B2B Sales executives all have at least one thing in common:  We are constantly on the lookout for that next big deal, right? I used to know a sales person who called himself a ‘whale hunter’. He literally would say things like, “I stand on the deck staring out towards the horizon, sometimes for months, looking for the right whale, and then I hunt it down.” While I tried to not stand around on deck as much as he seemed to like to, ahemm, I always was keeping my eye out for the big deal (that guy did sell some huge deals, btw).

But what do you do when you’ve finally found yourself a big opportunity? Of course, one must do all the good basic sales stuff like qualify, understand the organization, size up the competition etc., but really, after that, how do you go about winning against the other competitors, who you can bet are after this deal too and also hire capable sales people? After many a large campaign (many won, a few lost, and a few draws) I came up with an approach to handle positioning and messaging for each large opportunity that I worked on, that I think gave me a big advantage against my competition who relied on the packaged messaging from their company.

In order to develop the unique message for a client you have to start with the basics. First, what does the client care about most? Notice, I’m asking for one thing and that’s important. You see, I’m going to try and create a message attached to the thing they care about most, and see if I can do so in a way that puts my competitor on defense. So, back to the customer. What is really driving them to make this business decision? Big deals usually mean big bets and risks for customers. Often times, my opportunity is actually part of a larger project, initiative or program that is attached to a larger corporate strategy. What is that strategy? What is really driving the acquisition of this product and service at this time?

This is the time to be careful about how you listen though. Junior people in the prospect company may be focused on their pet concerns, but that is only part of the picture. Let’s say your day to day contact really cares about ease of use, but senior management is more concerned with short ‘time-to-value’ for the project. The answer for your messaging is to talk about ease of use with respect to how your products ‘usablity’ decreases time-to-value, yes? You are are catching on? And let’s say you get a meeting with the operating executive who owns the budget for your initiative. You may then ask, ‘why are you so focused on reducing time-to-value’, and she might respond, ‘because we are trying to reduce the elapsed time of our product development cycle by 20% this year and I need this project done by June to make that happen’. Ahh, now you are really learning, yes? So the message becomes about reducing product development life-cycle time, yes? Still through better usability and shorter time-to-value than your competition, but you are all about reducing product development cycle time now.

The real challenge is getting the client to see you this way. What you’ll usually find is that the sales presentations and collateral or demonstrations your marketing group provides are insufficient for this effort. They might mention reducing time to completion, but usually that will be one of a number of benefits that the standard marketing collateral.  I will take the time to hand craft a new pitch to the client that emphasizes what’s important to them at every turn. I will use references that had the same business challenge and coach the reference client to focus on the business issues.  Every PPT slide, every proposal and every person who speaks to the client is to emphasize it as well. I instruct each participant from my company to embed this message into their discussions and deliverables, particularly the project plan for implementation. I also emphasize repetition. People need to hear you say something several times for it to resonate, for them to connect with you. With their busy days, Blackberrys, families – you know the drill, you have to puncture through so much noise just to get through to people, so make sure you are making the same point several times in each encounter with the client. You will know you are winning when they start talking about your product or the project in the language you’ve created. Then you’ll know you have really influencing their thinking.

A note of caution. Do not overdo the messaging and don’t make if fancy or obtuse. Your client will be happy to know that you understand what’s important to them, but if you go overboard with too much repetition or dumb down the message too much, one could quite easily come off badly. Done properly, however, you will likely put your competition on defense. You see, in my little example, I never said that I had the fastest to implement product, and in fact may not. Most salespeople today come in talking about how great their products are. They have “playbooks” now, and will use standard messaging for a client in a given industry or in a give competitive situation, but all of that canned stuff will likely look very stale compared to your ‘Market of One’ messaging. When compared to your leaner and much more to the point message, well, I think you’ve got the better chance of making sense to a buyer with your focused, highly relevant and lean message. .

I hope this idea works for you. Let me know what you think in the comments section.