The Art of Selling without Selling - Brentus Esotericus

Brent Peters  October 23 2009 08:19:19 AM

Today's philosophical dedication is one of my other favorites. Sun Tzu, based on the "The Art of War":
    ▪        Chapter 3:  For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
    ▪            Variant translations
    ▪            Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
    ▪            The best victory is when the opponent surrenders of its own accord before there are any actual hostilities... It is best to win without fighting.


What? I know bare with me.
There comes a phrase similar to this in martial arts, called "The Art of Fighting without Fighting.". Something that I learned, with slight differences in approach, in studying Wing Chun Kung Fu, a style created by a Woman in Southern China.

So when I have been called to visit many customers, In US, Europe, and in Asia. I am told that the economy is bad, and no customers will pay the price to upgrade software. Well, I have made several visits to customers, and here to say that after leaving, I am told there is a very high upgrade/deployment success rate in migrating the customers up. How is this?

My statement to many IBM Sales people and Business Partners, I am not always with IBM Sales, is that customers are interested in saving money. In perfect timing, Notes and Domino 8.5.1, and previously releases before 8.5.1, all introduced cost savings. So the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), has been on a reduction from 6.5.X (compression), to 7.X, 8.x (Template compression (design and data)), 8.5 (Disk savings DAOS, CPU (server consolidation), Admin (id management, domino configuration tuning, ...).

So when I walk in and start talking, customers are resistant to BUYING anything. Their CFO's, finance people, are all telling them to stop spending, and to cut cost. Question is, can you talk with customers about getting on a path to reducing their IT cost? So I usually get on a path of saying I am here, or the sales person saying we are bringing in someone to talk about "Best Practices".


In this case, "The art of selling without selling".

Some of the customers that I met with in china and europe. I was told there was "no way to sell those customers on upgrading.".

I had good success on my visits to customers in even at end of 2008 and in 2009. I think had good success with customers that I met with because I say, I would like to understand your infrastructure, configuration, topology, ... basically best practices of how you are using our software.


IBM Sales / Development "Brent"
"Dear Mr. Customer (), we want to come and visit you on our "Development Best Practices", we know that you don't want to upgrade. .... we have a development guy, or Tech Sales Person with us."

Customer
"Sure, I would love to figure out a way to consider saving on my IT budgets.".

IBM "Brent"
"So Mr Customer, I noticed that you are hurting financial, the newpapers said you have asked your employees to take one paid day per week off in order to save money...."

Customer ()
"Yes, that's true".

IBM "Brent"
"So, I take it that if we could help you with some "Best Practices" on deployments, ... that could put you on course to saving money, ... then you would be willing to listen, ..."

Customer ()
"Absolutely.".

IBM "Brent"  / "Presentation begins"
"You know you are on 6.5.5, we have template compression that can be done. Performance improvements. NSF reliability, DAOS, ID Vault, Modernize your apps for web, .... and all of this can
"Save money on deployments, HW (server consolidation, disk), people resources, admin, quality improvements, less down time, less network bandwidth, .... "
"On top of all of those savings, we have "PROTECTOR", which will do x,y,z for your spam/virus, ..."

Customer ()
"Firstly, you mean your Notes client, runs on the Mac?"

IBM "Brent"
"Yes, and the best part, I bet you have 75% of your company probably doesn't even use MS Office products, but you are paying for them anyway, this is Symphony on Mac.".

Customer ()
"Yes, this all sounds good, so how do we implement this?

IBM  "Brent"
"Well, we do need to do an upgrade, but by upgrading look at what you save, ....."

Customer ()  EXACT QUOTE turning to the sales team.
"Why did you guys not come out here before, ...? Of course we would like to do this.".


Now, granted there is a cost in license upgrade, and in deployment, but the faster you do this, the faster you can save money. The faster you can save the customer money, the faster that they could use a PORTION of that savings to potentially by new products.


My example here is this. When we have done all of the FVT automation in Notes and Domino, the savings that we have achieved allowed us to by new hardware, new license of other test software (vmware, ...), but we can now test more, and test more quickly. These customers could do the same, and go to finance and say, if we can save X amount of dollars (euros, rmb, yen, ...) then we would like to take a portion of that savings and purchase licenses, ... is that a good deal? The customer may save $1M, and say to finance, we would like to take $500K of that and purchase x,y,z.

Now with Project Liberate, this is HUGE savings for customers. Do you know about project liberate? Saving money on MS Office licenses that paying the maintenance is very very costly?

So "The Art of selling without selling". This could be the way that you could help customers migrate to the features of the new platform that you need, xpages, ... AND, help the customers free some budget, especially from Project Liberate, so that the customer can afford to by your BP/ISV software solutions, or services that they also need.  Help the customer find a way to purchase your Lotus based solution.

Be creative, find ways like this to help your customers purchase.
"The secret to creativity is, knowing how to hide your sources."  Albert Einstein
B.E.

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