Methods of engaging your customers
In the last few columns, we’ve been talking about pragmatic positioning and competitive engagement, the science of developing and communicating your message – your simple message – based on your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. I’ve shown you how the Direct and Indirect Methods of Attack from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War can help you do just that.
Now we’re going to talk about the message – and how not to get shot down when you’re delivering it.
A lesson from Bill Clinton and … Allison
Just before the November 1992 election, as then-candidate Bill Clinton departed Florida after inspecting the damage of a recent hurricane, he told the press, "I will not politicize this situation. I’ll keep my criticism of how President Bush is handling the situation to myself."
In a similar vein, Allison, a Business Resource-level salesperson for another client of mine, was conducting her presentation to a buying committee for her company’s financial software. She told the committee, "It may surprise you to hear me say this, but our software is not robust out of the box, and that’s by design." [Out of the box is a software package’s ability to be functional immediately upon installation, without further programing.]
Allison then added, "We figure you don’t have cookie-cutter problems, and you probably don’t want a cookie-cutter solution. That’s why we wouldn’t dream of asking you to re-engineer your business in order to conform to the needs of an inflexible software solution."
Allison said what she said because her chief competitor’s strength was its software’s ability to function right out of the box. However, that strength exposed the customer to having to conform its operation to that vendor’s inflexible software package – exactly what Allison wanted the customer to infer.
Taking the offense, without being offensive
Bill Clinton and Allison both understand another aspect of positioning: how to subtly put the competition on the defensive, and do it in a professional, innocuous way. This must be done with great care, of course. Word choice, timing, and your own credibility are just a few of the considerations.
Imagine if Bill Clinton had said, "I don’t think President Bush is doing enough to help the hurricane victims. If I were president, I would …". He would have been accused of politicizing a tragedy, thereby losing favor with voters.
If Allison had said, "You don’t want software with out-of-the-box strength, it won’t have the flexibility you need," she would have been suspected of trying to mask her own product’s weaknesses.
Paint me a picture, but do it with words
For Pragmatic Positioning to work, it must be executed with remarkable attention to word choice. It’s the words you use that make the technique come to life. Salespeople need to pay closer attention to how they say what they say – because, contrary to popular belief, the ear trumps the eye when it comes to fixing a picture in someone’s mind. Sales professionals need to become less concerned with having sexy slides and graphics to convey their message and more concerned with finding the right word or words to create that picture in the customer’s mind.
What picture could possibly create the same effect as the words: "The softer side of Sears"? A picture can only describe a reality. A word can create it.
Your success in implementing Pragmatic Positioning rises or falls with the words you use. The wrong choice of word in the most subtle of contexts can doom a positioning message. Determining which method of Competitive Engagement to use is not the hard part-it’s choosing the right words in the right situations to implement the method of engagement.
You say potato, I say potahto
To take a simple example, compare two hypothetical candidates for US president. One says, "If elected, I will propose to Congress ten billion dollars in Medicare cuts."
The other vows, "If elected, I will propose to Congress ten billion dollars in Medicare savings." Both have said the identical thing, but each will be viewed differently by the same voter.
Indeed, a single letter in a word can sometimes make a profound difference. Consider Jhane Barnes, one of the world’s premier fashion designers. Her name had originally been spelled Jane Barnes. But as USA Today reported on Aug. 10, 2000, "Barnes lost sales after retailers learned she wasn’t a man. The main reason she altered her first name was to make her logo appear both more masculine and European. To this day, some major customers still don’t know how to pronounce it." USA Today went on to point out that Barnes acknowledges that her business would not have survived without the "h."
A final … word on Pragmatic Positioning
As you transform yourself into the Business Resource you want to be, you must migrate away from "communicating information" as the core of your value as a sales professional. You must instead "position a message." Only then can you bring maximum value to your own company and to your customers. Only then will you achieve world-class status in the new era of selling.
Jerry Stapleton is president of Mequon-based 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: jstapleton@stapletonresources.com; Web site: www.stapletonresources.com
May 10, 2002 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
