How to position yourself and your sales campaign for success in the new era of sales
Jerry Stapleton
For SBT
Over the last few months, we’ve been talking about "Knowledge Calls," which are intended to gain you valuable insight into your customer’s organization and business. They also are intended to move you from Vendor/Problem-Solver to valued Business Resource in the eyes of your client.
Beginning this month, we look at "Positioning" and why, in the new era of selling, it’s more important than ever.
Anybody want to buy a city?
Let’s say you were attempting to sell the city in which you live to the International Olympic Committee as a prime location to host the games.
You would probably get busy promoting your city’s strong infrastructure, highway system, communications network, low crime rate, skilled labor force, and the like. It certainly wouldn’t be obvious to you to promote your city as one of the poorest, most crime-ridden, least-educated, worst-housed municipalities in the nation. Surely you wouldn’t talk about your city’s overloaded sewage system’s dumping of tons of untreated waste into the local rivers and a state government that imposed a moratorium on new sewers.
Yet that’s exactly what Andy Young and Billy Payne did. They’re the two who orchestrated Atlanta’s successful bid to host the 1996 Summer Games. Those attributes raised the city’s score, not lowered it.
As Fortune reported it: "Astonishingly, when the time came to go out and bag an Olympics, Billy and Andy managed to turn their bleak story into a selling point. Remember, as our two heroes hit the road in search of Olympic votes, they had to overcome anti-American sentiment. And so, to a select but powerful bloc of IOC members, Billy and Andy sold Atlanta as a Third World city, as the capital of African America — as, in fact, the only African city in the running for the games."
What Payne and Young used so successfully to bag the 1996 Summer Games is a textbook example of positioning: Concentrating on a theme that defines your company and its message in the mind of the customer.
Positioning: The missing link
To be sure, sales campaigns are won without positioning. Many are won almost exclusively on the strength of the seller’s ability to demonstrate knowledge of the customer’s business. Likewise, many have been won on the basis of demonstrating the most compelling value proposition among competing suppliers. And many sales deals are won as a result of the sheer political savvy of a sales rep’s astutely working the organizational dynamics within the buying company, which perhaps compensates for an inferior value proposition.
Customer business knowledge, value proposition, and political strategy — these are three pieces of a total sales plan that individually or in combination can frequently get the job done. But all three would have fallen short in the case of Atlanta’s quest to snag an Olympic event. Indeed, Atlanta’s "value proposition" couldn’t have been weaker. The missing element is the fourth and final piece of a total sales plan: Positioning, which needs to play a prominent role for salespeople who want to succeed in selling’s new business model.
The concept of positioning sounds simple enough. And it is. In fact, most salespeople are familiar with it on an intuitive level and put it to use to varying degrees. But positioning needs to be implemented more consciously and consistently, especially by those endangered species who continue to focus on communicating information to customers as the central element of their sales "strategy."
Let me paint you a picture
Value must be positioned, not just described. Business-to-business salespeople need to borrow a page from the world of consumer marketing. Where marketers say, Coke is "The Real Thing," salespeople might be prone to say something like, Coke is "The world’s best mixture of corn syrup, caramel color, and carbonated water." Likewise, marketers say, it’s "The Softer Side of Sears," not, again as salespeople might say, "Sears’ new line of clothing and other non-hardware goods."
Mel, a salesperson for a client of mine, was selling inventory-control software to a large feed-mill company. Mel’s competitor’s product was clearly superior to his on a feature-by-feature comparison. Its value proposition was much more compelling, especially for this customer.
But Mel’s company had one feed-mill installation already under its belt; his competitor had none. Throughout the sales campaign Mel never deviated from his positioning message: his company’s "feed-mill expertise." Unlike many salespeople, Mel never let his competitor suck him into a feature battle. By staying "on message," Mel won the deal.
"The Real Thing" and "The Softer Side of Sears" are positioning messages that probably cost their companies many millions of dollars to develop, and that tapped the expertise of some of the best marketing minds in business at the time. Countless books have been written on the subject. Corporate America spends billions learning about and implementing positioning.
Believe me, I’m not going to try to give you a crash course in marketing and positioning. My goal in the upcoming columns is to distill the essence of positioning in a way that makes it practical for the business-to-business sales professional to use. Stay tuned.
Jerry Stapleton is president of Stapleton Resources, LLC, and author of From Vendor to Business Resource: Transforming the Sales Force for the New Era of Selling. For more than 10 years, he has been showing companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 500, how to sell to large accounts. E-mail: jstaple@theibsgroup.com; Web site: www.theibsgroup.com.
Pragmatic Positioning:
The soundbite that sells
In the last few months we’ve talked about the importance of getting to know your clients’ business and how Knowledge Calls can help you do that. But what about your business — and your message? Are you able to effectively articulate just what you have to offer as a Business Resource to your client?
In this series based on his new book, "From Vendor to Business Resource," Jerry Stapleton shows you how to stand out above the clamoring horde.
Free on the Web
For an excerpt from Jerry Stapleton’s new book, From Vendor to Business Resource, go to www.FV2BR.com.
Jan. 18, 2002 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
