The natural tendency of anyone brought up in the services industry is to say yes. Yes, to helping a customer with something “just a little” beyond scope. Yes, to meeting marketing’s seemingly endless requests for showcase account examples. And yes, to bailing out a salesperson who promised a ridiculous date on a client go-live. In fact, yes is often the first word that comes out of a services professional’s, services manager’s, or services leader’s mouth.

In many situations, it is the right thing to do--suck it up for the good of the client, your colleagues, and the company. A little extra effort on your part can do a lot of good. It is worth it.

Yet, there are some very negative aspects of saying yes too often. Based upon your agreeable past behavior, you set an unrealistic expectation with the people you deal with, as they assume you will always say yes to any request. So when the customer or the salesperson or the marketer comes to you with a truly outrageous request and you refuse, he looks at you with disbelief and mutters phrases such as “I wonder what has gotten in to him! or “she must be having a really bad day.”

Furthermore (and, of course, it was not your intent), you establish a perception that you are a pushover. This will never be stated, but most cultures (especially Western ones) don’t respect people who “don’t stand up for themselves” or who “lack backbone.” So your attempts at being a good team player backfire, and you are seen as being a weak manager.

So what is the answer? If you have fallen into the “pattern of yes” described above, you can’t just start saying no anytime you feel justified, or you’ll get the reaction described earlier--it is too abrupt a change. You have to earn the right to say no. You accomplish this by making a “just say no” personal strategy. Do your homework up front by defining appropriate boundaries of what you will do and what you will not do to make your services organization successful while supporting the overall business. Involve senior management in the process to gain agreement on how to handle all the special requests that you know from experience will occur, and get their commitment on how they will be handled. By involving other executives, and by having fair plans on what is acceptable and what is not, not only can you “do the right thing” for the business, you can build and maintain your own personal credibility.

Say yes when it counts, but just say no when it doesn’t.

Tags: professional development, managing

My third commandment of selling services is to Customize Each Solution, in which I emphasize the importance of making each customer feel special and unique even if your solution is off-the-shelf.

All good services sellers know the importance of sharing stories from other experiences that are similar to the customer. For example, providing successful case histories from similar customers with similar issues builds your credibility.

However, no one likes to be told that their reality is exactly like those of others, and the seller that emphasizes similarities too much will find that this strategy backfires--causing resentment in the prospect.



The key is balance. After sharing similarities, jump to exploring the uniqueness of the customer.

Example #1
Share Similarities: “As you’ve seen, we have successfully implemented our technology in many companies within your industry.
Explore Uniqueness: However, I must admit that we have never worked with a start-up, and I’m sure there are some unique considerations. May we talk a little about how we can tailor our approach to best meet your needs?”

Example #2
Share Similarities: “Yes, we have trained thousands of executives in how to become better leaders.
Explore Uniqueness: However, I don’t recall our working with an organization that has the type of competitive challenges you do. I’d recommend that we first start with an assessment to make sure we focus on the right things. May I share with you different ways we could start?”

Example #3
Share Similarities: “We are pleased that over 80% of our customers are under services contracts and 93% score us as “Excellent” in performance evaluations.
Explore Uniqueness: You know, though, I’ve never been asked to provide a contract in North Africa. I’m sure there are some unique challenges to consider. May we flesh those out to see what we might offer?”

Pretty simple, isn’t it? Balance your selling strategy by always exploring the uniqueness of the customer. They will appreciate your transparency, and you will more quickly build trust.

Tags: selling services

My second commandment of selling services is to Communicate the Invisible, in which I point out the many--and major--differences between tangible products and intangible services, and what an effective seller must do differently to sell services.

A really big selling sin involves expecting customers to connect the dots--to understand issues, concepts, ideas, and services that they have little or no experience with. It is up to the services sales expert to help the customer make those connections. The best services sellers are masters at turning feelings into facts and concepts into cash through the use of stories and analogies.

Here are a few behaviors that I’ve observed the very best services sellers deploy:

1. Convey the importance of immediate action. Confirm that the issue being discussed is a business priority and also a personal objective of the customer, thus requiring immediate action.

2. Provide both positive and negative case examples that the customer can relate to in order to bolster your cause, spotlighting what businesses and individuals gained by taking action or what they lost by not taking action. Actively involve the customer in:

• Exploring the potential positive impact on both the business and the individual of addressing the issue.
• Exploring the potential negative impact on both the business and the individual of not addressing the issue.

3. Use a financial calculator to quantify the impact of taking or not taking action. Let the customer provide the inputs to the financial calculations using figures and terms relevant to his or her personally. Whether ROIs or TCOs or Net Present Value, it is good to make some suggestions, but let the customer come up with the numbers.

Explain your methodology in detail using already-developed figures and diagrams, or manually put them on the whiteboard with the customer, describing each action and the rationale for each step.

Break things down into stages to make it easier for the customer to understand, and then ask him to think through how it would work in his organization. This lowers anxiety as he applies the concept to his own reality.

Share examples of similar customers facing similar issues and how you tailored your approach to meet their unique needs and made them successful.

Predict where potential problems may occur, and then explain your remedy to pre-empt each issue and explain the actions you will take to minimize both time and hassle for the customer.

4. Share best practices. Customers find it reassuring that you have enough experience to know what the best practices are and that they are incorporated into your approach. By asking the customer how these best practices can apply to him, it helps him both relate cognitively and connect at an emotional level. This is a real confidence builder and something that can be made quite visible in the mind of your prospect.

5. Communicate stories and analogies that your prospect can understand and relate to. For example, the prospect may never have purchased a service contract for his equipment, but he may have purchased a service contract on his company’s copier. By asking him the reasons for his decision, he can better relate to the benefits of uptime, convenience, no hassles, etc., of your offering. If he has no business experience with service contracts, he probably has some personal experience, such as purchasing an extended warranty on a high-definition TV or other large purchase. Explore his thinking and relate it back to your offering.

In addition, a customer may never have purchased a business assessment before, but he can probably relate to the need for a physical checkup before taking on a new sport or strenuous activity.

Furthermore, if you find yourself in a competitive position, you might make the medical analogy that your organization is not a general practitioner but a heart specialist, and thus the most appropriate choice for an important decision such as the one the customer is facing.

Other non-business analogies can help bridge the familiarity gap as well. For example, if you know your customer is a big football fan, you can use the concept of “the huddle,” “going deep,” “game plan,” and many others as a way to relate the importance of ideas in terms the customer can understand.

6. Provide write-ups of high-recognition reference accounts that tout the value of you and your offerings. This acts as a shortcut to decision making. The more complex and unfamiliar the situation to the customer, the more he will look to references to help him decide. If two or three well respected people in well respected companies with similar issues are happy with your offerings, your customer will likely be willing to accept the premise that he will be happy as well.

Apply these concepts and you will become a master of selling the invisible.

Tags: selling services

In a recent article* I wrote about the importance of providing customer choices, but limiting them to two options or ideally three. Doing so will lead to more sales and happier customers.

Now I’d like to share the best practices on how to do it:

1. Make it standard operating procedure to offer three choices. Require it of your sellers in all they do--from making suggestions during initial discussions to outlining three options in formal proposals. Customers like it, and are more likely to buy if you offer three alternatives.
2. Craft your three options based upon value potential that is easily discernable by the customer. Your comprehensive option should be both broad and deep, and hence will be the most expensive. Your bare-bones option should be the minimum offering that you are still confident in to meet customer requirements. This leaves your high-value option somewhere in the middle. Assuming that all three of your options are strong on value, about two-thirds of your customers will choose your middle choice.
3. Always start with your most expensive, comprehensive option, followed by your high value option, then finally your bare-bones option. This goes against a “logical” sequence from low to high, but this high to low approach has strong emotional appeal. Starting high makes your other two choices seem much more affordable by comparison. I am sure that you have seen this before in other scenarios. For example, if you go into a clothing store to buy a suit, shoes, and a belt, the savvy store clerk will always sell you the suit first. Once you have laid out $1,000 for the suit, paying $250 for shoes seems very reasonable, and a $40 belt seems like a bargain.

*Alexander, James. 2011. “Less Is Better than More: Offering Too Many Choices Is Bad Business.” http://www.alexanderstrategists.com/art_less_is_more.html

Tags: professional services, selling services

In talking to services executives in charge of leading their company’s transition from product support services to professional services, a common story line develops:

A. They are very interested in:

1. Learning best practices.
2. Understanding key benchmarks.
3. Showing some results quickly (Hey, there is always job security to consider!).

B. They are always concerned about:

1. Launching new services offerings.
2. Getting the product sales force to sell services.
3. Dealing with cultural resistance (product-centered company mindset).

Does this (or did this) sound like you? Addressing A is straightforward--the core and best practices, key benchmarks, and proven transition methodologies can be obtained (at least the 20,000-feet version) very economically and relatively painlessly. Most dedicated services executives will make the investment to learn what is needed. They will read the books, buy a study or two, attend a workshop, and/or have services industry consultants in for a day to learn trends, issues, and best practices. Excellent start. You are now “in for a penny.”

But are you “in for a pound?” How you react to the potential roadblocks of B will provide the answer. If your responses include comments like these:

• “We don’t have time for market research--we are going to launch these six new services and see what happens.”
• “I don’t have the budget to train people how to sell services--can’t they just listen to a webinar?”
• “Culture is all that smoke-and-mirror stuff! I’ve never seen how it really impacts business results anyhow.”

Sound like you? If so, you are still in for a penny. You also are in for a very difficult time.

However, if your approach to the concerns of B sounds like this:

• “Solid voice-of-the-customer research sets the foundation for our services organization, and I’ll commit some money and the necessary 90 days to do things right.”
• “Most product salespeople can learn to sell (at least some) services once given services-specific training, coaching, and motivation. This is a priority to me, and I’ll work with the vice president of sales to provide services-specific training and coaching.”
• “If I am to be successful, I must deal with cultural resistance. I’ll take the time to think through a transformational culture change plan and spend the money to put it in place.”

…you are in for a pound.

These are two distinct approaches. Which one has the greatest probability of success?

The moral of the story is that anything worth doing is worth doing well. In leading the transition from product support services to professional services, commit the time and money to do it right or you are probably better off (at least from a career perspective) not doing it at all.

Tags: professional services, selling services, leadership

Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Churchill. This very rare club of esteemed folks had the ability to “multi-task” and “multi-produce” at an extraordinary level--doing many (and sometimes quite varied) works simultaneously and doing them all brilliantly.

Alas, most of us aren’t members of this elite club, but because of the “do more with less” movement brought about by downsizing and cost-cutting programs, we find ourselves facing a laundry list of goals, projects, and tasks covering a variety of areas--some we are good at, and some we are not as good at. The predictable outcome is less than stellar work and probably some degree of fatigue, flounder, and frustration. (Hey, you don’t even have time to do the things you are good at well!) So you and the organization may be more “efficient,” but you sure aren’t more effective. Here are three tips to minimize the Flounder Factor:

1. The Rule of Three

The vast majority of people (even really smart people) can hold only three goals, or three issues, or three ideas in their mind at one time. That seems to be the maximum. So when you have a rule that holds up, don’t violate it. Limit your organization’s primary goals, critical issues, and top tasks to three--no more. If you can live by this rule, you will see that life becomes much easier.

Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign understood this concept when they developed his slogan, “Serve the People, Save the Planet, Explore the Universe.” Agree or not with the man or his politics, but at least you’d remember his focus! The Rule of Three is also a maxim of good communication--limit your message to three main points, and your power of persuasion will go up dramatically.

2. Separate the Vital Few from the Useful Many*

Now you may say, "Rule 1 sounds good, but I still have to deal with these 26 KBIs I got from the big boss." We understand that this is reality. However, you do have the power to focus on the few--to concentrate your best efforts on the top three that will have the most impact. Rank your goals and tasks, concentrate on the top three, and determine the absolute minimum effort required to meet the bare minimums of the rest. Delegate as many as you can (in the name of developing your people!), and try just forgetting the least important and see what happens. More often than not, no one cares.

3. Before You Giveth, First Taketh Away

Next, think about your people and your role in helping them become more successful. Before adding one more dipper to their overflowing bucket of work, first think through what can be dumped out to make room. Ask them (no, require them) to rank their tasks in consideration of accomplishing their responsibilities, and eliminate any “nice-to-do” items. They will respect your wisdom, appreciate your consideration, and contribute more to the things that truly matter.


*This phrase comes from Joseph Juran, one of the giants of the quality movement.

Tags: leadership, managing technical talent

As mentioned before in this blog, it is important to stay the course. Things may get worse before they get better; overall sales volume may dip before it goes up. People will complain and look for every possible reason why this selling services thing is a terrible idea. You will need to stick to your guns as people test how serious you are. It is hard to do, but again, firing your number one box seller, Ace Flanagan, when he refuses to try and sell services sends a powerful message.

The other critical fact is that understanding and articulating the invisible is much more challenging than discussing feeds and speeds, features and functions. What you think, what you say, and what you do are different when selling services.

A few people adapt quickly and intuitively, most people, over time, can be adequate at selling intangibles given enough training, tools, and reinforcement, but another group will never quite get it. Not because they are bad people or don’t try, but because they are wired differently. From a sales management perspective, this is a very big deal.

Even if you follow all of this advice exactly as outlined, and I hope you do, about one in three product salespeople will not be successful in selling services. (Hey, it’s not their fault—they were hired to sell boxes.) You should understand this from the beginning and be prepared to help them find new jobs inside or outside the company.

Conclusion

So there you have it—the Five Steps to Selling Services Success. Getting the sales force to effectively sell services is critical to long-term success in seriously selling services. Sadly, the common approaches most executives take to bring about this change just don’t work. To be effective, all aspects of the sales performance system musty be changed, coupled with solid training, backed by strong reinforcement, and supported by a leadership team willing to make some tough calls to make sure that the change sticks.

It takes at least a year to yield meaningful results and often three years to make them effective. Yet, do not despair. Future blog entries will outline the steps to kick-start selling services by getting everyone who touches the customer involved in the selling services process.

Tags: selling services

When services inside of product companies were seen as tactical cost centers, the mandate was clear: make the product work, keep the customer happy, and manage costs. Smart services executives did their job and kept their heads down.

However, as services have transitioned to strategic profit centers and contribution expectations have increased, the services business is under much greater scrutiny. Hence, services leadership must re-think their priorities and figure out how to shift emphasis from enabling products to enhancing the business of their customers.

Stuff Rolls Downhill

My experience is that much of services activities center around problems that never should have occurred. Poor product design drives services issues that never go away, sucking up valuable resources for the life of the product. Opportunities to move the services business ahead are mired in the day-to-day tactical world of dealing with problems that should and could have been avoided.

A large proportion of these problems can be eliminated by proper thinking and planning early in the product development cycle. Experience shows that proactive, aggressive input by seasoned services professionals from the get-go is the key.

How well are you doing in impacting product design early?

Gain insights and learn from your peers. Participate in this survey on designing products for serviceability.

Tags: selling services

Here’s the scenario: Senior management has bought into seriously selling services and wants to get moving on it. When advised by a services expert that selling services is “way different” from selling products and requires special actions to succeed, they respond that they have a good sales force, and a good sales force can sell anything—just tell them what to do and back it up with solid incentives. They decide to kick off this initiative at the annual sales conference. See if this situation strikes a chord:

The Big Boss strides toward the podium and gazes out upon the entire sales force huddled in the banquet hall, awaiting word on the new launch. The Big Boss soberly rolls into the presentation, banging the drum of doom about lackluster performance, the challenges of the marketplace, and the potential wrath of stockholders if things continue as is. The figures formulated by the consulting firm hired to build this case spell out the problems (in PowerPoint, naturally) in cold, hard figures. The message is clear: Sell more, better and faster—
change or die.

But just as quickly, the atmosphere changes. The Big Boss dramatically stops the presentation and smiles broadly at the audience. Then, on cue and as if choreographed by a TV producer (it probably was), the balloons drop and the band begins playing something like “Back in the High Life Again.” (Note that if the meeting is in Las Vegas, live animals come on stage.) Next, animated slides (yes, more PowerPoint) proclaim the dawn of a new era, the Golden Age of “Total Value Solutions” (or something like that—they all sound the
same, don’t they?). TVS, as it is quickly dubbed, will be the touchstone, the compass, the blueprint for trekking the treacherous path from the abyss and leading the company back to its former greatness and beyond. As the four-color glossy listing the new expectations of the sales force and the new compensation program is passed out to everyone in the hall, sellers are asked to stand up and swear their personal allegiance to the “Six Selling Steps to TVS.”

On the outside, the salespeople smile broadly, nod their heads, and quickly start using new TVS catch words, enthusiastically applauding the visionary leadership at the front of the room. Ace Flanagan, the company’s top product seller starts a standing ovation.

On the inside, the salespeople are quickly doing two things. First, they do the math on the new compensation program. Their rough calculations show that even the big percentage spiff on selling services is small potatoes when looking at total compensation. Yes, it would be nice to make a few extra bucks, but it is probably not
worth the effort. Second, they are weighing the seriousness of what is being said. If you meet your product quota, no one will slap your wrist for not making your services number, will they? This is a product company, right? Besides, this looks like just another Program-of-the-Month. The salespeople decide to talk the talk and wave the flag when asked, but keep a low profile and do business as usual. “This too shall pass” becomes their unspoken mantra.

Fast-Forward
As the year goes by, an obviously frustrated senior management continues to beat the drum of TVS, but sales of services hardly improve at all. Extra bonuses are promised, threats are made, but at year-end nothing much has changed, and the promise of selling services is lost. The grandiose launch has been a total failure. Furthermore, senior management has lost some credibility, while the product-is-everything culture has been solidified even more. What was supposed to be a game-changing venture ended up being the Flavor-of-the-Season that sales accurately anticipated.

What went wrong? In a perfect world, all of us in business would behave altruistically, taking care of the customer first, the company second, and finally, our own needs. The business case for seriously selling services is strong. But in reality, that’s not the way it works. Although everyone may cross their heart, swear allegiance, and drink the Kool-Aid at the global kickoff, it will take much more than that to change selling behavior.

Salespeople, indeed all of us, behave in ways within some ethical boundary that maximize personal gain as easily as possible with a minimum of hassle and stress. This is not a question of values, but a fact of life. I know, I know, there are cultural and situational factors that impact the degree to which altruism is practiced, but it is a reality nonetheless.

For example, in organizations that primarily reward sellers on gross sales, sellers are highly motivated to do whatever it takes to sell the product at the possible expense of everything else. So would you if your desired lifestyle depended on it. If they don’t sell services, oh well. If they give away services, big deal. Getting the product sale is the prime consideration. Why should they change? For the good of the services organization?Forget it. For the good of the company? No way!

GIST: If you want to change selling behavior (in this case, selling services and not giving them away), you must address all the factors that impact seller motivation.

Here are some proven best practices of executives that have successfully guided the transition to seriously selling services:

1. Create a sense of urgency. When people are reluctant to do something, they will come up with every excuse imaginable to put it off. Change is time-sensitive, and prolonged hesitation only makes things more difficult. Leadership is needed to trumpet the cause and build the emotional momentum needed to break the status quo and get things rolling. To demonstrate urgency and show your seriousness, initially host highly visible weekly updates on progress. Personally call and write people to ask how it is going. Put this at the top of your to-do list each day. Publicly publish selling services success performance so that everyone can see progress. To emphasize the criticality, publish results versus targets not only quarterly, but monthly, weekly, even daily. Break it down by division, geography, even by salesperson in order to build the necessary momentum of change. Remember that when you are challenging the status quo, fast is better than slow.

2. Tie executive compensation to seriously selling services success. Make seriously selling services a core objective tied to compensation for the entire executive team. Yes, you “get it,” but your executive colleagues may not. These are the same people who achieved their success and power through the very system you are trying to alter dramatically. Remember that it is rare for the ruling class to support the revolutionaries, so the case for change must be seen as the only choice for organizational survival. Everyone will be watching for the slightest wavering at the top to justify stalling or just plain non-compliance, and the best way to prevent this is a one-for-all-and-all-for-one approach to compensation based upon hard numbers and firm time frames.

3. Make heroes out of those who attempt the change. As I’ll discuss in greater detail later, this is a scary change for many people, and you want to look for every opportunity to reinforce their new, seriously selling services behavior, even when the results aren’t as good as you like. Make it a point of singling out those who are doing what you request of them at your weekly feedback sessions. Send them notes and copy everyone, publish their success in internal newsletters and magazines, and give them small incentives to keep them going. Early on, it is the little things that matter.

4. Give zero tolerance for slackers. Here is the scenario: It is year end, and overall you have made good progress with selling services. However, your top seller, Ace Flanagan, has blown the doors off his product quota, doubling his target and selling twice as much product as anyone else. However, Ace didn’t come close to reaching his services quota, ending up at 28%. Your vice president of sales doesn’t want to rock the boat and risk losing Ace, so he suggests business as usual, paying Ace full commission and bonuses.

What a great opportunity! After telling your vice president of sales thanks but no thanks, you have a one-on-one sit down with Ace. First you thank him for his product sales contribution, but then quickly state your major disappointment in his services performance. You confirm that this is the new strategy, it is vital to the company, and that everyone is expected to contribute. You are sorry, but he will not get any bonus, he and his wife will not be going to Bora-Bora as part of the President’s Circle, and if he misses his quota next year, he will be fired.

5. Stay the course. There is a good probability that 90 to 120 days into the transition to seriously selling services that performance will actually go down. If you are doing the right things, giving lots of training, involving people in the process, and allowing for the inevitable lost water-cooler time, overall sales could well drop. Anticipated services sales may not materialize as people try to figure out how to do it, and product sales will drop due to lost time out of the field and the lowered productivity that comes with the deer-in-headlights stare when people are passively aggressive.

Don’t panic! If you give up now you will never get services off the ground and you most likely will never regain your level of past product sales. Suck it up, stand tall, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Tags: differentiation, selling services