To put it as simply as I can, if you are not creating real value in the sales process, you’re falling waist deep into The Commoditization Trap.

At the risk of over-simplifying corporate structure, I’ve learned executives have one of two focuses.  At the senior level, they’re focused on the problems facing the company, while mid- and lower-levels are focused on managing solutions.

• Problems are strategic and solutions are tactical.
• A problem focus is all about finding the right/best questions to unlock opportunities, while a solution focus is all about finding the most efficient answers.
• Problems deal with changing the status quo, while solutions are about managing it.

The problem that sellers face is that the traditional sales approach is not geared to connecting to the problem-centers of the customer/prospect organization.  I see it time after time.  Selling organizations are so solutions focused that they forget that they’re really in the business of solving problems.

With this focus they fall into the vicious cycle of solution selling, where they need to increase their volume at increasing rates to make up for tighter margins and lower win rates.  And simply restyling your website, or creating a new tag line isn’t enough to break through and gain the attention of the right people.

If you want to be valued, you must first change how your customers/prospects think about the solution you provide.  You must provoke them, and break them out of their traditional, status quo thinking.  And you can’t do that when your focus is on your product or service.

To succeed, you must create value.  You must teach them something that matters.  You must be able to show them first why they’re failing to get their desired results as easily as they’d like, and further you must be able to show them how they can reach their objectives more effortlessly.  You must ask them questions where they learn about their company and see their challenges from a different perspective.

Here are three tips to jump-start your efforts:

• Create a list of questions that will cause your customer/prospect to look at their situation from a new or different perspective.
• Share a 15 – 30 minute presentation providing a unique angle to solving a perplexing problem.  (Please note, this presentation cannot be about you – it must be customer focused and valuable to them.)
• Develop tools that allow customers to assess themselves.

When you do that, you’re doing something worth paying for.  And if you fail to do that, you’re going to be treated like the commodity provider they think you are.

Here’s the simplest and fastest way to determine if you’re peddling:

Look at how you approach your prospects and customers early in the sales cycle.  Consider the questions you ask, the material you share and the possible presentations you make.  Now answer this question:  Who learns about the prospect/customer’s company?

If the answer is you (or your sales rep) you’re a peddler.  If the answer is the prospect/customer then you’re positioned perfectly to break-free from The Commoditization Trap.

You read that correctly.  If you want to avoid being commoditized and being treated like a Peddler, your job is to ensure your prospect/customer learns about their company, their situation, problems and opportunities from the very first interactions.  Learning about your company, it’s products and solutions comes last, with no exceptions.

The problem so many selling organizations have is they view their first interactions as a qualifying or needs assessment process.  They ask questions to educate the selling organization, and, frankly, they bore the buyer.

• Don’t ask how the company has handled a function in the past.  Instead ask them how they’ve adjusted to address the problems that could be causing that function to be performing at subpar levels.
• Don’t ask them what do they like about what they’ve done in the past and what would they would change?  Provoke them with your Commercial Teaching Point-of-View that will cause them to look at their solution differently.

The point here is that the bar has been raised to making high value sales.  You can no longer rely on the customer to educate you on what they need.  You must teach them instead.  When you do that, you’re in a position to create real demand and separate yourself from your competition.

There are two important points that contradict that belief:

Your customers are nowhere near as educated as we’d like to believe they are about their problems, so it’s virtually impossible that they’ll be able to:

1. Truly understand your expertise and solutions, and
2. Effectively compare the difference – and the value of that difference – between you and your competitors.
3. When you’re focused on your expertise or solution you must overcome 2 huge barriers:
   1. You’re in a what’s it cost conversation, and
   2. Your competitors have expertise and solutions as well, and they’re probably pretty good too.

As a small, mid-market business, if your goal is to separate yourself from your competition, drive accelerated growth and expand your margins, you cannot do so by focusing on or attempting to differentiate your solutions.

You must – MUST – contribute to defining the problem.

Ask yourself these 3 questions to determine if your sales efforts are setting you apart and making growth effortless:

1. How much time do I, or my salespeople, spend talking about our solution vs. digging deeper into the real problem facing my customer?
2. In my sales calls with my prospects and customers, how much do they learn about their problem vs. learn about my solution?  As a general rule, you want them to learn 3x more about what’s preventing them from achieving their desired objectives than about how your solution will help.
3. How much documentation do we use to highlight and quantify the cause and cost of the problem?  (Feel free to check out our Core Sales Toolkit if you’re looking for some tools.)

Having witnessed thousands of sales calls, and advised thousands of more, I can state – unequivocally – that the single biggest, most common and most damaging mistake is that selling organizations spend too little time defining the problem, and jump to the solution way too fast.

Frankly, it’s one of the major advantages I’ve had in growing my business. A few years ago I quantified the impact of my blog alone and valued it to create more than $2 million of documented value for my company. On top of that I’ve won many awards and gotten quite a bit of press for the blogging and publishing that I’ve done.

I’ve done this while leading a growing company, speaking on a regular basis, coaching a college and youth baseball team, and spending quality time with my wife and two kids.  I don’t work 80-hour workweeks, and I take the vast majority of weekends completely off.

While I am certainly comfortable writing, and admittedly I write pretty fast, the reality is that I have no special power when it comes to writing, creating or publishing content.  What’s my secret?  I’m completely comfortable putting out imperfect content.

Here’s what I don’t worry about:

• Is the idea fully, totally and accurately communicated.
• Is the article/post/paper too long?  Too short?
• Are the pictures the best we can do?
• Is there 100% chance that there are no typos or problems with sentence structure?
• I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Several years ago I wrote a little book calling Building The Bridge.  It was my first attempt at writing a parable.  I wrote it, had it designed, edited, published and printed all in house.  In hindsight the dimensions of the book were too small.  There were some typos in the book.  The design was rudimentary.

And, as it turned out, the biggest mistake was that I didn’t print enough of them.  Sure some people complained about the style of the book.  Others said they’d never buy from someone who would publish a book that has typos.  While I certainly don’t celebrate those mistakes (and we work really hard to fix them and make sure they don’t happen again), I do celebrate the more than $500,000 of revenue that the book directly contributed to creating.

While others are fretting over what they’re saying and how they’re saying it, I was earning more than a half-a-million dollars.

The point here is that the value of your content builds over time.  You readers (customers) are not experts, and in most cases have desire to become experts.  The primary job for content is to put it forth consistently and ensure that it’s easy to consume (and even entertaining).

You’re not going to tell your story in one post.  You’re not going to change your prospect’s worldview with one article.  The job of your content is to tell your story and influence your market over time.  Remember, perfection is the enemy of progress, and if you focus on making sure “it’s right” before it goes out, you’re going to get beat by someone who moves quicker.

For years your business had the wind at its back, and you didn’t need an unfair advantage to grow successfully. In 2013, as we continue to recover from the “Great Recession,” ask yourself:

Is our sales approach creating an unfair advantage for us, allowing us to:

• Close more business,
• Close it faster with less effort,
• Increase our margins, and
• Drive our profitability and business value?

If you’re answer is yes to all of the above, then by all means keep doing what you’re doing (and why are you wasting your time reading this page). However, if your sales approach is not creating an unfair advantage, you won’t want to miss our next webinar.

Join us on April 3rd, from 2 – 3 pm EDT as Doug Davidoff, Founder & CEO of Imagine Business Development, shares key insights on Designing Your Sales Approach to Create Your Unfair Advantage. 

This program is ideal for CEOs, Presidents, sales team leaders, and top salespeople looking to breakthrough the barriers that are holding them back. We’ll share the secrets that sales and marketing consultants don’t want you to know like:

• The lies about sales and marketing that are throwing your business into the heart of the commoditization trap.
• How the traditional approach to hiring salespeople is killing your profits.
• Why your definition of marketing is cutting your sales and profit potential by as much as 50%.

More importantly, we’ll dispel the myths and share the path and plan that is enabling $1 – $100 million companies in more than 25 industries to transform their sales approach into their unfair advantage. Enabling them to build the system that makes sales growth:

• Simple,
• Scalable,
• Predictable,
• Sustainable, and
• Effortless 

Plus, we provide time for an open question and answer period so that you can get on the path to creating your unfair competitive advantage.

Over the last 18 months I’ve been focusing on simplifying the approach that small and mid-market companies take to growth.  There is probably nowhere where this is needed more than in strategic planning process.

Working with thousands of companies, I’ve come to understand that the focus of your go-to-market strategy can be broken into three categories. They are:

1. Those who will do business with you.
2. Those who won’t do business with you.
3. Those who should and aren’t doing business with you.

Those Who Will

The reality is that you do not need to spend significant time creating strategy for this group.  This is the customer base that you already have a strong grasp on, and as long as you don’t blow it, they’ll continue to buy from you.

Those Who Won’t

You shouldn’t expend any strategic energy figuring out this market.  While this may sound obvious, I’m constantly surprised how much strategic time is spent trying to get people who are never going to buy from you, to do so.  At best, energy put in this area will get you into an RFP process, that if you execute flawlessly will allow you to finish second.

Those Who Should

This is the segment of the market that deserves 90%+ of your strategic energy and effort.  To do so effectively, however, requires an approach that’s different than most companies take.

Here are some pointers to expand your customer base:

1. You cannot figure out how to get the people who should buy from you to do so by looking at the people who are buying form you.  If you could, this group would already be buying from you.
2. Attracting those that should buy from you requires that you first change how they view and value the issues you impact.
3. You do this by creating your Commercial Teaching Point-of-View.
4. Expanding this market requires that you focus on building customers – not making sales.

Last week I was presenting our new program Achieving Effortless Sales Growth to a group of CEOs in Canada.  When I got to Step Five:  Cultivate & Engage Your Market, a CEO asked about e-newsletters.  He told me that a previous speaker had come and told them that no one reads newsletters anymore, so they’re just a waste of time.

My response:  “People don’t read crappy newsletters and probably about 95% of the newsletters that go out are crappy.  But, people absolutely read valuable newsletters.”

This advice is true of blogs, white papers, case studies and any other content you create to support your sales and marketing efforts.  Two things are clear; with more and more content being created every day there is more noise than ever, so the stakes and thresholds are higher.

Your opportunity, if you meet that threshold, is that you’ll get heard while everyone else is ignored.  Here are five rules to ensure your content breaks the noise barrier and resonates with your audience:

1. Be maniacally clear on who you desire to communicate with.
2. Focus on a clear and critical problem they are dealing with.  The fastest way to get ignored is by focusing your content on your “unique” solutions.
3. Develop and communicate a clear, Commercial Teaching Point-of-View.
4. Always – ALWAYS – ensure that you are communicating something valuable.  Remember, with content marketing you are in the publishing business.  Ask, “Would my targeted audience be willing to pay to access this information.”  If the answer is no, find something more valuable.
5. Communicate consistently.  We recommend consistency on a weekly to monthly basis.  Rule four should determine your frequency – if the content you are sharing is valuable you’ll be good.

One of the things we do at Imagine is to work with our clients to develop effective lead generation.  We use email strategies, content strategies and even calling strategies.  When implementing, I inevitably get a concern that “People don’t read emails,” or “I don’t take calls.”  The real reason for this is poor execution – not poor tactics.

Let me be clear about something I haven’t said in a long time:

If you are not creating value, you are extracting value.

It doesn’t matter if you are a salesperson or an executive. Whether you are communicating with a prospect or a client. When you initiate communication that doesn’t mean anything, you add to the cost of doing business with you, and make yourself less attractive to do business with.

Let me share with you a prototypical example of many of the emails and calls I receive on a daily basis. I will be deleting the names of the sender and their companies to protect the guilty. This is an example of a call I received recently (but I get

Doug –

I am the Anne Arundel County representative for [company withheld], and recently heard about your business. I was told that I needed to come out and talk to you. I would love the opportunity to share with you information about Baltimore and Washington’s most comprehensive publication. Looking forward to meeting you.

Have a great weekend.

Regards,

This has the daily double: communicating no value whatsoever and using deceit. “I was told I needed to come out and talk to you.” Nice. It leaves the impression that someone has referred them to me, without actually lying. However, it’s a lie anyway.

Further, what in this message gives me the slightest reason to clear time in my calendar to talk with this person?

Do you want me (or your prospect) to respond?  Then put in the time to:

1. Research your list.
2. Identify real potential concerns/problems I may be facing.
3. Craft your Commercial Teaching Point-of-View.
4. Don’t lie.
5. Be clear.

If you give me a compelling reason to respond, there’s a good chance I will.  If not, we’re just wasting everybody’s time – and you’re killing your margins.

With the annual celebration of one-night stands (Super Bowl ads) behind us, I still find myself asking why so many companies spend virtually all of their resources and energies begging for sales, when they should be building customers.  A focus on building customers often seems like the longer, more complex path, yet it’s the only one that provides an opportunity for the predictability, sustainability and scalability of revenue growth.

When I consult with companies in developing their outreach strategies, I remind them that there are, in essence, six stages of engagement a prospect goes through when considering doing business with you.  They:

1. Become aware of you.
2. Decide to pay attention to you.
3. Decide that what you are sharing is relevant.
4. Decide to talk.
5. Decide that you, your company or services can make a meaningful impact.
6. Decide to give you their money.

Now, take a look at your advertising, your marketing, your website and your initial sales material.  Look at the message being communicated in each of them, and ask yourself, “Which stage is my material focused on?”

Without looking at them, I’ll bet they’re all about why your company and products are the best (stage six) or about all of the wonderful things you do (stage five).  With little to no material focusing on a prospect should talk.

It may be the toughest lesson to learn, but your focus should never be on making a sale.  Making a sale is a byproduct; it’s an ends, not a means.  It’s the result of doing things right, over time.  Just like winning a game is the result of hard work, not the cause; making sales is the result of creating the right conditions for a sale.

Focus first on creating meaningful conversations, and you’ll be invited in far more often, with far more influence.  Stop now and create three answers to the question, “Even if a prospect were never to buy from us, how can we make them better off for meeting and talking with us? “

Your account entry strategies and marketing efforts should build upon those issues.  Make the focus of your sales efforts the creation of quality conversations that allow you to dig deeper, instead of prematurely focusing on making a sale.  Focus on the relationship over the one-night stand and watch your sales soar.

One of the things we do for clients is to create the content that provokes, educates and leverage sales efforts.  Over the last three weeks I’ve been involved in about 12 content interviews we conduct to keep the voice of our client.  With a couple of exceptions, the only word I can use to describe what was shared is “Boring!”

The most frustrating part of my job is when I’m more excited about your company, your products, services and your impact than you are.  I don’t know what it is, but the way 98%+ of companies talk about themselves is just boring.  Maybe it’s because our parents told us that bragging about ourselves is rude.  Maybe it’s because we’re so focused in trying to get people to understand the importance of what we do that we can’t help but “blah, blah, blah” our way to oblivion.  Whatever the reason, it’s ineffective, it’s killing your company and it needs to stop!  Now!

We work with a client (who’s name and details I will protect here) who does some amazing things.  Their product is truly disruptive and yet extraordinarily simple.  Their solution can materially and permanently reduce the cost of manufacturing, increase efficiencies, virtually eliminate rejection rates and shorten production cycles.  What’s more it can be implemented in days, requires little training and no change or retrofitting for their customers manufacturing process.

Yet, how did my client talk about themselves?  They talked about their process.  They talked about the technical details.  They were (and still are to some degree) reasonable that a manufacturing process is complex, and the credited their prospects with the knowledge and understanding to allow them to translate their features and benefits into meaningful results.

The important thing to remember is that your prospects and customers don’t have time to think.  They’re too busy trying to keep up with the multitude of demands, the simply do not have the attention span to connect what you do to even the most obvious of points.  If you talk about yourself like a commodity, you are going to be treated like one.

The solution is to stop talking about your features and benefits – features and benefits are dead.  You need to speak the language of results.  Lead with impact.  No start with what you think makes you unique, finish with it.

• Be bold.
• Share you experience – help them understand why they’re failing to get the results they desire.
• Take charge.  Remember, your job is to challenge your customers.

We work hard to get to essence of what makes our client’s companies special, while standing out from competition and resonating with clients.  In an effort to help end the boredom, I’d like to share our approach with you.  If you’d like to access The Five Tips to Stand Out & Resonate With Your Market, along with an accompanying worksheet, you can download it here.