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Sense making in sales starts with making sense of Procurement: My view on Gartner’s most recent research on the “Sense Making Seller”

By Jens Hentschel, Founder & CEO, THE FIVIS PARTNERSHIP

Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, has just redefined what makes a high-performing seller — at least according to them and their new research. It is what they call a “sense maker,” which they define as:

• An individual who rescues the drowning B2B customer from the flood of high-quality and sometimes conflicting information.

• A trusted advisor to the customer that not only shares but also explains and contextualizes information, assisting the decision-making process through guidance, providing perspective and support in evaluating data and tradeoffs

• A seller who doesn’t “tell customers what to believe, but rather helps them to develop a mental framework to make their own decisions.”

In its study Gartner defines the buyer as the internal requisitioner of a service or product within an organization — the marketing leader, IT director, operations executive or R&D researcher — who reaches out into the market, encounters overwhelming and conflicting information and desperately awaits a white knight in the form of the “sense making seller” who arrives to help make sense of it all.

I am not disputing the increased availability and abundance of information at our fingertips, or the sometimes confusing nature of this information. What I do frown upon is the fact that the buying process described by Gartner leaves out one very critical element (arguably the most critical element of all) — namely, the role of the professional procurement function in this. The concept of procurement assisting the internal requisitioner, and ultimately leading the interaction with the seller, is not addressed at all.

The word procurement is not mentioned once in Gartner’s report. That does not make any “sense” to me.

The B2B buyer journey

Based on my experience as a professional B2B buyer at Procter & Gamble and elsewhere, let’s take a look into what actually happens when the aforementioned requisitioner requires a service or product. He or she will not approach this task in the same way they would book a holiday or purchase a mobile phone — by consulting search engines and social media, as highlighted by Gartner. This would undoubtedly lead to this overwhelming onslaught of information that one might struggle to make sense of.

Most employees, rather, turn to their professional procurement department to have their needs fulfilled. It’s Procurement that plays the role of providing structure to the buying process, enabling and guiding the internal requisitioner. It is Procurement that navigates the decision-making process, and it is they that help the requisitioner to make sense of the available options in the market. Procurement’s role, in other words, is to be an advisor ensuring that business needs are clearly defined, that external capabilities are identified and assessed, and that a purchasing decision is achieved in a timely fashion.

Gartner describes today’s B2B buyer journey as a messy, complicated, unpredictable reiterative and time-consuming process. But is this a fair representation of reality? I would argue that any company that struggles to bring structure to its buying procedures should seriously ask itself what is broken in its procurement setup. If, as Gartner claims, purchasing requests are indeed being delayed or cancelled because of information overload and companies’ inability to deploy the analytical skills to make timely decisions, then I would go so far as to challenge the professionalism of these companies. At the end of the day, these are the fundamental business management skills of organizational leaders that Gartner puts into question here, namely: digesting information, making assumptions and coming to a timely decision.

The solution? Enable procurement.

By no means am I discounting Gartner’s research that customers appreciate an impartial and consultative salesperson who can make sense of the abundant information out there in the market — a salesperson who can back up his data with third-party sources and who builds credibility through advising and not just selling. Every customer appreciates this – the procurement professional, and B2B and B2C customers alike.

Is Procurement immune to the oversupply of quality information? (Certainly not.) Are we not also struggling to weed our way through the various sources of data coming at us? (Yes, absolutely.) The difference is that we are trained to analytically digest this information and to make sense of it. This is why business leaders empower us to manage and own the buying journey for them.

In my view, today’s sales teams should not focus on the requisitioner only but instead zero in on the question of how to enable their procurement counterparts. Helping “make sense” to someone who is trained to analytically digest an abundance of data to come to a procurement decision (i.e., a procurement professional) is obviously different than assisting someone (i.e., a requisitioner) who may not be trained to manage the entire end-to-end buying process.

What I am concerned with in Gartner’s research is the fact that the procurement dimension of the buying process is totally omitted. It is absolutely crucial in my view that sales teams are not only aware of Procurement but also learning how to deal with them. A well prepared, customer-centric salesperson who understands the procurement processes, the KPIs and ways of working can complement Procurement’s work to steer the organization through the buying and decision-making processes.

Modern sales theories — including Gartner’s, I am afraid — have completely lost touch with reality on how advanced companies are managing their companies’ expenditures — namely, through professional procurement teams. Leaving out this dimension entirely is not only a miss but a dangerous one for any salesperson who is actually being faced with the reality of needing to interact with professional buyers day in and day out.

Making sense of procurement

So how can you be that sense-making partner for your procurement counterpart? How can you build a close relationship with your professional buyer? Involving instead of avoiding is where it all begins. Reach out to the procurement function proactively, early in the process, together with or in parallel to the requisitioner.

Walking in the shoes of your purchaser and putting yourself into their analytical mindset will be the ultimate key to success. As a matter of fact, a professional buyer looks for five key behavioral traits in a sales person. Understanding them, incorporating them into your ways of working and living up to them will help you build that winning relationship with Procurement.

Here is what you need to do:

Care! Care about my needs. Understand my company, my stakeholders, the end consumer and the nature of the business that I am in. I don’t have time to explain over and over again what my needs and requirements are. Invest the energy up front to understand the constraints, opportunities, risks and KPIs of my organization. A salesperson who can relate, is empathetic and has built credible knowledge of my business and industry has laid the foundation for gaining my trust.
Compete! Know where you are at vis-à-vis your competition. I have spent a lot of time to assess your strengths and weaknesses, and so should you — before you come and meet me! Understand where you are strong and where you lack expertise. Ask for feedback and consider it a gift. Be upfront about your opportunity areas and where you might fall behind your competition. I do not expect you to be the best but to always try to become the best. That is the spirit I am looking for in a salesperson.
Improve! The status quo is never acceptable. Continuously and proactively think about how you can make our relationship even better. Don’t wait for me to bring up what needs to change because by then it is already too late. Improving what is already good will allow you to form a trusting relationship with me.
Respond! My timeline should be your timeline. And at times, sorry to say, it might not fall into your 9-to-5 framework. Understand my own and my organization’s communication requirements, communication frequency, channels and the language that should be used. Not responding or making me wait for your response can be painful. Adjust and adapt your communication strategy to my needs. Understand the stakeholders in my company, and assume the responsibility to be responsive.
Win! Know what you actually want to get out of this relationship. There is nothing more deflating to me than when a salesperson does not know the answer to this question. Just making the quarter is not good enough, I am afraid. Inspire me by articulating what you want to achieve in our winning relationship in the next two, three or five years — and let me know what I can do to make you successful. Believe it or not, I am actually invested in helping YOU win because only a successful supplier can deliver value to MY organization long term and sustainably.

Make sense?

Jens Hentschel, Founder & CEO of THE FIVIS PARTNERSHIP. The Consultancy That Gets You Your Oomph back! www.fivis.io

Industrial goods, SAMA training and certification, Strategic account management process

Once you’re in, you’re in: A SAM-tested process for expediting human interactions to acquire invaluable customer knowledge

By Saleh Al-Ben Saleh, Strategic Account Manager, Emerson

Expediting “inside” knowledge of your strategic account(s) is vital to realizing indisputable value for both you and your customer. Human interactions are invaluable to gaining this knowledge, but issues of location, time and logistics make accelerating these interactions a common challenge for SAMs.

Here I present a tactical approach that covers best practices showing human interactions success for one strategic account site, taking into consideration the following three key metrics likely to contribute to successfully accelerating human interactions (and, thus, inside knowledge) at a selected strategic account site:

Interaction time with individual strategic account client(s) during a single day visit
Relationships built/strengthened, quality of information gathered, initiatives/opportunities realized
The number of potential touches created for future visits

Before getting started, let’s look at four facts we need to accept in order to understand the value of the approach I call “Once you’re in…you’re in.”

Strategic accounts often have multiple scattered facilities, yet you only have eight hours per day to spend on a customer visit. So you should spend that time wisely, and by wisely I mean on valuable client touches.
While most clients claim to have open arms to meet and explore business-related issues, the reality is that priority takes precedence, and planning for meetings is a time-consuming task for all parties.
Even with a solid agenda, it will be difficult to facilitate several formal meetings on the same day at the same location.
Unplanned, stand-up meetings can be just as important as well-prepared meetings — if they are executed in the right way, with the right talking points and objectives in hand.

Putting all the above points into the context of expediting “inside” knowledge of the client, we can agree that SAMs would be wise to leverage any planned customer meeting to generate additional valuable but unplanned meetings during a single customer site visit. Picture yourself jumping from one purposeful interaction to the next, all day long in the same place. This is the main reason I have chosen to call this this approach “Once you’re in…you’re in.”

It’s not that hard. On a typical customer visit, we probably have at least one scheduled meeting of between 30 minutes and two hours, out of a total of seven hours (the typical daily window for meetings). The challenge is to see how much of these seven hours we can use to create human interactions. I propose that the answer is “all of them” – if you prepare well, remain alert and act quickly.

The following six-step methodology has worked for me in my career as a SAM.

#1. Start with the “T.” The “T” stands for “them” in the “TUFA” concept, a process for building on your existing target customer profile or creating one if none exists. The “U” stands for us, “F” for fit and “A” for action. Your customer profile should include all information on your history with the customer, including past performance, ongoing initiatives, an organizational chart and a social chart. Make sure to compile a list of all gaps in your customer profile. All this intelligence should be written and organized in a way that will help you drive fruitful conversations with the targeted account clients. Pro tip: Make sure to use open-ended questions to allow more talking space for your clients.

#2. One planned meeting to get in. If you are calling on an established customer, start from the end and follow up on a hot topic(s) with your assigned focal point. If it is a new customer, you may need several exploratory meetings to identify the right people with whom to interface. In either case, once you have secured your meeting, you should be able to develop others for mutual benefit.

#3. Jump to the unplanned meeting. Through the profile you have developed in step one, and/or through your scheduled meeting(s) from step two, updates, initiatives and challenges will present themselves to you in one form or another. Whenever possible, seek to learn the champions of these items and ask to meet them while you are onsite. Most likely, you will be able to track them down for short, fruitful, stand-up meetings. Repeat this as many times as your schedule allows. After each interaction with a new champion, make sure always to exchange contact information, which you will need to schedule follow-up meetings.

#4. Think client and “walk the talk.” Eventually, a picture will emerge, and the potential for the next meeting will follow accordingly. Clients will frequently use three evaluation tools to decide whether or not they want to continue developing a relationship or not:

How much you understand the business from the client perspective
How well you can build mutually agreed-upon action plans for both sides
How fast you are able to “walk the talk,” deliver as promised and follow up on other commitments as well

#5. Enhance the “T.” Make sure the gathered information in steps two, three and four are reflected on the profile you created in step one. Having an updated profile will allow you to see the big picture clearly, plan your next visit and identify the people you want to interface with either through planned or “spontaneous” meetings.

#6. Do the loop. Now start again from step one and move through the process again.

Once you capture the value from undertaking this process, you can draw imaginary lines between the steps, create additional steps and add “sub-steps” as needed. I think of this as a best-practice template, which I encourage you to adapt to best fit your circumstances.

Conclusion

When trying to expedite constructive human interactions within your strategic account clients, you must endeavor to find the “sweet spot” between formality and informality. If your process is overly formal, you risk missing out on potential customer touch points and slowing progress. If your process is overly informal, you may get more customer touches, but your conversations will be less constructive and new relationships much less “sticky.”

The goal is to have as many meetings as possible in a single day, continually leveraging the information gained from past interactions to garner new ones. When executed to perfection, you will move from unplanned meeting to unplanned meeting. Success is never guaranteed, but based on my experience, this approach will give you the best chance of expanding your customer footprint over the long haul.

Customer buy-side perspective, Strategic account management process, Strategic account manager skills and competencies, Value co-creation

How to create financially quantified value propositions in six (actionable!) steps

By Malcolm McDonald, Emeritus Professor of Marketing, Cranfield University School of Management

Our definition of a value proposition is “the translation of the supplier’s offers into monetary terms that demonstrate their contribution to the customer’s profitability.” The key phrase here is “customer profitability,” because if you can prove that dealing with you will make your customer richer, they will buy from you.

Even a cursory glance at the pricing example below from global engineering group SKF illustrates the dramatic impact that is possible as a result of preparing financially quantified value propositions.

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