The Importance of Giving to Receive for Business

What is Serving?

European research at DrKW was topped ranked in the US. The sales team were great account managers and took me, as Head of Bank Research, to every corner of the country. They struggled to sell though, leaving the business overstaffed and in time it was sold.

A similar situation confronted OTAS Technologies. We had people who were brilliant at showing the product but needed a sales professional to close deals. The lessons from DrKW did not go unheeded.

Showing product and answering queries is part of serving clients. But a sales team must do more. It must ask questions to uncover pain and position a solution. Serving is about readying a client for the selling cycle.

The Selling Cycle

The sales process involves marketing, selling to and servicing clients. It covers all client facing activity and staff. It should constantly be improved.

Selling starts with qualified leads and ends with transactions. It is also in three stages, which are serve, sell and close. These must be performed in order for every client. That is how to build scalable systems for your business.

Serving and selling take roughly equal amounts of time. Closing depends on readiness to buy. Around 20% of buyers are happy to move to payment. The rest have varying degrees of questions and objections.

How long you spend serving depends on the product. The more expensive, the more time is required. It takes longer to establish the required trust and credibility for bigger tickets. There are also more people involved and each requires a personal approach.

Starting Over

Go to market involves identifying client pain. This means an issue that must be fixed and is more than just a problem. Thereafter, companies position a unique solution to the pain. Identifying pain and relevant positioning are required for each persona in the process. They have different motivations depending on their personality and role.

A common mistake sales teams make is to start a meeting as if the go to market just finished. In reality, days or weeks may have passed between arranging and holding a meeting. It is imperative to start over, reminding clients of the pain and positioning the solution.

People are curious. That makes them potential rather than current buyers. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science discovered that only 5% of buyers are ready to buy. The remainder form a pipeline.

A key role in sales is to identify who is ready to buy now. Focus on these people and keep the rest warm.

Injecting Urgency

Serving is helping people uncover the significance of problems and the opportunities to solve them. There are common reasons why buyers do not feel the need to act now:

1. They do not know a solution is available

2. They underestimate a competitive threat

3. They do not appreciate the value of a solution

Serving is the process by which sales people uncover the depth of issues and guide buyers to the immediate pain that it is worthwhile fixing. Revealing the value of a solution is demonstrating its return on investment.

What are some of the ways to serve?

How to Serve

Another common sales mistake is to sell before serving. For example, demonstrating a product before understanding client pain, let alone if the product addresses it. Take the time to ask questions that encourage clients to describe pain. This process is what prepares them to buy.

Give parts of a product for free. This may be a sample, or software via a website or trial. Do not make it hard to access. The reward is that buyers imagine the product working for them and become hot leads.

Businesses fear revealing trade secrets. But if no one knows who you are, no one knows to copy you. You must give to receive or remain forever anonymous.

Never rush to close. Without serving and selling you don’t do deals. If they are not ready, serve them with industry knowledge to keep you front of mind. Reciprocity bias is the tendency to return a favour to those who help us.

Happy Endings

There was no happy ending for DrKW but there was for the high quality people who worked there. One lesson I took from finance is that if you have clients you will always have a job.

There was a far happier ending for OTAS Technologies. The business was sold to a firm that in turn was bought. The evolved version of the software serves clients to this day.

I’m Simon Maughan and I write The Profit Elevator as a guide for B2B firms seeking faster growth. Implementing The Selling Cycle is included in the Seize the Opportunity element of The P.R.O.F.I.T. Through Process Planner. For more details reply to this message.

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