Mastering - Prime Resource Group

1 E1 FFIRS 02/04/2010 Page 7 MasteringtheComplex SaleHOW TO COMPETEAND WINWHEN THE STAKESARE HIGH!Second EditionJEFF THULLJohn Wiley & Sons, 02/04/2010 Page 11 ForewordWAYNEHUTCHINSONVice President, Category and Supplier Management,Shell International, The Hague, The NetherlandsWhen we began planning our annual sales meeting atShell Global Solutions in 2004, we decided to recog-nize our top salespeople with a special rainmaker s wanted to give this award to at least ten salespeopleand decided that to win the award, each of them shouldhave written at least $10 million in business in the previousyear. The only problem was we didn t have ten salespeoplewhoqualifiedandwehadtodropthe barto$ years later, when we started planning our 2009 salesmeeting, we had 22 salespeople who had each written over$25 million worth of business the year before.

2 In asingledeal. Diagnostic Business Development1, the subject ofthe book you are about to read and the brainchild of itsauthor, Jeff Thull, played an instrumental role in this the first edition ofMastering the complex Sale, thisnewly updated and revised edition perfectly articulates thechallenges we faced at Shell Global Solutions, challengeswith which many business-to-business companies, largeand small, continue to struggle. In 2003, when I arrived tohead up sales and marketing, we had the most comprehen-sive and best set of technologies and services for plants inthe oil and gas, petrochemical production, and other proc-essing industries.

3 We knew they were the best because theyxiE1 FLAST 02/04/2010 Page 12had been developed for and refined in Shell s own facilitiesaround the world. We also had a great brand. As a unit ofone of the world s leading oil and petrochemical compa-nies, we had no problem cold calling and getting appoint-ments with top executives in the industries we served. Butonce our salespeople got face-to-face with prospective cus-tomers, far too often they simply pulled out our thick cata-log of 850 discrete offerings, which ranged from consultingengagements to complicated process technologies to sim-ple widgets, and took the position of We ve got it do you need?

4 As Jeff explains in Chapter 1, our approach and ourskills were stuck somewhere between Era 1 and Era 2, andwe needed to start thinking and behaving in terms of Era 3,which is all about customer value, improving thecustomer sbusiness. We had to rethink our portfolio of offerings froman outside in or customer perspective. So, we went to the52 groups involved in the development and delivery of our850 offerings and we asked them, one by one, to describethe value that our customers derived from using our tech-nologies and services. The majority of their responses weresolution focused and enumerated features and asked, What s the business value of our anti-corrosion tool?

5 Business value? It doesn t make money. It elimi-nates corrosion in the processing room in a refinery orchemical plant. Sure, but what happens in the absence of this tool?What happens if you don t eliminate corrosion in the pro-cessing room? Well, eventually there will probably be a fire oran explosion. If that happened, what would be the consequences what would it cost the customer? The value-hypothesis lights began to flicker 02/04/2010 Page 13 Thinking about our portfolio in terms of customervalue also led us to the realization that the bulk of the valuewe provided was not in the specific offering, but in ourexpertise in integrating them into value-added packages anddelivering them to customers in specific sequences that op-timized the value captured by the customer.

6 In fact, we real-ized we could double the measurable value of our solutionsthrough the proper integration and sequencing of their de-livery. Previously, we had been selling our technologies andservices separately, and none of our salespeople were fullyconversant in all of them. Different salespeople (as well asrepresentatives from each of our 52 delivery groups) weretrying to sell different solutions to the same customers atthe same time. Sometimes customers were visited threetimes in a single week by three different people from ShellGlobal Solutions. We changed our approach to dedicatedsales professionals working with each customer, and theyfocused on selling larger, more comprehensive were soon winning orders that were not subject to thebidding process.

7 Because of the breadth of the solutions wecould deliver, our competitors couldn t match our portfolio led us to reconsider who wewere selling to and to seek out what Jeff calls the primecustomer. We didn t want to sell 850 different productsand services to a million customers. We wanted to selllarge, complex , multimillion dollar deals and create on-going relationships with customers who would want towork with us on an ongoing basis. So we segmented ourcustomers and ranked them into three levels based on thevalue we could deliver to them and the revenue we couldearn if we served them well. Then we reassigned our salesforce give you a sense of the tremendous impact this majorchange had in how we managed our portfolio and that ourcustomers had on our sales costs and results, consider this.

8 ForewordxiiiE1 FLAST 02/04/2010 Page 14between 2004 and 2009, we reduced the size of our sales forceby over 60 percent from 110 to 42 professionals and weincreased our average contract size by 800 percent and tripledour course, it took a lot more than a simple re-jiggeringof how we positioned our products and services and howwe ranked our customer base to achieve results like needed to rethink our value-selling strategy and turnour approach to selling on its head. As you will learn in thisbook, you can t sell value as if it were just another productfeature or benefit; customers won t believe your can blame them, given their past experiences with thereturn on investment (ROI) hype and value promises madeby salespeople?

9 I knew this when I went to work for ShellGlobal Solutions many sales professionals know deepdown that there is something fundamentally flawed in theway they have been trained and encouraged to sell. I didn tsee it put into words until the first time I readMastering theComplex became clear that we had to stop presenting andstart working with our customers to reach a shared under-standing of what they were missing and how much it wascosting thembeforewe offered to sell anything even ifthey said they were ready to buy right now. We neededarepeatableprocessthatwouldenableu stoanalyzeacustomer s current situation and then look at our currentportfolio of products and services and identify those thatwould add the most value to the customer s interesting thing is, likemost business-to-businesscompanies, we already had a few highly successful sales-people who were engaging with customers in this way, butthey could not tell us exactly what they did or why itworked.

10 Jeff built a very successful business arounddecoding, capturing, and teaching what the best are book provides such a process Diagnostic BusinessxivFOREWORDE1 FLAST 02/04/2010 Page 15 Development and explains why and how it works. JeffThull and his Group helped us to transform the way wethink about, structure, and execute customer engagementsso completely that I don t think it s entirely accurate to callwhat we do selling the way we sold changed so dramatically, wehadtofigureouthowtogetoursalesforcetot hinkandbehave very differently than it had in the past. In order todiagnose problems and design solutions, the sales forceneeded to become comfortable working at every level ofthe customer s organization,understand how customerperspectives on and measurements of value change withfunction and job descriptions, and adopt a collaborative,non-confrontational style.