Selling Disruptive Technology - Is there a better way to sell?

Selling Disruptive Technology

I would like to thank John (I hope life is great in San Diego) for asking me to write a few lines on provocative-based selling…

There is nothing new about the debate on sales methodology and what’s right for your company, however, there has been an uptake in the belief that disruptive technology start-ups need to adopt Challenger Sales methodology.

Even though I have sold disruptive techno most of my life and used the Challenger Sales with great effectiveness, I still love the “solution-selling” methodology and its principles can be very useful at the back end of the sales process.

In fact, I am a great believer that you can even be more successful when picking appropriate bits from different methodologies and applying them at the right stage of your sales process.

Provocative at the front-end of the sales process

Under the conventional solution-selling method that has prevailed since the 1980s, salespeople are trained to align a solution with an acknowledged customer needs and demonstrate why it is better than the competitions. 

When selling disruptive technology, customers might not know they have a need for your solution and, therefore, the vendor has nothing to align it with.

Introducing the “Challenger Sales” methodology; the vendor identified a process that is critical for its customers, develop a compelling point of view on how it is broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor is offering.

Once you have identified a high-impact issue, one of the most difficult aspect of this methodology is to develop a provocation stance to help your customers recognize the issue.

In my experience, not many salespeople are capable of doing it on their own, therefore the marketing, sales and development teams must work together to put a strong business case behind our provocative stance.

Once we have the provocation stance, the proof for it and the solution to fix the issue – then we can present it to the right ears.  Start by convincing your customer’s internal sponsor, agree on the business case figures and move up the ladder.

Consultative at the back-end of the sales process

Now that you have displaced the traditional players, the “solution selling” principles can be useful at this stage.

Once you create the business case with your sponsor, educate the relevant stakeholders of the benefits, savings and ROI, then you enter the closing stage where your negotiations skills will be put to the test.

If you want to sharpen your negotiations skills – have a look at the books written by Roger Dawson.

https://www.rdawson.com/

Conclusion

Should every sales call your company pays from now on be a provocative one? 

Probably not, unless you are a start-up focused on one offering and one target market. 

Provocation-based sales cycles—though much quicker than solution sales cycles—are resource-intensive, so only a few can be run in parallel;

In fact, in my experience, provocative-based sales work very well when you follow an account-based selling strategy.

What??? (John added) An account-based selling strategy? What is this?

Well… I guess, John, this will be the subject of my next blog post.