One way to improve your sales approach is to treat the sales conversation as a collaboration. You and your contacts are both working to understand the challenges that prevent the results the client needs and what is necessary to improve the client’s outcomes. One large part of this collaboration shows up in solution design.
When you sit down with your sales champion and their stakeholders you can expect questions about how you do things. These questions are often technical, and they’re asked because your contact needs to determine if what you do will force the client to change something that works for them. Sometimes, one wrong answer can cause you to lose the opportunity.
There is little written about what we can call the collaborative sale. More still, you have been trained to believe that your solution is the best available in our solar system, or perhaps the known universe. Even if your solution is excellent, one thing is true: It works for some and fails for others.
When your solution fails, it is because it creates a conflict in some important process.
For example, we only train and develop sales organizations that need a modern sales approach and the enabling sales methodologies. If a client prefers a legacy approach, what we do would cause problems.
The Solution Orchestra
As the salesperson, you are the conductor because you have experience leading your clients through the buyer’s journey. Your orchestra comprises the sales champion, leaders, and stakeholders who will participate in any decision to change. You need to ensure you understand what these different parties need to succeed.
The first challenge here is ensuring the right people are in the room when working on the solution. When certain stakeholders are left out of this collaboration, you may sell your solution, only to find that it causes problems. You cannot be aware of potential conflicts if key players are not part of the conversation.
Here is an example: Imagine a client needs a certain technology to work with the sales organization. To make the solution work for the client, the sales organization had to buy the technology and collaborate with the client on implementing the solution. Sometimes, orchestrating a solution can be far more complicated.
Uncovering Conflicts
Much of the time conflicts show up when the salesperson is presenting their solution. In The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales, the fourth commitment is about collaboration, surfacing any conflict long before you provide a proposal and pricing. The fifth commitment is about building consensus, but you can often pursue both conversations at the same time.
You don’t want to find out that any stakeholders have a problem with your solution or some process you use to produce results. You have a better chance of figuring out what you can do about any conflict before you commit your solution. You need time to collaborate with anyone that needs you to make some change that would allow them to agree to the solution.
The more time you spend dialing in your solution with your prospective client, the easier you make it for your contacts to agree that it is right for them.
Your Solution or Your Client’s Solution
When you skip past collaboration, your solution is your solution. Instead, what you need to succeed is to propose a solution that your client sees as their solution. You want every stakeholder to have skin in the game. It’s easy for a stakeholder to refuse to support a decision when they had no part in defining the solution.
In one client pursuit, I stepped into a conference room with 14 people staring at me. They were the task force changing suppliers. Throughout the conversation, three of the leaders asked questions about the solution. After the meeting, I visited each of the three leaders in their facilities, collaborating to dial in the solution for each of them. When I provided a final presentation, I explained the adjustments we made to ensure each leader got what they needed to say yes to the solution. They all had skin in the game.
You can improve your sales results by giving your clients a sales experience that gives them skin in the game. This is only possible if all stakeholders contributed by collaborating on the solution together.
Because buyers are unable or unwilling to make decisions without consensus, collaborating seems to be the best way to ensure you can win over the stakeholders. You want your contacts to own the solution before they buy it.
Collaborating Design Solutions in B2B Sales
One of your roles in a modern sales approach is to conduct collaborative design. It’s important to ensure your contacts understand how your solution works and what changes they may need for it to fit their business. A large percentage of buyers may not have had an experience collaborating on what will be their solution. Others who have had this experience will expect you to help them look for conflict that may harm their results or cause them to fail.
Even though this is often a messy, difficult process, it improves your ability to win deals. In the end, you will have more stakeholders who are pleased with the solution and the process. Spending time to dial in exactly what each of them needs to ensure success helps you create an outcome that many salespeople miss: providing confidence and the certainty of success.
Your sales experience is improved by treating the sales conversation as a collaboration. This not only helps the client, but it also causes them to put skin in the game, making it easier for you to win out over competitors, especially those who believe so strongly in their solution that they are unwilling to make adjustments. It’s fine to believe in your solution, but you need to know how to collaborate.
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