A Brief Recap on Selling By Research (SBR)

Hi Friends,

It's me again. Your friendly neighborhood sales-specialist (but currently unemployed) hobbit. (Seems that people just do not like specialists, huh?)

Jokes apart, now let's get down to serious business.

I think that it will be prudent, to indicate in a nutshell here, what we have discussed about Selling By Research (SBR) in the last three posts. This is because I confess that after going over the subject posts, I found that there is something missing.. something akin to a common thread running through these three posts thereby linking them and by virtue of which the reader an see or feel the writer’s vision and feelings.
 This has not been the case here. 

I am sincere in what I write and I don't think that without the recap, these posts will do little justice to all those hours of working by the midnight oil.  My apologies to you too for wasting your time to some extent and I do hope that you will give me another chance to make amends. The recap is as follows:

(1)SBR is only applicable in the field of selling of capital, engineering equipment which are of high value. SBR is  practical only when the value of the item or service being sold exceeds 30 Lacs in INR. This at the present rate is about 0.6 million USD. SBR should never be used in selling priocesses for low value items or services or FMCG. And, the value criteria mentioned above is the unit value. BULK value should never be considered when to justify using SBR.

(2)SBR cases always have less competition but the competition is global and world class. It is true that sometimes, smaller companies do grab the limelight but theirs is a dicey life. They can go extinct at any moment.

(3)All the players in a SBR application have open strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the person with the sales lead first has a much better chance of getting the order. That is why sales leads matter so much.

(4)In SBR, the most important input is information. You need to have all the information with you if you want to clinch a deal. If you are thinking that this information is required for blackmail of any type, you have totally misunderstood me. This information is about the solution you are offereing and the customer’s history of accepting different kinds of solutions.

SBR is 100% ethical folks..you help the customer..you DO NOT CHEAT HIM or HER.

(5)To practice SBR, you need trust on your people and your boss needs to have trust on you. I have seen allegedly foreign-returned-top-honchos-whose only ability is acting berating people for not going on tours. I pity people like this as they totally fail to know what touring is all about in this high value market. I also pity the management of such companies.

(6)Cold calls have no place in SBR sales. Think about it..Will you give a order wore more then half a million dollars to someone on a cold call. I won’t and the chances are that you won’t either. And in today’s times when it is possible to have a confidential report on whether a person has a criminal record in the US by a mere click in an hour or two, lack of information of a customer and his company is unexcuseable. Yes, dead ends will be reached every now and then but you have to circumvent them.

(7)Finally please remember that SBR is only for selling in India and in South East Asia and maybe in the Middle East. In the west, I will not venture to comment as I know nothing about the markets and general sales behavioural trends there.

We will now wnd SBR here and next time we will take up strategy, unless anything comes up in between. We will explore sales & marketing and we will try to ante up social skills. Till then its bye from

The one-and-only

Bilbo

Selling By Research (SBR) : THE FATE OF THE COLD CALL

Hi Friends,


This blog post has been republished on popular demand. Have a great day.
Regards
Bilbo

The day is very near when the “Cold Call’ will become extinct. Yes! ---I mentioned exactly what you heard.

Before all of you come onto me for ‘blasphemy’, I would like to clarify that I am only talking about High Value Capital Equipment selling and this is not generalized to include all types of selling. But why should cold calling be extinct in capital selling.
The answer is simple. Because of the internet and globalization.


Tell me one thing. Suppose you are the customer and you have allotted one hour of your precious time to Mr.X who is from a company manufacturing water-line valves. Say, you carry out turn-key projects involving water distribution and you need some competition among your vendors. But what does Mr X do? He asks you what you do, he asks you about your projects, tells you that they manufacture valves and asks you whether you have any requirement. You conclude that this gentleman is on a cold call..What you do next depends upon the selling capabilities of Mr. X and I'll leave you people to think of a way vide which Mr. X can  be penalized because of his audacity.
Now consider this. You receive a phone call from a reputed valve manufacturer who knows about your company etc. He tells you that he has learnt about your bagging a multi million dollar contract (you are impressed) and that he, Mr Y, would like to give a presentation on his valves..how they save you energy, etc)
I don't need to be a magician to tell you that the next order will be bagged by whom.


Now, let's bring you onto a secret. Mr Y received some news that the project has been allotted to your company. He then finds all about you, your requirement. He is a make approved by the consultant. He wants to come and tell you all about why his valves should be purchased. Mr Y has done his research and therefore wins.Mr Y shows the customer what's in it for him or where the customer will win, unlike Mr.X.


This is all the more true in recent times because technically almost all brands are equal. Their prices differ because of quality. Unfortunately, quality is not a tangible parameter. Whether you get the order today depends still more on your research therefore.


This , ladies and gentleman, is the art of SBR at the basic level. No more cold calls in this segment will succeed. If you recognize this and accept it, you will save valuable time.


Recently, a slogan called "Never cold call again" has become popular, but I think it was me who first said those words, in capital equipment and heavy machinery selling'. Anyway, whoever was the first, the fact remains that cold calling is a dying art and as soon as SE Asia leaves it, the better.

Selling By Research: (SBR) and the six serving men.

I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

…from “The Elephant Child”; Rudyard Kipling

This is a verse that remains popular to everyone till date. Kipling’s six serving men even to this day aid us a great deal in our quest for misplaced idealism and unworthy perfection. But now, enough of chit-chat and we go back to the class and continue interaction with Sales By Research (SBR)

First, let us consider the first three. What, Why and When.. What we are about to discuss here is the new or rather ‘mixture of common sense and old thinking in a rubber stopper sealed bottle’ and giving it an almighty shake’ which has been termed by yours truly as ‘Selling by Research’.

This is not a magic potion aka ‘Geriatrix’...it is just application of the principles and habits of us homosapiens which the majority of us tend to do and therefore have been classified as normal.Let us imagine a person Mr.No’all who really knows everything about the planet. Due to his encyclopedic knowledge if you ask Mr. No’all anything about Earth, he can tell you everything about it. But when you ask about the moon. If you want to restore Mr. No’all, draw a link between the moon and earth...and on & on he goes again. Similarly, what I have done here is to make a link between already known and proved concepts and SBR

Here I want to remind all of you that the sales I am talking about here is capital engineering high value equipment, not other products/or services. I have no reason to believe that  SBR will not work except that I have not tried it out practically. Logical thinking appears to suggest it will work but the impotency of logic in different situations has been so well documented that I have the greatest qualms in saying ‘YES’. Indeed, it is better to say NO and be happily proven wrong,  then to say YES and embarrassingly proved to be wrong.

All having been satisfactorily defined, we now return to Kipling’s last serving man ..who is …HOW

“How” was a person of infinite patience, which

Was a perfect avatar as suited his immense size;

And had there been a contest of "one track minds"

"How" would have undoubtedly won the prize.

SBR can be defined as the act of breaking up of a sales process-which appears impossible or not feasible into small pieces thereby altering one’s view and perspective and then going on subdividing till each is solvable. Research is required  to do this subdividing. The individual sub divisions are then solved and the results combined in the same order. This continues till you arrive at the original ‘apparently impossible’ question , this time with the answer at your other hand. The research is done and information collected and compiled. When you get this information, you get power because “information is power” and with this power-you use it to get over the apparently impossible sales task.

In my next post , we will talk about How in a more detailed manner. If anyone is interested in the entire poem of Kipling, the following link will lead you to it http://bit.ly/xcJ80O

That’s all for now, friends!!!

Until the next post, it’s now
Hasta Manana

From Bilbo