Puzzle

Senior Sales Manager: "We sell information technology products and consulting services, and my team keeps getting stuck in the technical conversations about how we do what we do, instead of addressing the business conversations related to the results we produce. As a result, our sales cycle is brutally long, and a large percentage of these efforts end up in no business whatsoever, because, by the time we get to the close, the situation has changed.

"How do we get out of this quagmire and shorten our sales cycle to three months or less?"

Diagnosis

After several interviews and meetings, we found that three primary problems existed:

1. Our client hadn't developed its unique value proposition (UVP) – the customer-focused wording that describes the exact, bottom-line result produced.
    
   (Note: In crafting a UVP, look for the words that make the prospect's heart beat faster, while his internal voice says, "If I could do that, solving every other problem would be simple.")
   
2. Our client hadn't successfully divided its sales process into three parts – the conceptual sale, the technical sale and the contractual sale – and wasn't getting firm commitments on each part before moving to the next.  
3. Our client was measuring its sales efforts based on how it sells, rather than on how its prospects buy, and those measurements are mostly subjective, rather than objective.
   

Solution

The ultimate goal was to help our client get its prospects to purchase a result, without caring much how our client produced that result.

We call this the "Leap-of-Faith, Keep-'em-Safe™" sale, because it's a trust-based sale. We helped our client create this type of sale by following these four steps.

Step One

We helped them start the process of identifying their unique value proposition. (Note: This can sometimes be done quickly, but mostly it's a time-consuming research effort. The good news, however, is that while you're looking for the killer UVP, you'll stumble on several acceptable UVPs that actually increase results.)

Step Two

Once our client chose a UVP, it need to develop a sales presentation with three separate pieces:

1. Conceptual Sale: A results-focused business discussion with the highest decision-maker willing ton meet. At the end of this discussion, there should be a handshake agreement to do business, "if there are no unforeseen showstoppers."  
2. Technical Sale: Only after achieving the conceptual sale should the technical discussion occur. This discussion could be with the same executive, but most often will be with a technical group instead. The only purpose for this discussion is to learn whether any technical showstoppers exist that will eliminate the ability to achieve the result on which both parties agreed in the conceptual sale.  
3. Contractual Sale: If no technical showstoppers are found, meet once again with the business decision-maker and come to final agreement.

(Note: Figure 12.1 (from Chapter 12 of Gill Wagner's book, "How To Build The [Your Name Here] Sales System) contains a seven-tiered graphical representation of this concept in Adobe Acrobat format. Right-click this link, and choose "Save target as," "Save to disk" or whatever your system allows, so you can keep a copy of it for future use.)

Step Three

Once our client perfected this process, the next goal was to move one step closer to a pure conceptual sale – sell ONLY the result to be achieved, and close the deal in the first conversation – the Leap-of-Faith, Keep-'em-Safe sale.

In a nutshell, the sale is made on faith – the buyer believes the result can be produced, agrees with the fee required to produce the result (and his return on that investment) and doesn't give a hoot about the technology of "how it is done" – provided it's ethical, honest and there aren't any unforeseen showstoppers.

In the Leap-of-Faith, Keep-'em-Safe sale, the technical conversation is actually the first step in the implementation process, rather than the second step in the sales process.

Of course for the prospect, the Keep-'em-Safe part was that our client started offering an unconditional money-back guarantee – should a showstopper be found or should the result not be produced the fee would be refunded.

And to keep our client safe from getting burned, we structured the agreement so its client must make his "Was it worth it?" decision on a regular basis – once every two weeks or once per month.

(Note: At Honest Selling, we have client engagements for which we get a set monthly fee. At the beginning of each month, we decide what puzzles we'll solve during that month. After the first month, the client can:

1. Write another check and have another puzzle solved.  
2. Give us more time to solve the puzzle (if we weren't successful in the scheduled timeframe).
   
3. End the engagement.  
4. Fire us and ask for that month's fee back. 

There are numerous ways to structure the Keep-'em-Safe part, if you apply a bit of creativity.)

Step Four

We showed our client how to measure its sales cycle based on the non-sequential steps its prospects go through when buying, rather than the sequential steps our client prefers to use when selling.

Results

By breaking our client's sales cycle into the three phases describe above, and never moving to a subsequent phase until agreement and commitments are made in the previous phase, our client cut its sales cycle in half in nine months.

By measuring its sales cycle based on how its prospects prefer to buy, our client was able to eliminate 50 percent of its previously wasted sales time– they no longer wasted time with prospects who were never going to buy in the first place.

And once successful with these first two objectives, our client began to experiment with the Leap-of-Faith, Keep-'em-Safe sale, and was able to occasionally close a major engagement in as little as a one-hour.