Ladder of Achievement

Company Risk Profiles

Advanced Consultative Selling: Selling in the Blue Ocean

By Mike Schultz

For the last 50 or so years, consultative selling has been the go-to approach for most sellers.

In traditional consultative selling, the buyer states a need and the seller positions their offerings as solutions to problems. This used to be enough to win the sale. But today’s buyers often perceive sellers and their capabilities to be somewhat interchangeable.¹ This leaves sellers stuck in a capabilities battle, fighting price pressure.

The traditional consultative sale, with the need defined by the buyer, looks like this:

So what can sellers do to break out of this echo chamber, avoid discounting, and differentiate themselves to win more often?

W. Chan Kim and Renée Maugorgne, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, one of the most popular business books in recent memory, argue that companies "succeed not by battling competitors, but rather by creating 'blue oceans' of uncontested market space. They assert that these strategic moves create a leap in value for the company, its buyers, and its employees while making the competition irrelevant."²³

In sales, this means that sellers need to create a surge in value for the buyer. When they do so, they make themselves categorically distinct. This is where the future of consultative selling comes in. (Read our latest white paper on this topic, The Future of Consultative Selling.)

Sellers who win go beyond traditional consultative selling. They inspire buyers with new ideas and perspectives. They question the status quo and don’t let buyer’s accept it, thus redefining the buyer’s reality and widening the possibilities by creating these ‘blue oceans.’

We call this kind of advanced consultative selling Insight Selling. We’ve written a lot about Insight Selling, which we define as the process of creating and winning sales opportunities, and inspiring buyers and driving change, with ideas that matter.

Read more: What is Insight Selling?
When sellers build on the traditional consultative selling approach and add insight, several things happen:

• Sellers redefine the need
• Buyer perception of value they can realize is expanded by the seller; the seller maximizes the impact potential
• Other sellers continue to fight over the originally stated need; the Insight Seller is selling a significantly different solution to a changed buyer perception of need

The net effect is the seller makes the leap from the red ocean (traditional consultative selling) to the blue ocean.

RAIN and the Blue Ocean

Since we first unveiled it in 2003, RAIN Selling has been our core consultative selling methodology. It’s about maximizing buyer value by discovering and solving hidden need along with stated need, and helping buyers visualize the most desireable New Reality for them. Our RAIN Selling model looks like this:
Here's how advanced consultative (or insight) selling looks and can be applied through the lens of the RAIN model:
When selling, don't just uncover needs—add value by redefining them. Show the buyer the impact they can achieve by establishing a New Reality they didn’t know was possible.

In doing so, you will unleash impact and value unexpectedly. You will be categorically different from other sellers, putting yourself in the best postion to win because of the value you, as a seller, bring to the table.

1. Mike Schultz and John Doerr, What Sales Winners Do Differently (RAIN Group, 2013).
2. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business Review Press, 2005).
3. Wikipedia contributors, "Blue Ocean Strategy," Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy.

The Green Box Exercise

I lead a  T.E.C. Canada group which comprises CEOs and Presidents of both private and publicly traded organizations.  Member companies in my group are found listed in the top 250 companies on the 2015 ROB Top 1000, in the top 1/3 of 2015 Profit 500, in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ and have been finalists in Ernst Young’s “Entrepreneur of The Year Awards” for 2014 and 2015.

  

Joining T.E.C. Canada has enabled the leaders of these organizations, as a team, to share their drive and commitment to enrich each other’s ability to achieve their individual business, professional and personal goals. Members act as a private board of trusted advisors with no agendas other than helping each other share best practices, solve management issues, make better decisions and improve leadership skills. 

As a group we often engage in “exercises” designed to enhance leadership skills, personal development and business performance. Recently I had the group work on an exercise entitled “The Green Box Exercise”. This exercise focuses on personal development. 

It’s an exercise that has relevance and benefits for everyone so I thought that I would share it.

The Green Box Exercise

John (an Australian) called his son Jim to let him know that he’d be flying to New Zealand the following day to try to close an important business deal.  Jim, a pilot in the Air Guard Reserves warned his father that potential Typhoons could make travel hazardous.  John laughed and reminded Jim that if anything tragic happened, to remember to get the “Green Box” out of the closet in his bedroom.

The next day, John was killed when his plane crashed into the side of a mountain on the north island in very low visibility.  Several days after the funeral, he remembered his father’s words about the Green Box.  He called his mother and they brought the Green Box to the family attorney.  Inside, they found 28 envelopes.  Here are the labels on the envelopes:

• Letter to my Wife
• Letter to each child (3)
• Letter to the employees
• Letter to my mother / father
• List of most important 5 employees in the company & their strengths/weaknesses
• Off balance sheet deals
• Organizational Chart
• Details of any company trusts
• List of personal and business people that should be contacted in the event of passing
• Deals in process and evaluation of them
• Strategy that I am thinking about but haven’t told anybody about
• List of Trusted Advisors and their roles (may or may not be currently working with company) such as attorney, accountant, etc.
• Instructions not addressed in Will
• Copies of POA documents
• Copy of Passport, Birth Certificate
• Copy of all credit cards
• Copy of physical property titles
• Personal stock portfolio information
• Details of Life insurance—personal and company owned
• Details of all other insurance
• Copies of personal property valuations (Jewelry, guns, collectables, etc.)
• Computer passwords
• Personal financial Statement
• Extra passport photos
• Medical/Dental Charts
• Funeral/Burial Instructions
• Mementos and to whom you’d like them given

The Exercise:  Start by addressing envelopes, preferably envelopes of a personal and business nature.  Remember that this will be the start of your green box, and people will read these at the time of your death.

Some of the items are not trivial to build up but, having done it once, updating becomes a little easier. 

Things like passwords and user names are a huge issue as are having a clearly defined beneficiary for all your investments.  Burial instructions are a source of family strife as are the disposition of trinkets and mementos.  

Please avoid any changes to your will or additions which may void your will. These should be done by an attorney and properly registered.  

It's undeniably a pain to do most of the items in the Green Box but I assure you that it is one or two factor pain for those left behind to clean up!

Work to live & don't live to work

Big data, marketing and decision-making – what is it all about?

Sofie Sandell

Big data, marketing and decision-making – what is it all about?

Last week I got asked if I know about big data and how you use it in digital marketing. Yes, of course, I do. I’ve been using big data for years when analysing numbers from websites and social media.

I’ve also been fortunate to speak at many conferences where some of the speakers are fully trained ‘big data ninjas’, and I’m lucky to know some of them personally.

Big data is complex information, and it feels as overwhelming as a huge waterfall. It’s only if you present big data in a meaningful way it helps you to make better decisions.

Big data is inconveniently big. It’s hard to handle. Impossible to overview in its raw form.

On Wikipedia, you read: “Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying and information privacy.”

An acquaintance who is responsible for all digital marketing for a large hotel chain in the US told me about her struggle to start to look at numbers when making decisions. For years, they had been making most decisions based on prejudices, personal experiences, and their ‘gut feeling’.

Every hour their hotels have thousands of guests who are in touch with them, either online, over the phone or staying in one of their large hotels. The information they collect about their customers is big data.

The information they have about their guests comes in many forms. Some are internal data, and some are external. You have access to the data that you asked your guests for before their visit and during their stay, and then new random data that you collect from your guests.

Their challenge was to use all information they have about their customers in a meaningful way so they could make better marketing decisions. To kick this off, they spent several days in a large conference room trying to figure out every possible touch-point that their customers have with them. What they got was a big complex map that told stories about their customers. The map was not easy to overview, or understand. The next step was to set up data collection points that they could follow and then also improve everyone’s web analytics skills.

Analytics is a vital phase of the big data cycle. The most common tools marketers use is Google Analytics, and it tells you about your website visitors. With the help of this information, you can understand what was successful in a campaign and how many online leads it gave. You can analyse your conversion rate, and see how many visits lead to a sale or an inquiry.

It’s when the data shows you meaningful pattern that you can do something with it. To see those patterns in an excel spreadsheet can be hard. That’s why you use visualisation software to do this, there are amazing and beautiful tools that magically help you visualise data.

To start using web analytics in a meaningful way took a while for the hotel chain. It’s not a one-month projects, but more like an on-going continual improvement project where everyone has to be open for new learning and share their knowledge.

Five examples of big data in daily life: 
1) The Panama leak was a big and complex project with 11 million documents. And to understand them better, see the pattern the journalists used big data visualisations tool. They used Neo4j and Linkurious to follow a pattern and see where the money went.
2) Eye on the Reef program – people, are helping scientists to find out what’s going on with the reef by sending them updates.
3) The Airports of the Future Project
4) NASA earth image project
5) For the health sector, there is so much to be discovered. Last time when I visited my local GP, or ‘house doctor’ as you say in Swedish, the nurse told me that they keep track on patient’s blood pressure, ‘they give us a call and share their blood pressure weekly, and we add it into the patients journal.’ Right now they collect the information manually. In the future, it will be done over a digital application on your smartphone, and you may send it to your doctor if you wish to.

We will use new personal digital technology in the future. We already have the fitness bracelet and different health apps. We will track all kind of body functions, sleep, movement, pulse, blood pressure, periods, hormones, blood, saliva, and weight. Then we will connect this with our smartphone, and start to see graphics and other visualisation tools, and share this with our doctor. There is a lot of medical issues that you can keep track of and prevent this way.

With so many new digital devices we are collecting and storing more data than ever. One question we need to ponder is how we will use it, and how it can be helpful. More tracking tools will be developed, it will give us more data, and they may help us to make better decisions.

How many people who are working in digital marketing are big data ninjas? Not that many, unfortunately. Big data is complex, and by collaborating and sharing skills you can explore what it means to your organisation.

The Reason Why Corporate Innovation Is So Hard

Gijs van Wulfen

Innovation is a paradox for all of us. On the one hand you are well aware that you have to take new roads before you reach the end of the present dead end street. On the other hand it is incredibly risky. It takes a lot of time. And it takes a lot of resources. Research shows that only one out of seven innovation projects gets launched and is successful. So saying yes to innovation is a step into the unknown. It creates fear of failure, which causes fear to innovate, especially in big organisations where a conservative corporate culture prevails.

On average it takes 18 - 36 months to develop a new concept, which often will only be profitable 2-3 years after introduction. Stimulated by short-term targets managers in big corporates focus on 'the business of today'. As innovator you want them to shift money and resources to the business of tomorrow, which is really hard.

Now be honest now: "Do you want to invest your personal savings in a project with a 1 out of 7 chance that it will be successful?" Probably you won't, unless you have to. And that is the real reason why a lot of managers wait until not innovating is not an option anymore. We all are humans.

I like to quote the CEO of BMW AG, the German luxury car producer, Dr.-Ing. Norbert Reithofer. When asked why BMW started the risky E-car project with the BMWi-3 and i-8 he responded very honest: "Because doing nothing was even a bigger risk" [Autoweek 41-2013].

Big corporations have often a very clear mission statement with an emphasis on innovation, a very well organised innovation process and professional innovation departments. Shareholders, board and bosses will however only stick out their necks for innovation if doing nothing is a bigger risk. This is the main reason why corporate innovation is so hard in practice.

So you how can you break the status quo and create momentum for innovation? Make them nervous that doing nothing is indeed a big risk. How? Identify the key persons in your company and confront them personally with concrete reasons for change that will move them out of their comfort zone.

So how can you make your managers nervous?

• Take them to visit start-ups challenging your position.
• Invite a trend watcher to confront them how quick the world is changing.
• Visit ex-customers who just changed to a very innovative competitor.
• Take them to Tech Universities to see experiments with new technologies.
• Spam them with articles of new successful business models;
• Visit young customers and ask what they think of your brand and - products.

Your conservative managers will say yes to innovation as soon as they get the insight themselves that doing nothing is an even bigger risk.

Go for it! Good luck.