The Behavioral Advantage

Terry Bacon, David Pugh

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780814413135
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Kundenbeziehungen

Terry Bacon and David Pugh showed how great companies outperform good ones through "behavioral differentiation" -- going beyond superior products and dependable service to connect with customers at every touchpoint.

The Behavioral Advantage broadens the concept, applying behavioral differentiation to the business-to-business arena. The best B2B companies depend on a multifront approach to business interaction, and this book reveals the secrets behind what is essentially a chess game with competitors.

To win the game, companies must develop a carefully plotted opening game, with the following internal factors being fully aligned:

• values,
• policies,
• practices,
• and behaviors.

A smart and efficient middle game lets the company build and strengthen its position, and the endgame assures victory and lays the groundwork for future business. Just as individual customers do, B2B customers remember those companies whose behavior consistently and significantly outshines even strong competitors. These firms create a lasting advantage -- and reap the profits that come with it.

CHAPTER 1

The Death of Selling

There is no new thing under the sun.—Ecclesiastes 1:9

It is always the latest song that an audience applauds the most.—Homer, The Odyssey

Incredible breakthrough! The first wholly new sales paradigm of the twenty-first century! This unique sales system has been proven successful by the world’s leading sales teams. Featuring the umpteen habits of high-performing salespeople, this method will end rejections and objections; shorten your sales cycle; guarantee that you reach the right top-level buyers; and increase your revenues by 200 percent, 500 percent, or even 1,000 percent! Using a unique questioning method, you will learn how to identify your customer’s hidden needs, create breathtaking solutions, and build powerful and enduring customer relationships that make you a consultant to your customers instead of a salesperson.

Does this sound familiar? In one form or another, this language appears on the dust jackets of hundreds of sales books that have been published in the past twenty years. If you believe the hype, the past two decades have been a phenomenal period of evolution in sales technique. Breakthroughs occur with the publication of each new book on selling. If that is not remarkable progress, then nothing is. Furthermore, many of these books purport to offer unique sales systems, approaches, or strategies, which, upon cursory examination, are very similar to other authors’ unique sales systems, approaches, and strategies, thus violating the physical law that prevents two objects from occupying the same space.

We wondered if any of the sales systems or techniques described in these books truly represented new thought, so we researched how selling has been written about and taught throughout the past century. During our study, we read scores of books on selling. The earliest was written in 1894 and the latest . . . well, they are still rolling hot off the presses. We reached several conclusions from this research.

First, the basics on selling were well established in the earliest years of the twentieth century, if not before. Although much has been written since about understanding the buyer’s motives, asking good questions, listening, meeting the buyer’s needs, developing sales strategies, planning for the interview, crafting a compelling argument, presenting your solution, handling objections, and so on, the overwhelming majority of later authors are mostly covering well-trodden ground, despite their claims of novelty. However, the selling environment itself has changed considerably, especially since World War II, because of the growing complexity of business organizations, the professionalizing of purchasing, and other factors. Consequently, the basics of selling—at least as described by writers in the early twentieth century—are no longer appropriate for the selling environment of the twenty-first century.

Second, at this point in history, the rudiments of selling are so well understood that people in business who don’t understand them have simply not been paying attention. Everyone today knows that you have to build relationships, you have to manage your key accounts, you have to be more of a consultant to customers than a high-pressure salesperson, you have to sell solutions (not products), and you have to demonstrate your value. You have to be customer oriented, know your customer’s business and industry, sell at the top, make allies of gatekeepers, listen to customers, ask good questions, yada, yada, yada.

Been there. Done that. What else you got?

It’s not that these “eternal truths” are wrong; they’re just used up. Legions of salespeople have learned these things and used them endlessly. Customers know them already. What’s more, customers use these same approaches and techniques to sell to their customers. Everyone today does consultative selling, or tries to. Everyone does relationship selling. Everyone tries to quantify their value. If they don’t, they’re not even in the game. What used to be fresh and innovative is now exhausted and boring. The sales pitch is dead. Everyone’s heard it over and over. Furthermore, today’s sophisticated customers can scope you out on your Web site faster than you can put together your presentation. In this age of the Internet, reverse auctions, online catalogs, and Web-based purchasing, your Web site is now your pitch. Customers qualify you as a supplier by looking up your company and products or services on the Web, and if your Web site does not give them adequate qualifying information, you may not even make their supplier list. Today, they may not have to talk to you to know whether you can provide what they need. Many buyers prefer it that way because they want to reduce their purchasing transaction costs, and it’s easier and faster for them to research you on the Web than it is for them to meet with you and sit through your PowerPoint presentation.

In our previous book, Winning Behavior, we argued that in this age of global competition, markets are becoming increasingly entropic, which means that they relentlessly reduce product, channel, and other traditional forms of differentiation and create a numbing sameness. It’s becoming harder and harder to build a better mousetrap because competitors copy your innovations practically as fast as you can roll them out, and when capability becomes commodity, all you can do is lower your price and sing that old sad song as you watch your margins erode.

It’s becoming increasingly clear, however, that selling has also become a commodity. In the B2B world in particular, nearly every salesperson uses the selling techniques that have been promoted over the last few decades—to the point where the selling process itself has become commoditized. Not only are your products and channels virtually the same as your competitors’, your selling process is too.

The paucity of new ideas in selling is evident in a review of the recent articles published in journals related to selling and sales management. In the two-year period from November 2000 to December 2002, for instance, Selling Power magazine published 216 articles or short “tips” pieces on topics related to selling. Thirty-three percent of those articles focused on sales management, including articles on hiring and motivating salespeople, conducting sales meetings, running trade shows, and managing incentive and compensation systems. Another 22 percent of the articles dealt with selling skills, including articles entitled “Handling the Tire Kickers,” “Overcoming Price Objections,” “Presentations to Wow a Group,” “Demanding Customers,” “Use Your Sell Phone,” and “Effortless Closing.” There were fourteen articles on motivating salespeople (we can only conclude that this is highly problematic), seventeen articles on prospecting, twenty-three articles on using technology to improve sales (including thirteen on CRM—customer relationship management systems), eight articles on dealing with difficult customers, twelve articles on sales presentations, four on time management, and three on the power of positive thinking. As we will show in this chapter, these articles are fundamentally no different from the advice written to salespeople over a century ago. In reading Selling Power magazine, one would be forced to conclude that little has changed in the field of selling since William Miller offered fifty tips to salesmen in 1894, including this one: “Never sit in your office and do nothing because the weather is bad. [On a] stormy day men have more leisure to give you and more inclination to listen.”¹ Talk about the power of positive thinking!

The Art of Canvassing

To appreciate how and why selling has become commoditized, it’s useful to understand how concepts about selling evolved (or not) in the United States during the past century. Professional selling developed during the post–Civil War era with westward expansion, post-war reconstruction, and the relentless march of the Industrial Revolution. In late nineteenth-century America, armies of commercial travelers rode horses, wagons, steamboats, and rails to hawk their wares to a rapidly developing class of merchants, storekeepers, manufacturers, miners, builders, and craftsmen as they were laying the foundations for the vast middle class of consumers who have always been the backbone of the American economy. From 1865 to 1910, America was transformed from a predominantly agrarian economy to a predominantly industrial economy, and with that transformation came the development of selling as a profession. Competition was increasing, and there was a greater need for a competent and repeatable approach to persuading customers to buy one’s wares.

One of the first American authors to articulate the art of selling was William Miller, whose slim, leather-bound advisory on selling life insurance is a classic on early sales thinking. Like many nineteenth-century authors, Miller takes a trait-based approach to selling: “An Agent’s natural fitness for this profession,” he argues, “depends chiefly upon his business qualifications, industry, persistence, alertness, and a certain tact and persuasiveness which are acquired by practice, rather than by observation and instruction. It is the art of doing and saying the right thing at the right time, in the right way, and of discreet suppression when silence is golden.”² Miller believed that successful salesmen had the essential qualities of politeness, honesty, and industry; that they won the confidence of their customers by being earnest and direct; that they cultivated customer friendships through geniality and kindness; and that they built their business by being methodical. “Appear cheerful and happy,” he advised. “Do not complain of hard times. Seem to be happy and prosperous. People will like you all the better for it. Be honest and conscientious. Try to satisfy and please your customers.”³

In the language of the times, a salesman’s canvass was his sales pitch or presentation. Like many early authors on the art of selling, Miller believed that it was crucial to practice your canvass until you could recite it from memory and then to present it forcefully and earnestly. Furthermore, he did not believe in giving customers alternatives: “Have no option for your patrons. By presenting different plans you induce the disposition to compare and hence to delay. This defeats you, temporarily at least. It is better to take a given point and carry your patrons to it.”⁴ Nor did Miller believe in responding to or anticipating objections: “Never anticipate objections,” he counseled. “It is ‘borrowing trouble.’ Ignore them if possible. If compelled to answer them, do so very briefly, though courteously, and resume the original argument.”⁵

In these kinds of statements, Miller was reflecting the origins of the hard-sell approach. Get the appointment. Make your pitch. Ignore objections and stick with your argument. All you need is the right stuff and the discipline to be systematic in your selling: “System is indispensable. It can accomplish wonders. It reduces labor to its simplest form and is essential to the rapid dispatch of business and the accomplishment of great results.”⁶ Although Miller’s advice is aimed at insurance salesmen working in a much simpler world than today, his advice can still be found, in one form or another, in the pages of Selling Power magazine and in numerous recently published books on sales.

The Knack of Selling

Miller’s go-getter philosophy sprang from the optimism and belief in progress that characterized early twentieth-century America. If you have gumption and pluck, you are bound to succeed. Walter Moody shared Miller’s belief that determination was the most important trait of successful salespeople. In Men Who Sell Things (1907), he said, “Pure grit constitutes one of the most essential elements of successful salesmanship. It is the best there is in a man; it is that fine quality that whispers in our ear in moments of discouragement, ‘Never lie down.’ When exhausted and sinking in the mire of Despond, it calls cheerily from the banks of Hope along the shore: ‘Don’t give up! I’ll pull you out.’ ”⁷ Moody’s book is largely a character study of successful and unsuccessful salesmen. The latter he describes as knockers, order-takers, wheelbarrows, sky-rockets, fussies, quick-tempered types, know-it-alls, and old-timers. The former, he says, are the product of positive qualities and intelligent application of principles. Moody was among the earliest twentieth-century sales authors to talk about the science of salesmanship: “I assert without hesitation,” he said, “that the really big men, those who have made the profession worthwhile, are the ones who have employed the highest degree of science in their work.”⁸ He believed that buyers’ motives could be understood scientifically and that salesmen could devise plans for arousing buyers’ interests based on facts about human decision making that enabled salesmen to influence buyers in predictable ways, although his book does not classify buying motives. For that, we have to turn to The System Company.

The crowding of the field of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Death of Selling
• Chapter 2: The Changing World of Buying and Selling
• Chapter 3: The Chemistry of Preference
• Chapter 4: Checkmate! How Business Development Is Like Chess
• Chapter 5: Opening Game: Conditioning the Market
• Chapter 6: Middle Game: Conditioning the Customer
• Chapter 7: Middle Game: Building a Powerful Position
• Chapter 8: Late Middle Game Positioning
• Chapter 9: Endgame: Conditioning the Deal
• Chapter 10: Creating a Behavioral Differentiation Strategy
• Chapter 11: When the Going Gets Tough . . .
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright