They Must Believe You Know Their Business
“I kept striking out,” Mike, a sales rep, was telling me.
Mike was selling payroll software. He would get the appointment to do the demo. Then he’d show up, demo the software, but the response was always the same. “This software doesn’t really fit our business.” The calls ended with, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Mike was dejected. He needed to close some business or find a new job selling something else. He couldn’t understand how a prospect could say, “This doesn’t really fit our business.”
Mike said to himself, “I’m selling a payroll system for God’s sake.”
Then one night, while eating a sandwich in his hotel room, Mike had an idea.
“What if I change the demo data to reflect the positions and titles of the employees of the company I’m trying to sell?”
His next demo was to a hospital.
He got to work changing the names of the employees in the payroll software database. He used real but fictionalized names, removing names like “Employee1.” He then categorized them by position. The categories included administrators, doctors, x-ray techs, lab techs, nurses, maintenance, etc. This took him a couple of hours, and then he hit the sack.
The next morning he practiced his pitch using the new employee demo data. He was ready!
As he was giving the demo, the prospects looked receptive. “This is a welcomed change,” he thought to himself. He kept going. He showed them the reports first. This was usually where he started to get the crossed arms and the closed body language. But it didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened. The people were engaged. One even said, “This is just like our hospital.”
As you might have guessed, Mike was successful on this call. The sale was made.
Mike learned an important lesson about selling software to businesses, the B2B sale.
Business prospects expect you to understand their business, to not only relate to the problem they are aiming to solve but to solve it using the terms they are familiar with and use in their day-to-day discourse at the company. They need to believe you are one of them and understand their problem intimately.
Jobs learned the hard way.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, discovered this B2B selling principle the hard way. He was selling a computer to the masses and not doing very well. He then focused his sales efforts on the desktop publishing business. He developed the operating system and applications of his newest computer, the Macintosh, specifically to solve the multiple fonts issue of this industry.
This focus allowed him to differentiate his product from IBM’s personal computer. It gave him the beachhead and the much-needed cash to continue building his company. Then the rest of the market fell in love with the Macintosh. After winning the desktop publishing market, Steve Jobs repositioned the Macintosh as “The Computer for the Rest of Us.” The rest is history.
Summary
A horizontal software solution will indeed solve the problem for any business. But business people are so focused on their industry and unique vocabulary that they are blinded. Applying a solution for ‘the rest of us’ is a bridge too far. They don’t think broadly enough to consider how this horizontal solution might apply to them and their business.