all applicable across the broadest possible set of customers. In other words,
you need scale. Commercial Teaching is definitely
not
something you just
want to leave in the hands of individual reps.
Commercial Teaching also requires you to think very differently about
customer segmentation. While traditional segmentation schemes like
geography,
product silo, or industry vertical may be sufficient for sales rep
deployment, the companies that do best at this approach have learned to
also segment customers by need or behavior. If you can find a group of
customers with similar needs—irrespective of where they are or what they
sell—those customers will likely all react in a similar fashion to a common
set of insights. For example, we have seen Commercial Teaching work very
effectively around a common need to free up cash,
or reduce employee
churn, or improve workplace safety. In each of these cases, the suppliers in
question helped customers think about that need in new and surprising ways
by reframing their thinking, convincingly laying out the fully loaded costs
of inaction, and then providing a credible course of action that naturally led
back to the supplier’s unique solution. And each did it across large groups
of customers who under any traditional segmentation
strategy would have
appeared, superficially at least, to have nothing in common. The common
denominator for insight, in other words, isn’t geography, or size, or
industry. It’s a common set of needs.
We’ve done a great deal of work in our Marketing & Communications
practice across the last three years helping members develop and implement
various needs-based segmentation techniques,
based on a number of best
practices developed at some of the world’s leading B2B companies. The
one thing every company that’s gone down this path has discovered is this:
Needs analysis is not something you can afford to leave in the hands of your
individual reps. If your reps’ primary goal going into a sales call is to
“discover” the customer’s needs, you’ve lost the battle before you’ve even
begun to fight, because, frankly, your customers don’t want to have that
conversation.
Alternatively, Commercial Teaching equips reps to teach customers
what they really need by challenging the way they think about their
business altogether, providing them with new means to address their
toughest problems in ways they would have never identified on their own.
Granted, there are some important conditions that
must be met in order for
this approach to work. Commercial Teaching must lead to your unique
strengths, challenge customers’ assumptions, catalyze action, and scale
across customers. But when these conditions are met, it works—
phenomenally well, in fact. And the reason why, as we saw, is because more
than anything else customers are looking to
suppliers to challenge their
thinking and teach them something they don’t know.
That said, once you’ve laid the groundwork for effective Commercial
Teaching, your reps still have to go out and actually
talk
to customers. If
they don’t have the skills to challenge, even the most powerful insights will
fall on deaf ears. So what does a “teaching conversation” actually sound
like? Is it really all that different? Absolutely. It’s not just that Challengers
teach that sets them apart, it’s the
way
that they teach that really matters
most. World-class
teaching conversations, it turns out, follow a very
specific choreography, one that takes a traditional sales conversation and
completely stands it on its head. Let’s look at that next.