October 2020

Anyone around here know WHY we won that account? 

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A few years ago, a seller named Beth ran up to me and exclaimed with an exceptional amount of glee, “I just broke Unilever…I just broke Unilever!!”  This was a big moment as Beth had been chasing Unilever for many months and had worked very hard to win the business.  Of course, high fives and some sales dancing broke out in a scene that you have experienced numerous times.
 
Unfortunately, the dancing stopped a bit prematurely because I, the “always-teaching-can’t-turn-it-off-manager” killed the buzz by asking Beth, “so...why are they buying us?”  (Apparently I was a bit too early with that question.)
 
In last month's post, I spoke about a convo I had with Marc Benioff about changing his SalesForce.com’s ‘Closed-Lost’ term to ‘Closed-LEARNED’ because the term needs to map successful selling actions to our everyday language.  Discussing and strategizing over a lost piece of business is mandatory for every highly performing B2B sales org.  
 
But why should that rationale only work when you lose a piece of business?
 
After many, many months of training sellers to think about - and report - why they lost an opportunity, I turned the tables and started asking them why they won a certain piece of business.  When I started this practice, my question was met with incredulous looks that all implied the same thing, “…what does it matter, we WON”? 
 
It matters a lot.  It matters for all the reasons you know about: I want to know where the hot button is with each customer ‘cuz I want to keep hitting it!  That’s why my new buddy Marc Benioff and I agreed that ‘Closed-Won’ should NOW be referred to as ‘Closed-WonWhy’.  It should sound just like the one-word cliché that comes too freely from the mouths of some of our junior sellers, I’m talking about ‘WAIT-WHAT’.  Try it: ‘ClosedWonWhy’.  It's only one more syllable and flows just as nicely.
 
Most superstar managers and sellers – like you – understand the need to get to the WHY behind ‘ClosedWonWhy’.  Buyers buy for reasons that we can never predict, and often the deciding issue is much smaller than we think.  But whatever the buying motivation is, it’s important to the buyers and that means it’s important for us sellers to find it. 
 
The hard part, of course, is getting the insights and information from the buyers…and for that, you need to call me! But for now, try 'ClosedWonWhy' and see how far that gets ya.
 
Happy Belated Halloween….I hope tomorrow’s election day isn’t scary for you. 

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