Now, let me be clear. I have nothing against delight. But the notion that it should be the goal of a business to delight its customers is folly. Delight, after all, is an evanescent experience that comes and goes pretty much as it pleases. It cannot be reliably evoked. More importantly, your customers, and particularly your B2B customers, are not paying you in order to be delighted. Indeed, while ostensibly they are purchasing your products and services, what they really want to buy is outcomes.
As Ted Levitt taught many years ago, while a customer may need to buy a quarter-inch drill, what they really want to buy is a quarter-inch hole. A successful sales campaign, therefore, starts with getting clarity on what outcomes constitute success. This is harder than it sounds. Success is seen very differently from the perspectives of the executive sponsor, the department manager, the end user, the technical specialist, the CIO, and the CFO. All six of these have a stake in the game, and you will need their support to establish an enduring relationship.
Now, to be fair, a lot of business as usual doesn’t call for executive attention because inertial momentum is already on the side of the desired outcomes. It’s when the customer needs to change the status quo that we need to develop a multi-stakeholder current-state/future-state roadmap for success. So, let’s imagine you are in the IT industry and you are looking to land a major new account. What kind of a journey would that entail?
- The Executive Sponsor. The process starts with engaging the executive sponsor in a discussion of the current state of their business, what potential future state they may have in mind, and what “value traps” are impeding their progress. In this discussion you have the opportunity to demonstrate genuine intellectual curiosity about the dynamics of their company and industry and to propose connections between your offerings and their aims. The deeper this conversation goes, the bigger the opportunity space becomes. This, in other words, is where five-figure deals can become six-figure, and six-figure deals become seven-figure, for the outcome the executive sponsor really wants is to move the big rocks, not just to smooth out the gravel.
- The Department Manager. Department managers, on the other hand, are up to their ankles in gravel and they need your help to deal with it. Once again, engaging them in an intellectually curious conversation about their value traps allows you to identify the outcomes that will make a real difference and to make sure you highlight them in your proposal and prioritize them in your implementation. The outcome department managers want is productivity improvement for their team, as measured by faster response times, better quality, and greater throughput. The executive sponsor supports this sort of thing, but they have delegated it to the department manager, and so do not need to be directly involved.
- The End Users. The end users who work for the department manager are the ones whose behavior you will directly impact and whose buy-in you must secure. The outcomes they seek are improvements in their personal effectiveness and efficiency. Most frequently they are looking for relief from mundane repetitive tasks that a smarter system would just do for them in the background. “Free me from the stupid stuff!” might be their battle cry. With the rise of RPA (Robotic Process Automation), complemented now with GenAI (Generative AI), this is becoming increasingly feasible to deliver. One thing to remember with end-user communities, however, is that they mirror the Technology Adoption Life Cycle in miniature, meaning they are comprised of enthusiasts, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives, and skeptics. Each profile defines successful outcomes in very different terms, so the Customer Success team needs to identify the adoption profile of the individual they are working with before they go about prescribing tactics for meeting their needs.
- The Technical Specialist. It is not until you get to the technical specialist that you find anyone who is really interested in your product. This, in other words, is the first person who actually wants to see your demo. Demoing to any of the prior three stakeholders is typically a waste of time, at least until you can tune the demo to highlight the outcome they seek. But with technical specialists, it is critical to your success. They are often the ones who get to make the call between competing products that have roughly the same functionality, and you need expertise in both yours and the competitors’ offers so you can answer their questions with authority. A successful outcome for this stakeholder is to have a high-performing product to support.
- The CIO. The CIO has bigger fish to fry, and once again, you need to be sensitive to where they sit in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Visionaries who drive digital transformation will care a ton about platforms to support the future and be desperate to free themselves from the technical debt of legacy systems. Success for them is a next-generation infrastructure that can help modernize their company’s operating model, and they will move heaven and earth to get it. Pragmatists can have similar goals but will want to proceed more methodically, looking for predictable outcomes that come in on spec, on time, and on budget, as confirmed by customer references that are in production. Meanwhile, conservatives are secretly hoping they can just pass this baton to their successor, and skeptics will simply dig in their heels.
- The CFO. The CFO is likely to view success in terms of verifiable ROI, yet again with a Technology Adoption Life Cycle wrinkle. Conservative CFOs will be looking for “hard dollar” savings—direct reductions in out-of-pocket costs. Pragmatic CFOs will look beyond these to include “soft dollar” savings from productivity gains in throughput, cycle time, and quality. Visionary CFOs (and, yes, there are such folk) look beyond this for step-function changes in competitive advantage that would change the multiple of their stock price. What unites all of the above is that all these success outcomes have some flavor of “Show me the money!”
- The Account Plan. As sales teams well know, every account plays out in its own unique ways, but we can do our best to nudge it toward our goals. This starts with prioritizing the importance of our six stakeholders with respect to the buying decision on the table. If we have to create or redirect budget, then we need to call high, but if we are simply looking to consume budget, then we need to focus on the middle management instead. So, as an account manager, get your team to rank order the six stakeholders and then focus your efforts on the top two or three.
With respect to those top targets, the next step is to get the team to agree on their Technology Adoption profile. This is super important because you only get a limited amount of attention from any of these folks, and you don’t want to waste cycles on messages that won’t land.
Third, once you get a realistic sense of the outcome that are driving the sales cycle from the customer’s point of view, you need to differentiate your proposal both by calling them out as key goals and then customizing your offer to ensure they will get achieved.
All in all, it’s not rocket science, but it does require patience, and most of all, it calls for you to genuinely engage with the target personas to develop a differentiating understanding of what they are really after.