Merge 2.0: New Strategies to Pinpoint How Prospects Buy

By William L. MacDonald

You now have all the principles you need to pursue B2B complex sales and win more business. Whether you are at the beginning of your career or a sales veteran, the strategies in this book will raise the bar on your performance. If you follow the MERGE process for every prospect encounter, you can double your production and contribute more than you thought possible to topline revenue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546243588

William L. MacDonald

Bill MacDonald is a serial entrepreneur. What he learned from launching four successful companies became his springboard to help other CEOs grow revenue. PleinAire encompasses his desire to give back to the noblest profession in the worldsales. MacDonald founded PleinAire Strategies in 2011, a boutique, revenue-growth consultancy to help sales leaders transform B2B sales activity into sustainable revenue growth. Using his MERGE process, clients benefit from fresh thinking on old ways of B2B selling. MacDonald launched three leading organizations in executive compensation and benefits, notably Compensation Resources Group, Inc. (CRG), Merrill Lynch Executive Compensation Group, and Retirement Capital Group, Inc. (RCG). By 1999, CRG grew to 190 professionals, managed billions of dollars in assets, and maintained nine offices nationwide. Ready for new challenges, MacDonald sold CRG to Clark Consulting, a NYSE firm. He launched RCG in 2003, creating another market leader in the field. Currently, he serves as a managing partner of Executive Benefits Group and as a board member of DigitalChalk, a leading provider of online learning management systems. With thirty-plus years of experience in closing tens of millions of dollars in deals, MacDonald learned hard-won lessons. In his first book, MERGE: Simplify the Complex Sale, he lays out his sales process to decode complex sales. With MERGE 2.0, he shares insights on how prospects buy today and offers new to close more deals. He also wrote Retain Key Executives, a compendium on the recruit-retain-reward challenge, published by CCH. MacDonald serves on the Board of Visitors at the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University; a long-time member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), hes now a member in the World Presidents Organization, the Chief Executive Organization. He has spoken before many industry forums such as the YPO, Forbes CEO Conference, Conference Board and World-at-Work; he is a contributor to Million Dollar Round Table and Top of the Table. Awarded Entrepreneur of the Year and California Veteran of the Year in times past, he is also a graduate of Northeastern University and The Presidents Program on Leadership (PPL) at the Harvard Business School. Bill lives in Indian Wells, CA with Eileen, his wife. In the summer, they head to their beloved home on the rocky coast of Maine. Together, they raised two natural-born entrepreneurs, Natalie and Bill Jr., and now enjoy keeping up with five whip smart and talented grandchildren.

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© 2018 William MacDonald. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permissio n of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/25/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4357-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3561-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-4358-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905514

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank quite a few special people and firms, all of whom contributed mightily to my ability to complete MERGE 2.0, my second business book on complex sales in business-to-business (B2B).

First, my colleagues from Clark Consulting; Compensation Resource Group, Inc. (CRG); Executive Benefit Solutions; Lion Street; Miller Heiman; Retirement Capital Group; and my Young Presidents’ Organization/CEO Group at the Harvard Business School, I thank you. You allowed me to spend the last forty years of my life teaching, studying, and selling alongside each of you. This book reflects our journey together.

Next, I thank my first, true sales coach, Lan Goodwin, from G&M Employment, where I cut my teeth in executive recruiting and selling intangibles. I learned so much from observing his professional life.

And I thank another one of my early mentors in the insurance industry, Bob Fine, the general agent for Guardian Life, who taught me how to focus and drive goals forward by his example.

My first two business partners, Keith Tobias and Bill Forrest, helped me to shape the concept of process-guided consultative selling. Their combined business experiences brought a new perspective.

I must thank the young salespeople I brought into CRG who believed in the sales process and stuck with it even when they couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now, many run their own successful firms.

As I finished this book, I reacquainted with an old friend, Andy Ramey, who shares my thinking. We both continue to reinvent ourselves and get inside the heads of buyers. Andy introduced me to his son Nick, a young, forward-thinker who, along with Andy, invested many hours on the MERGE 2.0 manuscript giving me a millennial’s sensibility on selling. We enjoyed many late-night discussions on every chapter as they pushed me to do my best work.

To my editor, strategist, and right arm in my book writing, Carolyn L. Smith of ContentRunway, thank you. Without her knowledge of marketing and sales, and passion for writing about it, we may have missed the mission. She’s an asset to PleinAire Strategies, and to every company I’ve owned or worked with over the years.

Gratitude to my children, Natalie and Bill Jr., who endured my many nights on the road in building several companies. They have both given my wife and me the gift of their success in life and, of course, extraordinary grandchildren.

And to Eileen, my wife, my partner, best friend, and confidante, I give my lifelong gratitude. Her patience and unwavering belief in my abilities have given me more strength than she will ever know.

Enjoy reading MERGE 2.0. I hope you find its message valuable to your sales and revenue building.

Bill MacDonald,

2018, Indian Wells, CA

INTRODUCTION

A simple yes. That’s all you want.

Unfortunately, it is harder than ever to get to yes, especially in B2B complex sales where well-informed buyers will not tolerate the ineptitudes of mediocre salespeople.

Today’s buyer is closed off from you─hidden behind a computer screen or voice mail. They own the power of Google searches, delete keys, and their limited time.

To inspire a savvy B2B buyer to act, you need to possess the endurance of magician David Blaine with the laser strategy of Delta Force. That means you need a solid approach, a clear understanding of your buyers’ issues, and the ability to help the buyer create a vision for the solution.

You may be skilled at opening doors with senior-level decision makers. You may use a well-defined sales process. You may even practice solution selling well. But it’s not enough to win in complex sales today. McKinsey & Company documented in a study that 75 percent of solution-selling efforts at companies were deemed failures within three years.

My simple definition of solution selling: If the salesperson probes deep enough to find the prospect’s pain points, he simply needs to connect his solution to the prospect’s needs, and that prospect will have no choice but to buy.

One major flaw with this strategy: in most cases, prospects don’t know what they need. They may know they feel pain, and yet be unaware of the size of their problem. Certainly, they have not formed a vision for a solution. In fact, as you will learn later, 95 percent are not even in the market for what you offer.

One of my goals for this book is to help you expand your thinking on many levels. The messaging you develop, the sales tools you create, and the sales training you undergo primarily focus on helping people understand your products and services—the why us story.

Instead, you must help the buyer form his buying vision and answer the questions: why change and why do it now? You and your sales team need to sell higher and earlier in the process by positioning yourself and your organization as an expert with key decision makers. You also need to open your initial conversations around a buying vision that supports your products and services.

Unreachable Prospects

I regularly consult with companies that face the growing challenge of unreachable and hard-to-impress prospects. Let’s say a prospect engages you and your company, responds to an e-mail campaign, hits your website, attends a webinar or even answers a direct sales call. You begin to tell him, based on your research, the issues that similar companies face, how you solved them, along with all the reasons he should select you versus your competitor.

Alright. Now you engage the prospect in a sales process to tie your solution to his needs. This action involves several meetings with other decision makers too. At the end of what feels like a long sales process, and much effort, the prospect makes no decision at all.

That’s right; he didn’t do anything. He stayed with the status quo. According to Sales Benchmark Index, nearly 60 percent of all qualified leads inside a company’s pipeline end up in no decision or the status quo. That’s the bulk of leads in your sales pipeline your team is working on, with no success, and at great expense.

When you take a closer look, you will realize that companies misjudge the sales readiness of their prospects. A faulty assumption exists that because they want to speak with you, they also want to buy your products or services. When you first make contact, you gear up and launch into your selling process. You break out your pitch book, slide decks, brochures and best messaging to advance the sale. You’re just selling too fast.

Buyers in Control

Here’s the truth: our research with executive buyers confirms more often than not that prospects first engage with potential solution providers to determine whether they should change their current situation. Something triggers the event, such as the loss of a key employee, missing profit numbers or a new competitor in their market, which motivates them to read your whitepaper or agree to a call or a meeting. At this point, they engage in cognition thinking, asking themselves if they need to do anything differently or are they still okay? They’re not ready for your sales pitch; they’re trying to figure out where they stand and whether they need to act now.

In this book, we take you through several chapters that lay the groundwork for understanding your buyer, his or her persona, how they think, how they form a vision for the solution, and how they want to engage when ready to make the buying decision.

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) defined the problem, revealing that on average, B2B customer/clients are nearly 60 percent of the way through the purchase decision before engaging a sales representative. While we know this 60 percent statistic is not universally applicable, the trend is unmistakable. Prospects with the resources and networks are happy to buy without your input.

This power flip is a game changer. These days, a few keyboard clicks can open an entire digital world. Empowered buyers are upending companies who have always relied on their salespeople to listen to buyer needs and create solutions around their product or service offering. It is a critical shift in behavior and requires a far different marketing and sales strategy than in the past.

What You’ll Learn

According to the 2014 State of B2B Procurement Study from the Acquity Group, 94 percent of business buyers do some form of online search, of which 77 percent use Google. MERGE 2.0 shows you, through an educational strategy, how to position yourself as a perceived expert in your category.

I will also show you how to open new opportunities under favorable conditions. Many more prospects (95 percent of your targets) do not know they have a need. You can develop a strategy to raise their awareness and demonstrate the risks of failing to change their current situation.

In a recent engagement with a retirement advisory firm, we analyzed its sales approach and validated the point. The firm specializes in 401(k) plans and seeks out prospects through webinars, speaking engagements, attendance at HR conferences, and through referrals from law and accounting firms. What I observed at the initial meeting was typical of most organizations. The firm’s team begins the meeting discussing what it knows about the prospect’s situation and his needs. In this case, it researched information on retirement plans. The team used FreeERISA.com, a website dedicated to specific information on plan size, fees charged, and the current provider─all valuable knowledge.

Then, the team zeroed in on key issues, specifically the investment fund line-up, fee arrangement, and some compliance issues. The pitch called for the design of a more balanced investment fund line-up at 30 percent lower fees, as well as assuming the company’s fiduciary liability, which the competitor did not do. Next, the team went into its why us discussion, turning to its company profile pages in the presentation, the who-we-are-what-we-do-how-we-do-it, and who-we-have-done-it-with pitch. Finally, they identified key areas where they felt they had a competitive advantage.

The harsh reality: the prospect was not in the buying cycle at this stage. Yet the advisory firm treated the prospect as if he was with a presumptive approach.

Later in the book, you’ll learn why you need to secure a few YES answers before you make any competitive comparison. The prospect is still in the cognition thinking stage, where he wants to understand the issues you raised, quantify the size of the issue, and decide whether to address it now or not at all.

See the Vision

Forrester Research tells us that 74 percent of executive buyers admit they prefer to buy from the company that first establishes the buying vision. The other 26 percent claim they will conduct a fair and square bake-off with all viable competitors which usually takes the form of an RFP process (request for proposal). Now that’s a significant difference. Follow their lead. That’s the group you need to reach. If you help create the buying vision, you can change the outcome of your sales cycle to the positive. For this reason, salespeople must spend time in the early stages of the prospect’s buying journey helping them understand the need to change and helping them form a buying vision. Many salespeople and their processes are not equipped to do this today.

In Miller Heiman’s 2015 Sales Best Practice Study, world-class sales organizations identified how they provide value to their customers, as well as how they capture, distill and translate that value into meaningful, significant statements and messages. Furthermore, they ensure the messaging rolls across all potential buyer touch points. To extend that value, they integrate it into the brand promise, locate it on the corporate website, embed it into demand generation campaigns, and connect it to content, collateral and talking points delivered by salespeople in prospect meetings.

The Study points out how world-class sales organizations stay close to their customers by listening to and learning from them, then applying their customer experiences in pursuit of prospects.

You will learn this process too, as we cover how to pinpoint the strategies that align your sales process with how your buyers want to buy.

The Harvard Business Review’s Top 10 Sales Trends states: For sales forces involved with large capital expenditure sales cycles, never before has the mantra ‘Call High or Die’ been so true. Salespeople must reach C-level executive decision makers early in the sales process because the default for organizations today is to maintain the status quo and delay every purchase.

When you enter organizations at the support levels, you cause yourself unnecessary pain and delay. That’s why I have dedicated an entire chapter to teach you how to book C-level appointments under favorable conditions.

In our retirement advisory firm example earlier, the sales team was asked 60 percent of the time to submit a proposal after the initial contact. However, 70 percent of those requests were part of an RFP process. For those business sectors forced into the RFP process, I will share some techniques to help you improve your win rate."

Four Barriers to Status Quo

Unfortunately, companies do not formalize their process to create buying visions around how prospects want to buy. Done loosely and organically, the process in most organizations shows little foresight or consistency.

I wrote this book to offer a new and improved version of MERGE. I want to help organizations break through the status-quo barriers and close more business. MERGE 2.0 augments your ability to identify and prepare to scale the four main barriers of status quo decisions:

1. Time Scarcity: Your prospect suffers from information overload. His time is painfully limited. Replace your self-promoting value proposition with a practical perspective on his problems. Bring value and insight to help your prospect realize the real danger of sticking with the status quo. I will help you design a value proposition that will resonate with your targeted prospects.

2. Risk/Loss Aversion: While you want to show prospects the benefits of working with you, neuroscience has proven the human need to avoid risk or avert loss is the greatest motivator behind the willingness to change. Moving someone off the status quo requires appealing to the potential risk or loss of not changing. Your approach and conversations need to propel your prospect to a place where he or she feels the status quo is no longer safe. What you’re trying to do here is create a little pain and pull toward the sale.

3. Reluctance to Change: Your prospects ask themselves if the pain of change is worse than the discomfort they live with every day. If they determine the outcome of your solution may be more unpleasant than what they are currently feeling, they will stay with the status quo. What’s worse, if they are not experiencing any pain, they won’t see your solution. Be certain your messages and conversations help the prospect see a clear and easy path from unsafe to safer.

4. Incumbent Advantage: Assuming your prospect is ready to solve his problem today, and he believes your solution will work, he could still decide to use his current provider to solve it. For him, it is the most comfortable approach. Which is why you must demonstrate sufficient contrast between your new solution and the incumbent’s approach. The need to displace an incumbent occurs regularly for salespeople, so I have dedicated an entire chapter to this sales imperative.

Not What You Sell But How You Sell

The Sales Executive Counsel analyzed tens of thousands of data points to determine what factors drive outperformance of competitors. Dixon and Adamson published the results in the CEB book, The Challenger Sale. Those results were not surprising.

As outlined in the chart below, 38 percent of customer loyalty is attributable to the combination of brand impact and product and service delivery. These qualities partially determine your ability to outperform the competition. In other words, if you build a solid brand, offer a great product and world-class service, you can win 38 percent of the time. Most executives expected much higher numbers. If you add the 9 percent contribution of price to value, then you can win 47 percent of the time.

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Source: PleinAire Strategies; data from The Challenger Sale

The remaining 53 percent of customer loyalty depends on your ability to outperform the competition in the purchase experience itself. As Dixon and Adamson state: Over half of customer loyalty is a result not of what you sell, but how you sell. As important as it is to have great products, brand and service, it’s all for naught if your reps can’t execute out in the field.

With MERGE 2.0, I offer you a marketing and sales process to help you develop better buyer experiences, designed to open more doors at higher levels and close more opportunities. I am confident the MERGE process will help you, as a sales leader, reach higher results with your team results. As a salesperson, you will experience a more satisfying sales career. As a company, you will engender greater customer loyalty and added revenue.

What’s Changed Since My First Book?

Readers of my first book, MERGE, may wonder what’s new and different about MERGE 2.0. What hasn’t changed is the robust MERGE process. No need to change what works for so many salespeople and companies. But I have expanded and refined the process for today’s business reality.

I’ve added many new ideas, strategies, and greater depth to help you master the buyer’s decision-making journey. Count on learning and using these strategies and more:

■ How to align your sales process with the way prospects buy

■ Simple tools for managing the sales process

■ Directions on how to develop buyer personas

■ How to create value propositions and a new sales playbook

■ Details on effective meetings and staging winning presentations

Best of all, you now have access to a new eLearning platform with all MERGE 2.0 modules available for easy and cost-effective online-sales training, designed especially for those who prefer interactive learning to reading books. Log onto https://pleinaire.digitalchalk.com/dc/learn/merge-2-0.

Read, retain, and respond with confidence knowing MERGE 2.0 puts you at the cutting edge of sales mastery. And I bet you’ll refer to this book so often for another sales nugget. What I really hope for? That your copy is generously highlighted, filled with hand-written notes in the margin, and stands prominently in its dog-eared glory on your book shelf.

This is your time. The time to rise to sales excellence in the best profession in the world.

With thanks and enjoy,

Bill MacDonald

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1:     Our Priority: Build Predictable, Sustainable Revenue

Chapter 2:     Where’s Your New Sales Playbook?

Chapter 3:     MERGE 2.0─A Sales Process Aligned with How Prospects Buy

Chapter 4:     M for Magnify—The Research Mindset

Chapter 5:     Why Buyer Personas Drive Sales

Chapter 6:     Develop Your Value Proposition

Chapter 7:     Open Prospect Doors with Educational Marketing

Chapter 8:     Secure Executive Appointments Under Favorable Conditions

Chapter 9:     E for Explore─The Power of Meeting Plans

Chapter 10:   Create the Buying Vision

Chapter 11:   Master the Challenge of Multiple Decision Makers

Chapter 12:   Unseat the Incumbent

Chapter 13:   Get Commitment to Cross the Chasm

Chapter 14:   MERGE: Recommend (R) and Generate (G)─Alternative Solutions

Chapter 15:   E for Engage ─ Stay Close to Your Client/Customer

A Final Word

About the Author

CHAPTER

ONE

Our Priority: Build Predictable, Sustainable Revenue

I refer to myself as a revenue growth consultant. By assisting B2B companies generate sustainable revenues, I fulfill my purpose in business. It’s what I know best and enjoy most.

A revenue growth consultant is a service professional focused on generating sustainable growth for clients. Many areas of business require growth focus; many growth-consulting firms fill the need.

My clients see me as a professional architect of growth initiatives enabling them to achieve their best, more effectively. It’s all about helping companies reach their full growth potential.

My specialty is sales growth, using marketing and sales processes as my tools. However, I cannot focus solely on increasing sales revenue; I must work to increase a company’s capacity to sell more so that the revenue stream sustains itself. Every company wants to leverage its sales expertise to rev up the revenue engine and build the infrastructure to support long-term growth.

Arguably, one could revenue is all that matters. However, it is not that simple today. Building revenue represents an intricate web of influences and actions that stretch beyond the act of making money or earning a profit. It involves strategy, structure, people, and process. It also involves brand esteem, customer loyalty, corporate citizenship and thought leadership.

Yet when I discuss growing revenues in prospect meetings, the first thing I hear people say is: Well, the answer is to increase the sales force. They believe adding more reps to the team will boost revenues. I see this strategy repeated to the point of banality and unfortunately it often leads to deeply disappointing results for the CEO.

And many times, it costs sales leaders their jobs. Growing the salesforce to improve the bottom line seems to make common sense, right? Well not exactly. Here’s why.

First, what impact does the CEO and sales leader envision with the add salespeople strategy? They believe more salespeople will acquire more new accounts; they anticipate higher revenue. These added reps may be deployed in new geography to broaden the company’s footprint or added within the existing footprint where the company can reduce the number of accounts per salesperson.

Then, those reps will invest more time to cross sell or upsell more offerings.

The strategy is flawed. Increasing the number of salespeople is setting yourself up for disappointment. Too often, the anticipated financial growth falls way short of expectations.

For several reasons.

1. Unrealistic ramp-up time associated with the expected results. It may take six months for salespeople to reach full potential. But