Even the most efficient sales teams complain about there not being enough hours in the day to sell.  Distracting work demands grow in pace, volume and complexity.  Competing corporate priorities, high-speed communications and administrative necessities shunt customer face-time to the side.  Meeting, traveling, training, reporting and forecasting munch away at the days.  No wonder sales professionals can find themselves spending less than 25 percent of their workweek in front of buyers.

But is time spent in person with the client the only time you sell?  Is the only solution to somehow wrestle more face-to-face minutes out of your complicated schedule and your customers’ busy days?  Or are there creative ways to maximize selling opportunities beyond the hours available for sales calls?

To the One-Percenters—those in the top one percent of their sales organizations—time for selling is no longer limited to personal time spent with a customer.  It no longer requires an appointment and an agenda.  When they formulate an account plan, create a new opportunity, kick off a project or manage expectations, One-Percenters always do it with the voice of the customer in mind.  At every turn, they ask themselves, “Where can I extract value for my customer”?

Customers Expect Added Value

With customer organizations becoming increasingly complex, it is no longer enough to rely upon a quality product or service priced competitively and delivered on time.  Customers expect added value that cannot be tendered across a conference table at a meeting.  They want suppliers to understand their unique, specific needs and to satisfy them.  It’s incumbent upon sales teams to create benefits that improve the value chain, grow business advantages and generate new opportunities.  They must produce and deliver consistent, customer-specific value messages that link their resources and competencies to the customers’ most critical needs.  One-Percenters solve for these before meeting with the customer. 

Good relationships with customers are built piece-by-piece, call-by-call, and experience-by-experience through a range of customer contacts.  They are based on value creation for the customer at every point of contact.  Successful sales executives demonstrate this through each step of the client management process.  Those steps are planning, selling, delivery and account management.

Planning
One client, a leading defense contractor, had been denied access to a key military command.  We worked with the contractor to analyze how the command did business internally and how it interfaced with its outside resources.  By becoming more attuned to how the command sought to do business, our client was able to position its business processes parallel to those of the command.  Doing so allowed our client to engage the command in a collaborative strategy for value creation. The contractor’s scheduled 15-minute appointment with military leaders turned into a two-hour planning session!
 
When sales and customer teams jointly identify an extraordinary outcome for both parties, develop a plan to achieve it and then execute the plan, they can develop long-lasting, high-value relationships.

Selling
One-Percenters embrace their customer’s mission in everything from using the client’s language to incorporating their values and perspectives in recommendations. They align messages and tactics to motivate the customer, create new solutions and package them in ways that suit customer needs and create value. This strategic empathy can generate a reciprocal reward when the customer becomes a sales advocate for the One-Percenter.  Selling on your behalf, he enrolls others within the organization, division by division, GBU by GBU.

Delivery
The delivery process is the optimum re-entry point for selling your next project.  One-Percenters schedule frequent progress updates and keep the customer informed about what’s to come during implementation.  As the project proceeds, they define and demonstrate the value being delivered.  At the same time, they detect and delineate the customer’s upcoming needs, positioning themselves to segue into a new sales cycle.  Not only does this approach nurture the relationship, it involves customers in value validation, making them a valuable reference to use in selling to others.

Account Management
Preparing quarterly reviews for clients is one of the best ways for sales executives to spend their time—and it is time spent selling.  Besides demonstrating commitment and ensuring that client needs are understood and considered, a quarterly review provides an opportunity to recap what’s already been achieved, what’s yet to be expected and the value delivered.

Valuable Sales Communication

One-Percenters also recognize that managing the internal sales teams is itself a time to sell.  Sharing success stories gets the team psyched to strive for extraordinary goals.  They develop a passion for what they’re doing, and work hard knowing that they are good at something gratifying.  Abundant communication increases coordination and spreads understanding of customer needs and procedures.  Valuable sales communication extends beyond the confines of the sales team: as news of their prowess spreads through the organization, customer colleagues recommend them, creating sales on their behalf.  Not surprisingly, motivated, high-communication sales teams seem to receive the biggest piece of the budget pie:  to the victors go the spoils. 

“It’s all about the customer,” declared one of our clients in a conversation with his sales managers.  “What is?” they asked.  “Everything,” he replied.  In every company, the people who sell, deliver and relate with customers are its most important talent.  They are the conduits to the company’s ultimate asset:  the customer.  Whether the selling organization is developing an account strategy, executing a sales call, implementing products and services, or responding to a customer problem, sales people need to “wrap themselves around the customer.”  It’s always time to sell.

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