Issue #122

Freedom To Win

This is a story about realising that interactive workshops are a much better way to sell complex solutions than presenting pre-baked answers to questions you don’t fully understand.

Once I tried it, I never looked back, it was clear that when prospects have a hand in their own solution, they are already bought into it.

Took a while to convince my bosses, mind you…

As I sat in reception waiting to go up to my big sales presentation, I was so nervous I thought I’d sweat through my suit.

We’d been preparing this pitch for two weeks. We had the right numbers, the resources in place, the guarantees and the growth path all sorted.

What I didn’t have was a price advantage; we never competed on price.

The receptionist called over, “Mr Roberts will be down shortly, can I get you another coffee?”

He was already half an hour late, unusual for him. Bob Roberts was a stickler for rules, timing and doing things by the book.

“No, thanks, but can you direct me to the men’s room?”

“Sure, up the stairs, left down the corridor, second on right.”

The stairs in the atrium were curved steel and very impressive. I paused at the top to look back out at the view across their campus through twenty feet high windows.

At that point I heard Bob Robert’s voice. I turned and saw him walking into the corridor from a room way down at the end.

I quickly ran over the mens room door, but paused before I went in, to see if I could hear anything.

“Exactly what we were looking for, Graham, thank you. I will call you later to arrange the letter of intent and contract negotiations can start then.”

I peeked out quickly and recognised “Graham”, VP sales at our biggest competitor. Nice guy, used to work for us, perfect hair, perfect teeth, very professional - obviously I hated him.

I was freaked out by what I’d heard. I did that thing they do in films where you splash water on your face. I always thought that looked phoney, it is, it just makes your shirt wet.

Anyway, I had to wait another twenty minutes before Bob deigned to show. Lucky, really, because the time gave me a chance to think. And my shirt to dry off.

I walked outside and did a lap of the facility and breathed deeply.

As I walked past a loading dock, I saw two guys throwing parcels into the back of a truck like it was an olympic sport. It made me wonder what it was like to receive a parcel like that.

And then it hit me what I had to do when I got inside.

I formulated a new plan, a last ditch approach. After all, I now had nothing to lose.

The room had the VP finance, the Operations General Manager and Bob, who was COO. It was already warm and musty from the previous (highly successful) presentation.

I felt like I'd arrived at a party when everyone's cleaning up.

“I can save us all a whole lot of time here,” I said. “You’ve read our proposal, you know our reputation. We can do what you need and way more than that.”

Bob looked almost grateful, ”Great, we can make it quick then.”

“Sure, there’s one thing I want to do first. I want to hear from the one person who is not in the room, whose opinion matters as much, if not more, than all of the rest of us here.”

“The decision makers are all here, John, who else do we need?” Bob’s gratitude was visibly draining away.

“Your customers, Bob, the guys who actually pay your wages and would pay mine if we got the business.”

“We know our customers, John, don’t you worry about that.”

“You do, Bob, but I’m not sure it’s getting down to the actual customer touch points. Let me tell you how we address that,”

I retold our solution from the point of view of a customer ordering their goods right now. I included the bit about their parcels most likely being damaged.

Then I took them on a journey into what that could look like in a year’s time.

I put some sheets of flipchart paper on the wall and we drew a new process together.

Suddenly instead of us facing off over a conference table, we were all on the same side, slapping post it notes on the wall and mapping out future customer journeys.

As Bob saw me out he was energised and excited, “I’m not going to lie, John, we had more or less given the business to another company. But now, we really have to think again.”

“Once you have, invite me back and I will do a full workshop on this for you and your team. We can get some customers in too, if you like.”

We did the workshop, it was a revelation for everyone who came. It took another month, but we got the deal.

Those workshops became the basis of our new sales methodology for the next ten years. I taught it to over 1500 salespeople all over the world.

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No newsletter next week, as it's the holidays, so see you in the new year!

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