Communicating Customer Needs Internally

much different animal than straight up enterprise sales. And God bless the people that work those contracts and one of the challenges that those teams deal with in particular is the need and the ability to communicate back to corporate what those agencies need, their priorities, et cetera, in order to drive a great outcome in that final contract for your company, but also for the buyer. So as the seller,

you have to kind of walk this walk. It's more of a challenge in government sales because sometimes corporate doesn't get all the nuances. But I know it's a challenge for a lot of salespeople. I mean, how many of us say corporate just doesn't get it. I'm on the phone of the customer. They don't understand, right, So we're going to break that down today. We're going to talk about communicating back to corporate. And there is a foundation that you need to understand as a seller to be

able to do this well. And it starts with understanding the key things your company wants in a deal. So I want to start there, Tim, Can you talk about what that means kind of if we operationalize that.

would call those complex selling environments. Complex because of the customer's organization, Complex because of the political aspects tied to it, lots of different interests trying to be met, Complex because of the size scope challenge of the problems. Complex because of the competitive environment. So anyone that's selling into a complex environment, I think this is topic is really relevant because you're right, Rachel, it does come up all the time.

And because of that, I found there are three high level concepts that we need to probably organize our conversation today around The first one i'll call two way guidance on a great outcome, not just us hearing from the customer what they want to achieve, not just us telling the customer what our company wants to achieve, but a

two way back and forth exchange. Then the second concept, the external sale, how we manage those ideas of a great outcome for both sides into the conversation with customer. But here's the one you are I think referring to a minute ago, Rachel. The internal sale. You know, I talk to folks all the time when we do our negotiating program and say, what's more challenging the negotiation with

the customer the negotiation back inside? And I'll give all of our listeners a big moment to think what the most common answer is, and of course it's the one back inside. So I think when we talk about from a seller level adual contributor level, how do those three concepts come into play to give us guidance on what we do to be able to manage both sides of the equation we're sitting in the middle of in a complex selling environment.

we let the lawyers deal with. But I'm talking about detailed guidance, the kind of product services to sell, timing, contractual terms, everything that's included in that. Now he said it in an ideal world, because what we found is more often than not that ideal world does not exist, and so we can hope that the company will give

us that guidance. But more often than not, we find individual sellers are operating in an environment where, without saying it, they're just kind of supposed to know what a great outcome would look like, which, of course, when I work with senior leaders, I say, why are you surprised that people come back with all kinds of crazy things in your opinion? But so what do you do in the absence of guidance from your organization what a great outcome

could look like. You've got to start capturing it with the customer and then start socializing back inside that's the external internal sale that you talked about, and probably the biggest key to all that is exactly what you said, Rachel, start early. One of the biggest things that gets in the way us being able to effectively manage both sides of trying to achieve a great outcome is we wait

too late to get started externally with the customer. We drive, drive, drive, to go through maybe a technical proof of concept, We work with the project team, and it's not till we get to the end that we start finding out well, wait a minute, they're legal has some requirements. Wait a minute. Their IT team has some requirements. Wait a minute, their security team has some requirements. So we're waiting too late to capture information from the customer. Slows things down, creates

challenge same thing internally, Rachel. We wait to the end, and by the way, most of our organizations are set up to push us to the end. Don't get our legal involved until you get most of the business terms all laid out. Don't go to the product team unless you really have this kind of need. Don't go to the services team. Don't go So what ends up happening is if we wait too late to start socializing what we're hearing and what we believe is going to be required.

Guess what you get the fire drill at the end, and then you're putting yourself into the worst kind of environment. Think about it. I know the world has changed a lot, but some things have not really changed that much. I've managed worldwide sales for several organizations and almost every single one that was tied to technology. Guess when we did most of our business the last couple weeks of a quarter.

So you wait to the end to start socializing internally, the approvals you might need, the support you might need. You're trying to do all that in an environment where everybody else is trying to do the exact same thing, and resources are scarce, Attention is scarce, and it's just

the perfect storm for delays, problems, fire drills. And I hate to say it, but when we're doing all that, there's about fifty other suppliers that our customers are dealing with that are doing the exact same thing, which creates those bottlenecks on their side. So I think the more you socialize that early and start getting out in front of all this is really helpful because then it allows you to drive it's time to allow you to drive discovery that make some of those items higher in relevance

lower in relevance, must haves, nice to haves. You can start organizing that and start getting closer to determining where's that sweet spot that sits between the customer's view of a great outcome and our view of a great outcome. And that's ultimately the individual seller's job is to try and merge those two together to come up with something that is not only acceptable to both sides, but highly motivating both sides. And you can't do that as a

fire drill at the end. It's such a challenge, Right.

go back to an old friend decision criteria. I think what has up happened a lot of time we start and we do a great job in early stage discovery on the outcomes the customers trying to achieve, but we have sometimes a tendency to stop there and what we miss are what are some of the requirements or the decision criteria that they need to put in place to

help them achieve those outcomes. Given the unique organization they are, their unique workflows, tech stack, organization, regulatory issues, whatever it is, what are their decision criteria? So I'm driving early stay age discovery to say, here's where you're at and the challenges it creates on this issue you have, here's where you'd like to be and the outcomes great. We all

get that. We recommend going a step further, dig into those requirements or decision criteria and start getting my preference. I like to have a written, prioritized, and confirmed set of decision criteria that I'm starting to socialize early in a complex environment, maybe across multiple contacts on the customer side. And guess what I'm doing. I'm not waiting to the end. I'm bringing some of that back inside to my own organization. Give me some guidance on some additional decision criteria to

achieve that outcome. What are some other things we'd be looking for? So I'm working both sides, but I'm not just aimed at the outcomes, because outcomes are subject to interpretation, right, Like, how do we get there? I want to get it to customer my three magic words. Rachel have used this before, Customer,

It's time for me to give me my proposal. Let me tell you what I'm recommending, because you told me, you told me these were the twelve decision criteria you're looking at, and I'm going to demonstrate for you right now, how my proposal maps to every single one of those. When we just stop at outcomes, Rachel, it leaves the door open for our competitors to say, well, we can

achieve those outcomes in a different way. I'm going to work well upstream from that to really try and drive discovery to help the customer understand, Yeah, I get the outcome. You want to reduce costs, or I get the outcome you want to have access to data no matter where it is. Yeah, I get you want to be more

whatever it is. I understand that. But let's back it up to say, given where you're at right now, what do you have to put in place to move from where you're at the challenge to where you want to be in the good things? And I think when we do that, we're actually helping the customers, our friend John Kaplan says all the time participate in their own rescue. We're helping them map out what their requirements are so they'll be more informed buyers when they go out in

the marketplace. And the more we do that upfront, by the time we get to the end, we're not introducing something surprising to the customer. We're just saying, I'm just responding to what you told me you wanted. Now here's the little nuance to this, Rachel. Along the way, I've also been hearing from my company, what are some things we might want, multi year agreement, the ability to track impact, we want success metrics, maybe we want access to your

team that sells into the government. Whatever that definition of a great outcome would be. We are starting to infuse that into some of our conversation on what a great outcome would look like, not just for you, customer, but what we need. I ask and tell customers all the time for me is what I tell them for me to get you more of what you're looking for. You got to help me get my company what we're looking for. And there's more of those things that actually are in

common and we share than are a post. So let's work with that upstream to really start socializing. And I owe it to my customer to give them some guidance what would make a great outcome for my company that we might be able to weave into this discussion that would help me get them some things they want.

that before we got involved. I remember one an individual rep had to go out and get up to twelve individual approvals from different functional areas finance, legal services, product, this regional lead or that regional leader. It required a lot of one offs. And what would happen is it would happen at the end of the quarter, right, Rachel. So what goes on, well, I need a discount level, so I'm going to go to finance and we're going to see if we could get exception beyond the pre

approved level that I could take the discount to. The finance team says, h let me look at it, and they make a one off decision relative to the discount, and then the rep gets a and goes over to the product team. We need to do some customization on this, and they're really busy. The product team says, can't you just sell them you are off the shelf, No, we can't.

We have to have this level of integration. Well, let me see, and they give a one off approval on that for that one customer, Rachel, that had up to twelve individual one of us, they would give twelve concessions. And then when it was time to go finalize the deal, someone say, we gave twelve different things. What did we get back? I can return because it was all isolated

one off approvals and that really slows things down. And Rachel, I pity the poor fool whose customer says, yeah, eleven of these look good, but I want to change this one, and they got to go back through the whole process. Again, So the one off approval process. If that's a reality for your company, you need some help with that. But at a minimum, you likely know it's there. You got to get out in front of it. And if you don't,

then that comes to the behavior problem. It doesn't happen as much today because we've put process improvements in place, but I'll say, Rachel, back in the day, every once in a while, some reps knew that there was this problem, and in fact they found the approval process went a lot faster if I just kind of kept the company a little blind to some of these special issues that were coming up until the last couple weeks of a quarter, whenever one was so rushed, and it would be much

more likely I'd get a quick approval. Right, those days are long long gone. And so when we don't bring back the internal sale or the internal negotiation, Rachel, we actually contribute to our own challenge. We're the architects of some of our own demise. Right. We wait, we wait, and then when we go want to move fast, the internal machine isn't ready for it. So those two things

create undoe bottlenecks that really get in the way. So what do you do as an individual, I think you got to be mindful of what's the environment you're working in. On the customer side, that's your job, right, but you also have to be mindful of what you're dealing with on the internal side. Some of our listeners work in very closely held organizations where the approvals required might come down to one or two people. Great, good for you, right,

but there might be complexity on the customer side. You still have to manage others of us work in that environment, like our one customer that had twelve different functions they had to deal with to get a deal done. Yeah, got to know upfront what you're dealing with and weave that into your plan. We don't often keep in mind, Rachel, the internal selling, the internal negotiation, and we've lived to learn with the frustration why is it so hard internally?

And I frequently tell people it's because you're not planning for it upfront and you've pushed it off to the end and you kind of get what you deserve. I wish it was different for you as well, but it's not. And that's bigger than what you can control. Control what you can control and get out in front of it early.

and you've got to try and manage those. But here's a best practice I learned years ago from the number one seller in my organization at the time, and our organization in those days, Rachel looked more like the one off approval process kind of company, And he said, you know what I do, Tim, once I start getting an idea of what the customer is looking for and I kind of have an idea the things that would matter for us. I sponsor a call. I sponsor a call,

and I'll bring in someone from finance. I'll bring in someone from legal. I'll bring in someone from the product team. I'll bring in someone from the services team. I'll bring it whoever is going to be from the product team. And I actually sponsor a call. Now, it was really easy for him because he had the biggest deals in the company every single time, and so people knew, if he makes the request for this call, we should have

representation on that call. And a funny thing happened when I started practicing that and then did it in subsequent organizations. I did it one time, and the inevitably all those people I invited would say, this is a really good idea. We should do this more often. Maybe we shouldn't depend on an individual contributor like Tim to pull it together. Maybe this is the kind of thing we should have our deal desk do. So. I think getting people in

line from the beginning, starting to socialize. I'm not saying this is what I'm asking to prove on You're saying this is what I'm hearing. The customer's interests are if we can achieve those, what can I ask for back in return? Start getting that guidance early. Because here's the thing, Rachel, we aloys often forget as an individual contributor. You see

your opportunities, You've got your history of experience. You don't understand all the wild, crazy ones that people dealt with and odds are there are people in your organization that dealt with some really wild complex situations and found a

way through that. They decided not to socialize because they didn't want everybody on it, but they've dealt with it before, and getting out in front they help you understand how can I just it while I still have runway left in the opportunity to be able to stick the landing. So you know, it's get out in front, socialize across from amultiple groups, maybe sponsor. Let's all come together and create a crazy idea, Rachel. Our negotiation strategy.

typically a reason. And I'll just say from my own experience, I'm in marketing, and even when I'm bringing a contract, a vendor contract to our internal team, they'll push back on things like, well, why do they need the money upfront? We should do net thirty and at sixty whatever, And I'll say, well, they're asking for the money upfront because they have to put all the resources against it now out.

Or they'll say, let's say in the contract, we'll say we'll get twenty CROs at this dinner, and they said, well, we should actually have more than that to make the numbers work. And I'm like, well, I don't want them to just pad the room with people that don't matter, right, I want quality over quantity. And as you have those conversations, then everybody starts to see why there's the ask there

or why it's that way. So it's important, I think to have contacts and that perhaps might be some advice for reps who are trying to articulate customer needs internally is to really help others have that context so they can help you move the deal forward.

different way. Maybe we can help bring some of the resources so you don't have to invest in much as much of front, or we can come up with creative solutions. Really difficult when you're trying to finalize a deal. At the end, finalize the negotiation and you're still dealing with positions. People have a tendency to dig in and what they do is they start fighting for the win on their position.

As opposed to when we do it early, people are much more inclined to talk about the underlying interests and there might be many ways to get those interests addressed. The classic one we deal with all the time. You got to lower your price. You got to lower your price. And then we get, well, what's the underlying interest while we're trying to you know, lower our overall costs. Oh,

lower overall costs. See when it's lower your price. This is only know two things I could do, say yes or say no. But if your interest is to lower cost, we've got a lot of things we can do on our side. Consolidate your spending a one vendor, be able to take advantage of the efficiencies of our new AI tools that allow you to have less people on your side. So hey, guess what, I actually might raise my price, but if I can shift the conversation to lowering your costs,

I might lower your cost ten percent. That's just the example of the difference between positions and interest. And let me tell you back to my main point here, Rachel. That is really hard to do at the end when you're trying to finalize an agreement, people can't get off the position. You socialize it early. It helps them understand yeah, actually there's a lot we might be able to do to help lower our costs. Thanks for bringing that up.

And now we start to look like that trusted advisor as opposed to someone that's just trying to get the deal done right.