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Three Must-Haves to Seriously Sell Services
November 3rd, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
Over the last couple decades of helping senior executives get serious about selling services, I’ve observed a few patterns that help me predict the success of this important transition. Organizations that show early success (one year or less) do three things. How many does your organization do?
1. Fund the services business appropriately. Duh! Sounds so ridiculously simple. However, over the years I’ve seen big companies that truly need to be able to sell services to survive, balk at spending chump change to give services a decent shot a survival. The same execs who wouldn’t blink at dropping $10 million on a new plant, hem and haw at spending $100K to start a new strategic business. Go figure.
Lesson: If you won’t pay, then don’t play.
2. Have dedicated services sellers. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard CEOs say something like this: “Don’t worry. We have a great sales team. They can sell anything, including services. We’ll just give them a good incentive and we’ll watch the sales roll in.” When I hear this, I cringe. I know at least a full year of building profitable services will be lost and the whole transition is in jeopardy. If you want to know more about how big a challenge it is and what it takes to be successful in getting sales to sell service, I dedicate an entire chapter in my book, Seriously Selling Services, on this topic.
Lesson: Relying on your product sellers to sell services is a dumb thing to do.
3. Sell services first. I know this may be blasphemy, but customers don’t see much difference between your products and those of your best competitor. Customers make their buying decisions based on the services that surround your products. Their confidence in your products is based on their assurance that your services and support will provide them what they need. Therefore, if you have more and better services, you have the key to getting sales and stomping your competition.
Lesson: Push your services, and your products will be pulled along with them.
Want to learn more about an organization that is doing it right? Read the Wesco services success story below.
Damn the Torpedoes! A Wesco Success Story
Hunker down…cut sail…throttle back. Accepted advice to follow during an ocean storm or in the midst of tough economic periods.
However, while competitors have followed this conservative prescription of idling their vessel during these rough business seas, Billy Gamble, CEO of Wesco, has charted a different course: one path over the waves and straight into the gale.
Bucking conservative conventional wisdom, Billy decided to make some aggressive, strategic actions in order to secure the future of the business. Fourteen months ago, while competitors were waiting for the wind, Wesco decided to start a new business, ramping up a for-profit services organization while its customers—golf courses and municipalities—were cutting back spending dramatically.
From left to right: Billy Gamble, CEO, Mike Lynch, Director of Performance Services, and Frank Pitman, Performance Services Manager, all smiling at the year-end services results.
“Sure it was a risk to move ahead,” declared Billy, “but it would have been an even bigger risk not to start then. I see services as the key competitive differentiator in this industry, so the faster we build services capabilities, the better off we will be. We have a long way to go, but I’m extremely satisfied with our performance. I will continue to emphasize and fund this strategic part of our business, stagnant economy or not.”
You have to love this “damn the torpedoes!” kind of approach. I’m pleased to have played a small role in this success story. I’ll report back down the road to let you know how it is going.
Amy Burgert, Performance Services Manager, dealing with a favorite customer.
Realize the Reality—Step 5 in the 5 Steps to Selling Services Success
October 15th, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
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.
Reinforce, Reinforce, Reinforce—Step Four in Seriously Selling
October 13th, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
Very strong training, as outlined in Step Three in the Five Steps to Selling Services Success, is a vital catalyst, and is a mandatory start for changing selling behavior. Remember, though, for almost all of your sellers, this is a very big change, and training won’t do it alone. Behavior change takes time and support, so be prepared to invest some time and money into it. Instead of thinking a single two- or three-day training event, craft a learning system with ongoing reinforcement over at least a year.
For example, back up the core sales training with a reinforcement workshop within 90 days to let people share successes and practice new skills in a safe environment. Make sure that the date is announced during the core training, and that expectations for the reinforcement workshop are laid out for all participants. Just letting them know that they are to report on the usage of what they will be learning is a powerful motivator. An even more powerful incentive to get them to do what you ask of them is that they don’t want to look stupid to their peers. This will greatly improve the odds ofthem paying attention and taking the training seriously. If you can’t do a face-to-face reinforcement workshop, at least have a reinforcement video teleconference with the same objectives. Though obviously not as powerful as a face-to-face event, a couple hours of a well-facilitated session will still send a strong signal and advance the selling services cause. If you don’t have video capabilities, then an old-fashioned Webinar can do the trick.
Also, make an electronic classroom available to allow for “ask the expert” dialogue and the further sharing of war stories. Participants may not want to “look dumb” to their management, but if trust was developed with the facilitator during the initial training, sellers will be more open to shoot straight and thus get the help they need to improve.
Consider investing money in providing in-field coaching. You are asking salespeople to perform much differently than they have in the past, and providing one-on-one modeling with real customers and coaching afterward are powerful motivators to personal change. In organizations where sales managers are responsible for hands-on coaching of their people and spend most of their time working with their sales reps, it makes sense to extend their skill set to coaching their people on selling services.
Note, however, that there are a couple of challenges to this approach. First, product sales managers within your company may not be much good at selling services either! Unless they have a different background than their sellers, they probably don’t have the right knowledge, skills, and mindsets to coach the selling of services. Before sending them out to coach sellers on how to sell services, they will need to acquire not only the core training provided to the sales force, but additional training in how to coach. Again, this is another investment, but one that will pay off in the long run.
A second consideration is that in some companies “sales management” spends very little time actively managing salespeople. In these companies, sales managers are often the company’s best sellers and have revenue targets of their own. These individuals are key to the company making its numbers. In these situations it is unrealistic to expect that they will be able to provide the reinforcement requirements outlined above. Not that they are lazy or evil, these folks have big bogies to make if they are to be successful, and that trumps people development every time. For example, I have a long-term client that has built his organization’s success by having a very entrepreneurial approach to selling. The sales managers are the top sellers, and it is in the best interest of the company that they spend a minimum of 90% of their time in front of their customers. They contract me to do in-field coaching of their new hires to help accelerate their learning curve and speed their success. If your company follows this model then you should also look for outside expertise to do the one-on-one, in the trenches, customer-facing sales coaching needed to accelerate selling services performance.
GIST: Behavioral change is difficult, and no matter how good the training is, you won’t get the results you want without strong reinforcement.
Tailor Your Training: Step Three in the 5 Steps to Selling Services Success
October 5th, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
Step Three in the Five Steps to Seriously Selling Services involves training. But, not any run-of-the-mill sales training. To be successful you need to invest in quality, services-specific sales training tailored to the issues and uniqueness of your situation. Generic, off-the-shelf packages have their place. SPIN Selling, Professional Selling Skills, and Strategic Selling are all good basic primers for box sellers, but they don’t cut the mustard when selling the invisible. The mindset, approach, knowledge, skills, and tools are different when selling services. Therefore, you need to put everybody through high-quality, services-specific sales training. Find services experts with training competence and tailor a program specific to the needs of your organization. Make certain that the following components are part of the curriculum: why sell services, how to sell intangibles, selling how customers want to buy, building trust, qualifying great services business, developing services power maps, selling services to the “C” level, compressing sales cycle time, and so forth. To keep things interesting and fun, incorporate lots of opportunity for participation, including custom role-plays built around specific scenarios that the sellers must address. It is important to get your product sellers both competent in their selling services capabilities and confident enough that they will try it with customers and prospects.
An important part of any good training is providing usable tools and teaching participants how to use them. Appropriate tools for selling services include feature-benefit profiles for all of your key services offerings, qualifying checklists, case studies of customers espousing the value of using your services, ROI calculators, and sales call planners.
To maximize buy-in to a probably skeptical group, when I develop selling services training I like to involve the top product salespeople, the Ace Flanagans, in the development of the course. I use one-on-one interviews to understand their thinking. I also conduct focus groups with my client’s best and average box sellers to understand their issues and challenges. I always interview sales management to learn their perspectives and their issues. Their participation will not only improve content quality, but also help gain needed credibility for the training. Even better, when possible I conduct interviews of key people within my client’s key customers to learn their issues, expectations, wants, and needs regarding services, and then I build this into the training. This is an extremely powerful way to drive change, as it is fairly easy to dismiss your own views as biased, but it is difficult not to pay attention when your best customers say they want to buy services!
Getting It Right the First Time
September 30th, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
There is an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal called “Getting Fit without the Pain.” Here’s the link.
The article talks about how some individuals desiring to make improvements in their fitness are hiring an expert physical therapist before they get hurt, as often occurs in rigorous training. These highly trained professionals conduct a detailed needs assessment before the individual starts training for a marathon or attempting weight loss or whatever, in order to tailor a program best suited for the individual. Taking the time to learn from an expert up front greatly improves the probability of success while minimizing the possibility of injury and pain. Makes sense to me.
Business Leader Impact
I believe there are some things we can learn from this article from a business perspective.
It is easy to jump on the train of Six Sigma or outsourcing or process reengineering. There are many organizations selling one-size-fits-all approaches that force fit a “solution” into your organization, sometimes without stellar results. In my area of focus, services, I often get hired by executives who have already bought into the philosophy of transitioning their services business from free to fee, and have started taking action with minimal impact. The learning here is that what is a best practice for one organization trying to seriously sell services might be a worst practice for another. An industry pundit would know the variables that impact change and help you adjust accordingly.
So my recommendation? Whenever you are considering taking a major initiative, invest in having a qualified expert conduct a readiness review for you. Here you will learn not only your probability of success and the steps to take, but most importantly, the actions to avoid.
Improving Personal Productivity with iPhone Dragon Dictate
September 29th, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
Anyone serious about selling services should be constantly looking for ways to improve their productivity. I have just the ticket. It’s the Dragon Dictate free app for the iPhone.
I don’t know about you, but I hate typing on iPhone’s tiny keypad. Thanks to Dictate I no longer have to! All I need now is a relatively quiet area and to speak moderately into the iPhone. It does a great job of capturing my words almost 100%. This improves my ability to communicate at least 400% faster. Now that is a big deal.
Whether you’re a seller of services, a services manager or any professional you will gain tremendously by using this handy tool.
Please let me know your thoughts and experiences with other other productivity tools like Dragon, or anything else you found, to make you more successful.
By the way I wrote this through dictation and did not have to touch the keypad at all.
Likeability Sells
September 23rd, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
For those of you who have attended my training related to building trust and selling services, you’ll recall that one of the “six trust builders” is likeability. I espouse that things being mainly equal, the person you select to work with is the one you like better. Hence, anything that you can do to improve this trait is important to creating and strengthening relationships. Finding common ground, showing respect, and being positive are examples of actions one can take to improve being likable.
An article in the Washington Post demonstrates this fact in politics as well as it highlights the defeat of D.C. mayor, Adian Fenty.
Here is an example of a person that most people approved of what he did but disliked him enough to kick him out (you may need to scroll up to the top to see the article).
The learning point? Likeability is important in every situation where trust is a factor, so be more likable and you’ll be more successful.
From Tactical to Strategic—Shifting Services Priorities
September 22nd, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
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.
5 Steps to Selling Services Success—Step Two
September 20th, 2010 by Dr. James 'Alex' Alexander
Step Two: Align the System with the Strategy
Adjust your sales performance management system (objectives, tools, rewards, consequences, and feedback) to align with your new services selling strategy.
A. Fitting performance specifications. First, make it crystal clear that selling services is now an important focus of the company and an important required responsibility of the sales force. These expectations should be translated into quantifiable services sales goals (how much, what type, when) and should be in place and outlined in all sellers’ quotas and in their performance plan.
B. Adequate resources. You must have the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools supported by quick and easy access to your knowledge management system and internal experts. Most of this is best introduced through training, as discussed below.
C. Minimal interference. In all probability, you have just added more responsibility and more work to your sellers, but have not taken away any of their product sales quotas. To give your sellers the time to learn and practice how to sell services in the field, you need to minimize or eliminate secondary expectations. For example, for the first six months, ask the marketing department to eliminate all requests of the sales force, minimize the amount of time you expect sellers to take executives around to visit customers— unless those visits include services sales coaching by the executive—try to hold off involving your salespeople in task forces, and reduce required paperwork and all the other things that keep them out of the field selling services along with products. Minimizing interference will not only free up time for your sellers to learn how to better sell services, it also will take away excuses for non-performance.
D. Appropriate consequences. First, add a carrot—link the achievement of services targets to lucrative incentives. You can scale back later. In an attempt to get the attention of your sales force, make sure you are paying a higher percentage of bonus on services compared to products. In addition, tack on some highly visible bonuses (five-day cruise for two, twin Harleys, country club memberships—whatever gets their interest) to generate some excitement when your box sellers make good services sales. Your best sellers like to compete among themselves, and this is a highly visible way to do it. If you really want to generate maximum interest in selling services, make sure the spouses are aware of the incentive program. They can apply pressure that sales management can never match. Second, add a stick—put negative consequences in place if services selling goals are not met (no trip to the Bahamas for the services slackers, no product bonuses if services sales goals are not achieved). Punishment is a strong word, but necessary nonetheless. If your top product seller, Ace Flanagan, does poorly at selling services, put him on probation and let him know that job security requires services sales maturity. You will be sending a strong signal.
E. Quality feedback. The faster you get reliable performance feedback to people, the more likely they will self-direct their behavior to meet expectations and gain the positive incentives. Ideally, your sellers should be able to access their performance-to-goal anywhere, anytime. And, of course, management attention, encouragement, and coaching will increase the probability of repeatable, sustainable performance. Start every sales meeting with the selling services review of performance to demonstrate its importance and generate motivation.
The above process seems logical, doesn’t it? These are classic, proven steps of how to change people performance. Yet I rarely see organizations that address all of these points from the start. Most executives will set services targets and provide solid incentives, then expect/hope/demand that selling behavior changes. It will not. The gap is too large, and the change is too scary. Without meaningful ramifications for not selling services, you are wasting your time. The result will be dismal (if any) increases in services sales and a year of frustration for management.
The important thing to remember here is to do all of these steps, or don’t do them at all. But often management is very reluctant to put negative consequences in place around not selling services. (Maybe all the sellers will revolt!) Even if they put the negative consequences in place, it takes a steel-backed sales executive to keep the top-producing product seller (and his or her spouse) from making the trip to Rio for not selling enough services. (Maybe he will quit!) Finally, most product sellers, no matter how effective they are in that role, find it hard to transition to selling the invisible.
GIST: Getting the sales force to attempt to sell services is only effective when:
- Objectives and metrics requiring them to sell services are a part of the selling package.
- Lucrative incentives are in place for selling services.
- There are meaningful negative consequences if their selling services objectives are not met.
- Management actually enforces the significant negative consequences if selling services objectives are not met.
- If you put a gun to their head, the sellers could effectively sell services on their own.
