Part One

How to Sell Without Selling

If you run a business you spend a healthy proportion of your time thinking about where your next customer will come from. If you are a sales person or sales manager you work hard to fill your pipeline or stuff the sales funnel with prospects. Given the time you invest in building a sales pipeline you might be surprised that almost everything you have learnt about sales is wrong.

Traditional sales techniques would have us believe that the funnels and pipeline timelines on the white board pointing to the downstream events of prospecting to closure as law of nature akin to gravity. The funnel has come to represent the salespersons life. Cast your net wide and then slowly percolate your prospects, leads and referrals through the distillation process until they come out the other end as fully fledged customers. This could not be further from the truth.

Just because all design firms have the potential to be great does not mean they actually make the transition from mediocre to great. Sales people are no different to companies. The reasons why sales people don’t become great are surprisingly similar to why companies wallow in obscurity or fumble with strategies for success. They lack the patience to embrace a single strategy and remain focused until they achieve the momentum required for the strategy to become self-perpetuating.

We have discovered a process and strategy that will work for almost any design company to create an endless stream of new business. The catch is that the strategy requires patience as well as the ability to continually tweak the tactics to improve the overall process. We call this strategy The Lens.

Let’s start by explaining what The Lens is not. The Lens is not a new pipeline management scheme. It is not a tool for sales managers to focus their sales teams. It is not a set of rules that magically transform your sales people into superstars. It is not some sexy set of software tools and documents that can be exchanged for real thinking and effort. It is not a quick fix. The Lens requires patience and focus.

Defining The Lens

The Lens is exactly what it sounds like. It is something that will focus all your sales and, even marketing, efforts into a single unifying idea that will cut through the clutter like a laser. The metaphoric use of a lens is to describe how all your sales energy can be narrowed down so that it is easy to understand and implemented. The most successful organizations are not those chasing multiple customer audiences. They focus on only one audience. They whittle down the distractions so that the definition of the customer can be drawn through the eye of a needle.

Creating The Lens

Creating your lens starts with analyzing who your ideal clients already are. If you are a new company and you don’t have any existing clients to reference then start with a profile of the ideal client and prepare yourself to modify it once you have a few data points. As you create the lens you will be looking to answer the following questions:

• Is our ideal customer new to the market or are they an established business? For example, do you prefer working with new or established companies? Are redesigns your thing, or do you prefer to work on projects from scratch?
• Who is the person that would be making the decisions? Is the founder or CEO the person you would prefer to deal with? Maybe you enjoy working with big brands and dealing with line managers and mid-level decision makers?
• How much experience do they have? Are you more comfortable working with clients that don’t have any experience with design projects or is the ideal client an old hat at the design game?
• What communication style are you looking for? Are you a quiet, introvert and like working with others who respect that or do you prefer fast-talking extroverts?
• Do you know what economic drivers keep you profitable? Do you communicate to your clients what your payment terms are and seek clients who immediately respect these terms?

Here is an example of an actual lens in use by our design firm Fresh Tilled Soil:

• The client must have worked with another service firm successfully
• Repeat clients are worth much more than a new one
• Experience working with outsourcing firm
• Know what they don’t know
• Meet your financial criteria for a good project and a down payment
• Pay on time (starting with deposit)
• Communication style mimics your own (i.e. online and fast)
• Sales process moves quickly, not an endless back and forth on scope
• Sign docs on time
• Comes from a referral from a known person
• Strength of ops team (sports car on the dirt syndrome)
• They value your time
• Your deliverables are not tied to people that you can’t control
• They agree to your methodologies/philosophies., if you have strong opinions about things, get those out early in the relationship as litmus test