Digging for a Match

by Stephen E. Heiman and Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja

All of us who make our living in sales are under constant pressure to sell: pressure from managers, from colleagues, from family and friends -- maybe most of all from ourselves. Because of this pressure, we are often tempted to take on marginal or potentially troublesome business that we really ought to stay away from. Few of us can resist that temptation all the time. So, at one time or another, most of us have sold business that we later ended up regretting.

Getting an individual order is never enough. The real craft of selling becomes evident only when every order leads to a Win-Win outcome -- an outcome that brings you satisfied customers, long-term relationships, repeat business, and solid referrals. So far, so good. Pretty much everybody in business would agree that this is how you would like all your sales to conclude.

But we go one step further. We say that, if you're involved in a selling situation where it's obvious that you're not going to get a Win-Win outcome, you should bite the bullet and consider turning that business away. No matter how good they may look in terms of immediate commissions, the fact is that some sales objectives are not worth pursuing.

According to a lot of people in sales -- especially those who came up through the ranks under traditional sales "trainers"-- this kind of thinking is a little off the wall. "Any sale is a good sale," they tell themselves. Or "all dollars are alike." Or "a bad customer's money is just as green as a good one's."

We might give these old saws more credence if we ever heard them from either our own or sales leaders. We don't. In fact the people who spout them are invariably sales amateurs -- either newcomers who don't know the ropes or people desperate for commissions. The real sales leaders -- and this is true whether you're talking about individual salespeople or companies -- understand a plain fact of economic life: No single product is for everybody at any given point in time.

They understand too that all dollars are not alike, and that if you're going to be successful in the complex sale over time, you are virtually obliged to turn some business down. If you don't, you will inevitably clog your calendar with dead-end business – with sales objectives that, even if you bring them to a close, will later have you muttering, "I wish I hadn't done that."

In our experience, these poor-quality sales objectives can account for as much as 35 percent of the potential business in most sales representatives' territories. If you think that figure is inflated, consider that it's based on our conversations with hundreds of regional and national account managers. These professional overseers of their representatives' sales objectives tell us that they're regularly forced to throw out a sizable proportion of their people's suggested prospects because they have a slim-to-nothing chance of ending up at Win-Win.

The reason that up to 35 percent of the prospective business in most salespeople's territories is poor is that they lack a dynamic, field-tested process for analyzing their customers' real needs. In all too many companies, the responsibility for doing this is handled by the marketing department, and the bizarre assumption is made that the sales representative actually knows less about what customers want or need than that department does.

The situation is complicated further by the fact that many marketing people have no clear idea of how to meet their customers' needs, once they determine them, and they pass that added confusion on to the sales force. Even worse, they pass on a traditional ambivalence about the real function of selling that can leave the salespeople uncertain about what their actual job is.

You've probably encountered this ambivalence. Most people in sales have. On the one hand, we're told that our mission is to sell as much of our product as we can to anybody who will buy it, at any time. This "cram the product" approach is, of course, the traditional philosophy of the slick talking huckster -- the person who is able to sell snow to Siberians. On the other hand, we're told that we should be selling to need -- that we should always be "digging for a match" between our product or service and the customer's real requirements. This is the more modern, marketing-based approach to sales.

You cannot have it both ways. Cramming product and digging for a match are mutually exclusive approaches to the selling process. We trust that we've left no doubt as to which one we recommend. If you're to be successful in selling, you'll have to leave the old-time huckster philosophy where it belongs – in the past – and learn how to dig for a real fit between what you have and what your customers need. Finding that fit is the heart of every honest – and successful – marketing approach to the complex sale.

You need to do this on an account-by-account basis, so that you can supplement the data provided to you by your marketing people. What they do might be called macromarketing. By focusing on large economic trends, it seeks to uncover the preferences of broad audiences. We're suggesting that you do a kind of micromarketing on your accounts. Use your company's marketing data as a base and go on from there. Only by assessing your individual customers' needs, and weighing them against broader market designs, can you adopt effective "matching" strategies for all your accounts.

These strategies must satisfy your needs as well as those of your customers. The term "match" implies reciprocity, and indeed the whole point of a Win-Win approach is to generate outcomes in which both you and your customers win. A significant element in the development of an "ideal customer profile", therefore, is to concentrate on customers who not only want what you have, but also have what you want.

And we don't mean just money. As we've said, getting the order isn't enough. Nor is pocketing a commission, no matter how hefty it is, enough to make a sale a Win-Win sale. The lesson should be clear. It's not enough to sell to a customer who likes your product or service. You also have to make sure that as many of your customers as possible come as close as possible to meeting your requirements as a seller. You don't develop Win-Win scenarios on a one-way street.

In every salesperson's environment, unless you're in a very mature territory and industry, there are almost limitless possibilities for contacting prospects and making sales. If you don't begin to focus on the real Win-Win possibilities as early as possible in your selling cycle, you'll almost certainly find yourself in the common, but unhappy, position of juggling more bad business than you know what to do with.

Therefore, to get the most out of your limited selling time, your first steps are to sort through the "universe" of potential customers, to assess which ones are most likely to pay off in good business, and to make a determination as to which ones have to go. Unless you start by judiciously restricting your "universe", the best time-management in the world will get you nowhere.

From The New Strategic Selling by Stephen E. Heiman and Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja. © 1998 by Miller Heiman Inc. All rights reserved by permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc.