account analysis and selling techniques.
I said, "Yes, there are some things that are specific to working with key accounts or major accounts, and I'd be happy to put a program together for your sales force of twenty highly experienced, sought after, highly compensated salespeople."
What I'm going to share with you today is what I would do in that one or two day seminar, compressed into the twenty minutes that we have during this segment of the show where I share with you sales knowledge.
What's the same about major account selling and any other kind of selling? The answer is that you need a process, whether you're looking to sell office equipment to American Express Financial Services, or you're looking to sell sales training services to KMCD Radio. You have to be able to have a process that is measurable, so that you know if you're on track, off the track, on schedule, off schedule, ahead of the curve, behind the curve, or what-have-you. And you also need to have something that's repeatable, something that if you do it right this time, you can say, "Ah, great, what did I do so that the next time that I come face-to-face with the same type of situation, I can have the same type of process?"
As you know, if you've heard the show before, I'm a big believer in having a sales process, whether you use the Dale Carnegie model of attention-interest-conviction-desire-action, or the Warren Wechsler model called The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling, which is find the prospect, find the decision-maker, arrange an appointment, ask questions and listen, present the solution, and ask for a commitment. No matter what you do, you have to have a process.
By the way, as an aside, I ran into someone here in town locally in Southeast Iowa about a week ago. I said, "Hi, I'm Warren Wechsler." And he said, "Warren Wechsler! I hear you on the radio. You've got that show on KMCD. In fact, you were on FPAC, the Fairfield Public Access television station talking about your sales process."
I said, "Yes, thanks a lot for listening. Yes that was me."
And then he went on to repeat back to me the Six Steps to Excellence in Selling. That really was quite nice for me to hear that because it said A, somebody's listening out there; and B, the knowledge that I'm sharing makes sense. Here's a guy who is just a regular guy like you and me. He's absolutely normal, like I said earlier, an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. He is in the oil services business, and he could repeat those steps back to me, one, two, three, four, five, six.
Ok, so that's what's the same. What's different? What is unique about selling major accounts or key accounts? There are a number of things that are different. The first thing you'll find is that when you're selling to large or major accounts, you're going to run into typically longer selling cycles. If you're working with an entrepreneurial company that is smaller in scope, you're probably talking to the president or owner. They have a very clear vision of where they're going. They don't have to bounce a lot of things off a lot of different people. If they see what you're trying to do, and if they capture your excitement, and your excitement is compatible with their vision, there's a real good chance they're going to be able to make a decision either very quickly, or sometimes impulsively, right on the spot. With major accounts, it's sometimes different. You're going to find yourself running into longer selling cycles.
The second thing that's different about selling to major accounts is that you're likely to run into more than one decision-maker. Using my previous example, if you're talking to a closely held company, you're probably talking to the president or owner. You're probably talking to the person that has what I call the decision-making criteria, that is, they have the need for what you're offering, they have the authority to say yes, and they have the money. If it's something that they decide is good for their company, they're authorized. They have the budget; they can spend the dough. So the second thing that's different about the major key account or key account arena is that you're going to run into more decision-makers. In a few minutes I'm going to tell you what I mean when I talk about more decision-makers.
There's another thing you have to think about, and that is there is more competition when you go after some of these large accounts because everybody wants the large account. There's more revenue; there's more glamour; there's name recognition. If I say to you, "Yes, I work in the banking business. Some of my clients are Citigroup, American Express Financial Advisors, Shierson, Merrill Lynch, US Bank, Wells Fargo, Liberty Mutual, Marsh McClennan."
Now if you were anybody who knew anything about the financial services business, you'd say, "Oh my goodness! Warren's really cool. Look at all those great companies he works for."
Maybe you're not local and I say to you, "Here are some of the banking clients I work with: Central Valley Bank. Here are some of my investment clients: John G. Canard, Piper Jaffrey, Dane Bosworth. Here are some of my financial services companies: H.R.H Insurance."
These are all great companies. I have wonderful relationships with them. But unless you're in Tampa, Florida, or Minneapolis, Minnesota, or Fairfield, Iowa, you have never heard of any of these companies.
The third difference then is that there is more competition when you go after these major account/key accounts because everybody wants to have them as their customer. By the way, they pay their bills on time too, those big customers.
The final thing that's different is that you're going to run into more sophisticated buyers. These people have been around. They've been exposed to lots of different things in the past. So you'd better be really good at what you do as far as your discovery, your fact-finding, the way that you present yourself, and the whole idea of what you're trying to do for them. You'd better be good. You'd better be an expert. You'd better deliver on your promises. You'd better have a great reputation that means something because the people that you're going to be calling on have heard every story in the book, positive and negative. And you'd better be prepared for that.
Briefly the four major differences are longer selling cycle, more potential decision-makers, more competition, and more sophisticated buyers.
Now having said all these things, if you're not depressed and you still want to go after major accounts I'm going to tell you how to do it. You have to understand that there is a process. I'm going to share with you exactly how to do it. The first thing is to do your homework. In some small companies, if you're calling on decision-makers of closely held companies, it's kind of cute if you go in there and say, "Tell me about yourself," because a lot of those people are the entrepreneurs that started the business and they like to tell stories about their company.
Imagine if I was able to work with a large pharmaceutical company. Say I was introduced to Merck, and I worked with some of the larger pharmaceutical companies here in the United States, and let's say I said, "Oh, gee whiz, tell me about your business." I'd be out of there on my ear in about as quick as you could say a New York minute. So what's the idea? The idea is you have to do your homework. You have to understand something about these companies. What do they do? What markets do they serve? How many salespeople do they have? What's their revenue size? What's their employee size? Where are their plants? Who are their competitors?
The best place to do this research is the Internet. You can find out anything you want to know about any company simply by going out onto the web and using some of the search engines that are out there. I've talked about this in the past. Northernlights.com. Dogpile.com. Google.com. You can even use Yahoo or Lycos or Alta Vista, but the three I mentioned first, Northernlights, Google, and Dogpile are actually great search engines. So go out on the Internet and do research. If you're aiming at Fortune Five Hundred companies, there's a Fortune Five Hundred website. You can find out a lot of information about your particular prospect. So that's the first thing. Do your homework.
Here's the second thing. Not aim high, which I talk about in my book, and I've talked about here on the show before. Not aim high; aim really, really high. Aim really, really high. I'll give you an example. I was calling on one of the top ten brokerage companies in the United States. I had done a lot of work in that field. Years ago, about half my revenue came from financial services companies, companies in the brokerage field. I was calling on one of the top ten. I didn't know whom to call on. It was one of those circumstances where I didn't have any referrals, so what I did was call and ask for the president of the company, president and CEO.
I called up. Ring, ring, ring. When the phone was answered I said, "I want to speak with Mr. Blah, blah, blah, the President and CEO."
The woman who answered the phone said, "Executive offices." Her name happened to be Kathy. I said, "Kathy, give me some insight here. I'm a sales trainer and public speaker. I wrote a book called The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling, which has become a bestseller. I work with companies like." I named-dropped four or five companies that she would be familiar with.
I said, "Kathy, help me out. Can you tell me how it works at your company? I know you're a very large brokerage firm. I could make a hundred calls into the branches or locations, and I wouldn't get too far. Help me out."
She said to me, "Warren, you got a pencil?"
I said, "Yeah." I thought she was going to say go away and write it in big letters.
She said, "Here's how it works. The first thing you do is call Dan. He is the Senior VP of Sales for the whole company. He sits on the Board of Directors of the holding company. He's the first guy you should call. But you know what? He's not involved in this day-to-day stuff. He's going to have no idea why you're calling. But he's going to refer you to John. John runs all the retail side of our business. He's in charge of managing all two thousand of the salespeople we have. He's actually a really good guy. He'll engage you in conversation. He's a fan of all this stuff. If you can get him involved in your book and send him your book and your audio book, he'll eat this stuff up. He's got libraries filled with the type of thing that you do. But he's not the decision-maker either."
So here I've got Dan who's not the decision-maker, John who's not the decision-maker.
She says, "Yes, but here's the guy you need to talk to. You need to talk to Brad because Brad runs all of training for the whole company. But if you just call Brad out of the blue he won't see you because he has no desire to see people like you. He's busy and we already have a lot of things in place. But if you call Dan, and Dan refers you to John, which he will; and John refers you to Brad, which he will; and then you call Brad, you'll get the appointment and everything will be hunky-dory."
I said, "Kathy, thanks a lot. You did a great job for me."
This is a major company, one of the top ten brokerage companies in the whole world, and this one woman, aiming very, very high as I did, gave me exactly the strategy I needed to do to implement it. I did just those things. It must have been the stars were lined up that day. I got through to Dan, and Dan referred me to John. I got through to John, and John referred me to Brad. The very next day I called Brad, got the appointment on the first try, went out and saw him, and then a week later I was on their calendar to start doing sales training for their brand new brokers. In fact, over the next two-and-a-half years, I worked with the rookie brokers and the six-month group. They'd bring them all back after six months, and they'd have more questions. I worked with the eighteen-month group, and then the three to five year group, where they'd bring them to a really nice place and celebrate the fact that they had made it into the business three to five years. That's what happens when you aim really, really high.
OK, remember I told you earlier that you'd have to understand different decision-makers? There are three basic groups of people you need to understand. One is what's called the user. Let's take my own example. I sell sales training services. The person I'm looking for who would be the user of that is not going to be all the individual sales people because those really are the ultimate client in my case. The user of my service is the VP of Sales, the sales manager, the head of sales training, the training director, or the Vice President of Marketing and Sales. Those are my users. Those are the people who are going to hire me because they need the product or service that I provide. That's one group of people you need to find.
The second group of people you need to find are what are called the economic buyers, or the financial buyers. Those are the people who control the checkbook. Sometimes it's the same people. The person who is the VP of Sales also has a budget. Sometimes it's not. They have to go through the training department, the HR department. Sometimes they have to find the budget somewhere else. They have to go to their corporate headquarters to find the money or what have you.
The third group of people is called opinion leaders. These are people that I call decision-influencers. They are people within the company whom you need to get to know because whatever they say has clout. They could be secretaries; they could be janitors; they could be manufacturing agents; they could be purchasing agents; they could be anywhere. But if they have clout, if they can bring you into the company, they're really good people to know as well.
That reminds me of another story. I do work with a large dental company. It's a national company based in California. The person that was the opinion leader there was a technician that had developed a process for making molds for people's teeth. He had nothing to do with sales or marketing or management. He had been a technician and a clerk. The guy who actually works with the teeth had come in, and he was the opinion leader. It was just an incredible experience for me. I was referred into their company by his daughter who had attended one of my classes. I think she was a pharmaceutical saleswoman.
OK, those are the three types: users, economic buyers, and opinion leaders.
There is one more thing I want to talk about that is different in this whole concept of major account, strategic account selling, and that is you have to find an advocate within that company who can be your selling partner. Within these large companies you're going to run into all kinds of situations where things get dragged down or slowed down or derailed. Things can just slow down because they run out of momentum, or inertia takes over and things go nowhere. It's like trying to run in quicksand. Your advocate is the person who is so excited about what you're doing, they are almost as excited about what you're doing as you are. While you're not there, while you're out working and doing what you do, they're going to be fighting your battles, carrying your lance for you inside their own company. OK? You have this advocate guide you through the process.
Those are some of the things that make this whole process unique.
I want to leave you with three really quick thoughts. One is don't forget the basics. The basics are you have to absolutely believe that you have the best product and service. As I opened the show, and I talked to you about the situation in my own career where I had to go through thirty-seven obstacles, delays, voice mails not being returned, until I got the final appointment with the key decision-maker. As you know, from that story, once I got that appointment, the rest is history. It became almost a three-year relationship with that company. Do you think I ever had my belief tested? Well, as we say in Minnesota, you betcha! It was tested lots and lots of times.
So what I'm saying is follow the fundamentals of having great belief in yourself and applying step four of my model: ask questions and listen. Once you get into those companies, don't pontificate. Don't tell them how wonderful you are. Probe and find out what their needs are, and where they're struggling, and what they're looking to accomplish in their own company, and how they're going to get there, and what their areas of concern are, and how you might fit in. Don't forget that fundamental truth about selling which is people love to buy, they hate to be sold. So your job is to go in there and ask the questions and get them thinking about potential solutions that you're going to recommend later.
The final point, and this is probably the most important thing about any type of selling environment, whether it's major account or key account, but especially in key account selling, is maintain the initiative. MTI as I call it. There are so many times when people say to you, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sounds good. Our committee's going to meet. I'll get back to you." And you say, "That's fine. I'll wait for your call." And you know what happens? They never call you back. So you say, "I understand that. Let me make a note. When are you going to call me back?" And they say, "I'll call you back blah, blah, blah." And you say, "Great. If I don't hear from you by." You put a date out there two or three days in the future. "then I'll make a note to call you." That's an example of maintaining the initiative.
OK, folks, I want you to all go out there and start calling on major accounts. In fact, I'll give you the Sales Idea of the Week. Find the largest account that you could possibly call on. Find the biggest company in your town. If you're in Southeast Iowa, you know who they are, whether it's Ottumwa, Mt. Pleasant, here in Fairfield, Sigourney, find the largest account. And then here's the Idea of the Week. Don't delay, don't wait, don't worry. Call that major account up and utilize the strategy I've shared with you today. Go after the big ones. Don't be afraid. Go out there and make the call on the major account in your area.
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– Warren
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