Do You Look Like the Answer?

More on a theme from the last couple days here.

Your dream client is looking at you to decide whether you look like the answer to them as it pertains to helping them accomplish what they need to accomplish. You may want your dream client to look elsewhere for reasons to buy from you, and sometimes they may look outside of you, their salesperson, for reasons to buy—which is to say that you play almost no role in their decision.

You may want your company to be the reason they buy. You love your company, and you believe deeply that it is better than your competitors and that you do better work. If your company is the answer, then you don’t need to create enough value to deserve to win the business on their desire to work with you on their challenges.

If you want your product or services to the be the reason your dream client chooses to buy from you, you are also moving the focus and the value created from you to something else. In this case, it may be your product, which in all likelihood isn’t all that different from what they buy now—and maybe not worth firing their existing partner to change. How easy you are to business with and how good your solution is matters, but it’s also evidence that you are not the answer.

You may want the return on investment, the tangible results, the outcomes you create or something else that happens to not be you to do the heavy lifting for you, but in a lot of complex B2B sales, none of things matters more than the salesperson—especially if they are going to have an ongoing relationship.

As much as some salespeople want to place the burden of creating compelling, differentiated value worth changing for on something or someone else, many sales leaders are no better. They want the process, the methodology, the sales stack, and a dozen things that are not the salesperson to tip the balance to their company and their salesperson.

Your dream client, however, is asking themselves whether you are the answer they have been looking for, or whether you are another person without the ability to help them make the changes necessary to producing better results.