Its not just about your product or service

I learnt a valuable lesson early on in my pre-sales career when we were contacted by a large company looking for a product to meet a set of criteria, an important one of which we couldn't do, and we told them that nobody could (which is what we believed to be true). Things went well until the final negotiating phase where they pulled us in to a dingy side room (previously we had always been in the board room) and were told one of our competitors had coverage for that important feature and as such they were not going to sign with us. To cut a long story short our sales exec managed the situation perfectly and after further meetings they went with us after all.

The thing I took from this is the thing we hear all the time - people buy from people. We had built a really good relationship over the course of their evaluation so they were willing to work around our one major product gap to their original requirements.​

The lesson is an old one - but the real power is keeping it front of mind when you think about your sales process at both strategy and execution levels, especially when you have sales teams in front of customers rather than a lone sales person.​

So think about your product or service alongside your quality of your sales process. I advocate thinking of the following key pillars:

• Product/Service value to this client - WHAT EXACTLY IS THE VALUE PROPOSITION TO THIS PARTICULAR PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER. To put it another way - have we qualified this opportunity from a "technical" point of view.
  

• Are we executing our sales process/sales play professionally. Are we turning up on time, smiling, asking researched questions and building understanding of their business/situation? Are we having a conversation? Are we always striving to add value to each interaction. Are we thinking about the people we are dealing with and how we are building relationships (an are we looking for gaps - the people we don't yet know or who are not on our side).

I'm leaving out the competition, and I'm leaving out having a unique proposition. If we do the second part really well then we will beat the competition more often than not. You'll notice I don't say "we will beat the competition every time" because I live in the real world - and we might lose because their VP is in the same Tennis or Golf club as the CTO etc etc. What I'm saying is you won't lose because of detailed features if you execute really well.