Technology companies are under pressure to accelerate growth and improve margins. However, the enterprise accounts these vendors sell into are increasingly viewing their offerings as commodities.
Example
One might assume that large outsourcing contracts that are multiyear, multimillion dollar deals are highly customized and tailored to each individual customer. This just isn’t the case. According to META Group (who has now been acquired by Gartner) in 2004 40% of outsourcing buyers could not differentiate the proposals between vendors. Not on price, product, solution, approach, vision, etc. This lack of differentiation is growing and expected by some to reach 60% by the beginning of 2007. Without clear differentiation, these firms went with the provider they liked the best. Surprising that some of the biggest ticket deals in our whole industry, where the vendors can invest over $1M for each pursuit, are won or lost by how the buyers were engaged isn’t it?
If this is the situation for transactions towards to top of the investment food chain, what does the situation look like with: equipment purchases, software negotiations, service procurements, managed service agreements, or system integration projects?
Most enterprise technology vendors are feeling these pressures and in a response to the colliding tectonic plates of accelerating growth, improving margins, and increased commoditization one of the strategic imperatives companies are embarking on is to retool their sales organization.
What is a C-Rate Consultant?
A C-rate consultant is typically the by product of a poorly executed transition from a product selling culture to a consultative one. He or she is a sales person who is unable to effectively synthesize business information about a targeted account which is relevant to a particular topic, in context of a given executive’s perspective, and articulate specifically how their company can help that executive address those stated problems.
Because they are unable to achieve these outcomes, a C-rate consultant takes up more of an executive’s valuable time and offers no more insight than their product centric peers. As a result, each c-rate consultant creates conflict with every executive they encounter. A sales force populated by C-rate consultants contributes to some major problems such as: rising costs of sales, wasted marketing resources, slower than expected traction of corporate strategy, and stagnate organic growth.
Where can I get more information on the C-Rate consultant?
This issue of a hybrid product centric and consultative sales person is extremely large and one we will be covering in more detail over the next several weeks. Some of the key questions we will be answering include:
Better understanding the problem
- Can you help me understand what a c-rate consultant is?
- What does “effectively synthesize business information” mean and can you give me examples?
- What does a “particular topic” mean, and why is it important?
- What does “in context of a given executives perspective” mean and what exactly is a “perspective” any way?
- How is “articulate specifically how their company can help that executive address those stated problems” any different than our corporate presentation, capabilities presentation, proposal, or approach?
- How exactly does a c-rate consultant cause damage with our accounts?
- It seems like this is all about the skills of our sales force, why is this a marketing issue? (Software CEO article)
- 80% of our sales come from 20% of our reps anyway, why is should I focus on this?
- How does the C-rate consultant put us at a competitive disadvantage?
- Why are our investments we are making in improving the sales force not producing the impact we expect?
- Who is our competition for mindshare of our targeted executives? (Link to a blog entry related to this topic)
How to fix the problem
- What exactly does “trusted advisor status” mean anyway and do our sales people really need to “trusted advisors” to sell our products?
- How many “trusted advisors” can a given executive really have anyway?
- Why are we losing to “no decision” and what can we do to fix it?
- What does the “perfect conversation” between sellers and executives look like so we have some criteria to build to it?
- This is an information intensive process, how do we collect and organize all of the data and processes it into value-added insight for our sales people to have better conversations with our customer?
- What is the role of messaging and marketing in all of this and how can this group add value to the process?
- When do “conversations” become relationships and how do we make sure our sales people can deliver on the expectations to maintain
- How do we model the best practices the 20% of our sales team so that more of the 80% can produce more revenue?
- Doing all of the work to be account and executive focused is too time consuming, detailed, and challenging. How do we do all of these things in a more scalable way?
- How do we more rapidly improve our performance, we are running out of time?
If you would like to speak with us about any of these topics before we get around to writing about it, please feel free to contact me directly. (scott.santucci@blueprintmarketing.com)
