Ep 10 - Strategy Changes the Game

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One of the mistakes that I made as a seller and that I see a lot of other sellers making is becoming single threaded. That one relationship, that one champion, that one department.
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But that's a very fragile position to be in and it's a very fragile strategy to have inside of an account because we know, as we've talked about, sales is not a game of perfect. So broader relationships create strength for us inside of our strategy. It creates resilience to our plan.
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I'm Dennis Sorensen and this is the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. This is the podcast for sales leaders and salespeople who know they're capable of more and are looking for a system that is predictable, repeatable, scalable and forecastable for growth. It's not theories, it's not motivational speeches. It's an ambitious way to operate your business.
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Hello and welcome back to the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. I am your host, Dennis Sorensen. I am very happy to have you back now with me for episode 10.
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Today I'm going to be talking about the second pillar under the process driven sales system, and that is the pillar of strategy. When I teach the workshop, I talk about strategy as really being foundational. And it's foundational in the way that I think about it because it was the way that I was educated and taught my own process driven sales system.
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So when I think about strategy, one of the things that I consistently see in sales organizations that I work with is that sellers are very busy, they're very active, they're very responsive to their customers, they're all working really hard for the most part. The question I ask myself is if they're busy, but are they busy operating from a strategy or are they just busy simply reacting to what's in front of them? When strategy is missing, discovery is shallow, relationships are surface, level, opportunities are incremental, execution loses its direction, and sales efforts are often very reactive. Ultimately, it's a game of transactional sales. And transactional sales eventually become commodity sales. And when sales become a commodity game and price becomes the only differentiator that we have, strategy and bringing strategy to the game is how we can change that. So in the last several episodes of the podcast, we've talked about being process driven. We've talked about the process driven sales culture. We've talked about planning and preparation and practice and play. We've talked about ambition and playing for the real total potential of our accounts, not just what we can see today, but what the real potential of what those opportunities represent. And most recently in the podcast, we've talked about discovery, both the discovery we do in preparation for our ambition and our strategy, but also the discovery that we do when we're actively engaged with the customer. So that we're constantly informing the strategy and evolving the strategy that that we're executing across our sales territory and across that particular account. So in this episode, we want to turn our attention to strategy. And strategy is a critical part of the system. Ambition defines what's possible, discovery reveals the opportunity, and strategy creates the path that we will follow. Strategy asks us to answer why the customer will buy what we're selling and why the customer will invest with us in the path toward their real potential. What problem are we solving for that customer? What will they pay for? Why will the customer choose us over any existing alternative that they have available to them in the marketplace? With strategy defined, execution operationalizes that path. Without strategy, our efforts can become noise. A lot of activity, and a lot of time spent on work that is effectively a roadmap to nowhere. So what strategy actually is? One of the problems in sales is that too many people use the word strategy when they really mean activity. Back in our discussion of the four P's, we talked about the trap of living in play, living in play, chasing squirrels or small deals, incremental deals that we find as we begin to do discovery and find that initial pain, working to cobble together enough deals, small incremental deals, in order to achieve our quota. And one of the things that's important in sales is hustle. Hustle is always important. In fact, most successful sellers begin with hustle, because hustling builds confidence, hustling builds sales muscle. Hustling creates strong activity, and hustling creates opportunity. But hustle alone can only take you so far. At some point, you want to truly scale as a seller and truly scale the business that you're building. You want to grow your territory. And if you want to build a business, if you want to compete for transformational outcomes, you need a strategy. And according to the dictionary, strategy is defined as a careful plan or method or art of making or employing plans to achieve a goal. When I was preparing for this episode, one of the interesting things was that I asked AI to tell me how I would build a strategy. And the first two questions that it asked me were, what are the goals you're trying to achieve? And what is the time frame you're working with? And I thought those two questions were interesting because both of those elements, goals and time frame, are really important in what we're doing in our process driven sales System. Two key principles of the process driven system. Strategy is not CRM stages. It's not busyness or just being busy. It's not customer meetings. It's not our notes from our accounts. It's not pipeline reviews. It's not the random pursuit of activity. Strategy is choosing where we play, choosing how we will win, choosing where we will invest our time, choosing to align to our customers most strategic initiatives, prioritizing our opportunities, allocating resources that we have intentionally, most importantly our time and positioning for the long term advantage inside of our accounts. Strategy creates leverage and leverage matters because sales is not a game of perfect. If your strategy requires perfection, your strategy is not built for strength. A strategy doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be directionally correct. One of my favorite quotes from General Patton was a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. What Patton is telling us is that we not that. Not that we don't need a strategy, but that we don't need a perfect strategy. He's telling us that a good plan, a good strategy, not a perfect one, is what we need. Perfect conditions rarely exist. Adaptability matters in what we do in sales, and momentum matters. Sustained movement with a good plan overwhelms hesitation. When I was at NCR Corporation, one of the foundational things I learned was strategic account and territory planning. NCR taught me to be process driven and strategic planning was foundational to that process and how we operated. But before I was at NCR and I was doing sales, I learned how to hustle. One of the quotes that I heard once from that was attributed to President Abraham Lincoln. And I've seen other times when it's been attributed to other people. But regardless of where it was attributed to is things may come to those who wait, but only the things that are left by those who hustle. And I always took this to heart when I was in sales, before I was at NCR Corporation, when I was going to college, one of the things that I did to help support myself in college was that I sold beauty supplies door to door in the dorms on campus. I'd carry around a bag of beauty supplies with me and I'd go door to door and then I'd show those beauty supplies to the girls that were in the dorms and I would try to find ways to get them to buy what I was selling. So was I selling? Yes. Did it take effort? Yes. Did hustle matter? Yes, it did. Did I have a sales story? Yes, I did. Was it a good story? Yes. It was. Did it require a strategy? Yes, but not the level of strategy that I later learned when I got to NCR Corporation. But it did not require a detailed territory strategy and it did not require enterprise level strategy. At that stage, hustle could create transactions. But at ncr, I realized something and that was that if I wanted to move beyond selling one or two cases of NCR cash register receipt paper, I knew that I needed to move beyond incremental sales. I needed to move beyond just hustle. And that's when I learned that I needed to have a strategy.
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A strategy to grow my entire territory. A strategy to actually make my level of hustle stronger. I needed strategy and I needed to learn how to think differently about growth. I needed to think beyond individual transactions. I needed to think about my territory penetration. I needed to think about account growth and prioritization.
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I needed to think about positioning myself within my accounts. And I needed to figure out how to develop stronger and better and wider and deeper customer relationships. I needed to learn how to begin to think about and play for the longer term opportunity that existed for me at ncr. I needed a territory strategy. And this is important because strategy is not only for enterprise software sales. Strategy is not only for massive enterprise deals. One of the mistakes that I would see sellers often make is, is when they hear a conversation about strategic selling is they immediately think, well, that only applies for fill in the blank. It only applies for software sales or technology sales or large industrial sales. But that's not true.
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Strategy applies to territories, to growth, to account penetration, to expansion of those territories. It applies to prioritization and how we prioritize our opportunities and the accounts that we're going to go after. And it applies to resource allocation. And in particular, as an individual contributor, our number one resource is our time. And so where we're going to allocate our time is really important. And we should have a strategy for that. Strategy changes the scale at which you can compete. Whether you sell paper rolls or databases or commercial roofing or staffing services, industrial equipment or services, software infrastructure projects, the principles are all the same. The scale may change, the complexity may change, but the strategy always matters. Because there is a difference between making sales and strategically growing a business. And what we want to think about all the time in sales is that we want to be building a business.
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I began learning that at NCR and later at Teradata, that thinking became even more important.
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Because truly successful enterprise selling is strategic. It is building a business. It's building a business. It's not Transactional, it's not reactive, it's not short term. Enterprise sales is organizational selling. And organizational selling requires a different level of strategy. Strategic sellers think differently. One of the things that strategy changes is the way the seller thinks. And this is important because strategy is not just a document, it's not just an account plan or a territory plan.
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Strategy is really a way of thinking because transactional sellers and strategic sellers think differently. Transactional sellers think, what can I sell right now? What deal can I close? What opportunity can I react to? How can I hit quota this quarter or this year? Strategic sellers, on the other hand, they think about their long term goals. Where are the largest opportunities in their sales territory or within that particular account? What relationships matter the most? What customer initiatives matter the most? Where should I spend my time? Where can I create the greatest impact for my customer and therefore for myself in my results? How do I expand my business? How do I become indispensable as a strategic partner to this customer? How do I build my business for the long run? It's a very important mindset. And again, and it applies whether you are selling paper or services, or industrial equipment or construction services, software technology, it applies in my mind to all sales. Strategic sellers think beyond the immediate transaction. They think about growth, positioning, expansion, relationships, all the different aspects that we've talked about. One of the biggest shifts strategy creates for us is the sellers stop reacting to what's directly in front of them and instead they begin intentionally shaping where they are trying to go. That's a huge shift in the way that we think about our sales territory and about the accounts that we're working with. Because without strategy, sales becomes very reactive. We react to incoming opportunities, customer requests, pricing pressure, competitive pressure, procurement processes, and whatever problem appears first for us that particular day or that particular week.
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And eventually we find ourselves trapped in incremental sales. We find ourselves trapped living in play. Like we talked about in the the Plan, Prepare, practice, play episodes. Strategic sellers slow themselves down enough to think and to think differently. They begin asking questions about the biggest opportunities they have. Which of their accounts deserve the majority of their time? Which relationships could change the game inside of the account? What customer initiatives they should align to and they can have the greatest impact on? Where can I create transformational value for my customer? Where can I move beyond incremental to become much making like we talked about in the last episode, making big changes to big things. Where can we become transformational in the way that we impact our customers business?
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And asking ourselves what would have to be true for this Account or my entire territory to become dramatically larger. Once we begin thinking that way, our behavior changes. Our discovery changes. Types of questions that we ask change. Our prioritization changes, Our relationships inside of our customer accounts change. The level of confidence that we bring to the sales call changes, in the way that we position ourselves and the solutions that we bring changes. Ultimately, all of this leads to our outcomes changing for us as well. Strategy changes. Prospecting and discovery. One of the first places strategy begins to change our behavior as sellers is in prospecting. Without strategy, prospecting often again becomes reactive. It is often random activity, random outreach, random pursuits, random meetings, and random pipeline Generation. Us as sellers were simply asking, who can I call today? Who might take a meeting? Who might respond to my email?
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Who might have the need right now?
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But strategic prospecting is very different. Strategic prospecting is intentional. Strategic sellers begin asking different questions about which accounts matter most, which areas of the territory have the greatest opportunity, which customers align best to our strengths, which industries are changing, which organizations are growing, which companies are under the greatest pressure, which opportunities become transformational. That changes everything for us in sales because now prospecting is no longer just activity. Now prospecting becomes territory development.
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It becomes very strategic. And strategy in that process changes the level of discovery that we do and the kind of discovery that we do. Different level of selling require different levels of discovery. When I was selling beauty supplies in college, discovery was relatively simple. Do they need it? How much of it do they need? When do they need it? Why would they buy from me instead of somebody else? It was still selling. It still required that I hustle and have confidence and have a good story and be persistent and be able to communicate. But the level of discovery was relatively shallow because the opportunities themselves were small. The buying process was simple and the complexity was low. At ncr, discovery started to change for me.
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Now discovery became about, how do I grow this territory? How do I expand this account? How do I increase my penetration inside of this account to grow this account? What are the buying patterns that I'm seeing inside of this particular account or across different accounts in my territory? What is the operational scale? What other departments might be able to leverage my solutions? The volume of the opportunity changed and I began to think about the white space that we talked about in ambition inside of my strategy. Because that's where we want to maintain our white space analysis is inside of our strategic account or territory plan. We want to have that written white space plan, and we want that to be part of our strategic account or territory plan. I was no longer trying to sell a few cases of paper rolls. Now I was trying to understand how do I grow this territory? How do I go beyond selling one or two cases of paper rolls to selling hundreds of cases of paper rolls or even thousands of cases of paper rolls? How do I do this? How do I compete at a larger scale inside of these accounts and become a larger, more strategic, more valuable partner to my customer? And later on, when I was at Teradata, Discovery evolved again. Now discovery became very enterprise level, it became very organizational, it was very strategic, and it was all about being transformational and how we could have an impact. It became an intelligence gathering exercise. Now I needed to understand how the executive priorities, I needed to understand and map my customers organization high, wide and deep. I needed to think about the operational pressures that the company was under. I needed to think about the alignment of the organization and the entire end to end buying process and what the future state goals were of the organization. I needed to understand my competitors and their competitive positioning inside of my customer account and how I could begin to position myself to get them against them, and how I could position myself against potential competitive threats against my position inside of the account. It was all about transformational efforts. The biggest shift to strategy is that discovery slows down for us in enterprise sales. Transactional sellers discover one problem and immediately try to chase it. Strategic sellers are curious longer, and we continue our discovery longer until we understand all of the potential problems that we could solve for this customer, all of the pain that we can remove for them. We widen our discovery, we deepen our discovery because we understand that something is very important.
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The first problem uncovered is rarely the full opportunity. And the bigger the opportunity, the deeper the understanding required to pursue it successfully. I mentioned high, wide and deep. One of the things that strategy changes is the way that we think about the relationships that we need to have. Transactional sellers often think about relationships being very narrow, very shallow, who will sign, who can approve the deal, who can buy right now. But in strategic selling, we have to think about things differently because the larger the opportunity becomes, the more important the organizational alignment becomes to us. As sellers begin thinking strategically about territory growth. Now, sellers need relationships across departments, across locations, across operation, operational teams. They need relationships in purchasing and procurement. They need relationships inside of leadership. They need relationships in finance and in field operations, potentially in maintenance and safety, and relationships with the end users. The people are going to actually use the solution or the product that we're selling. We need to think about all of these different types of relationships because now we're no longer simply trying to make the sale. We're trying to grow our accounts, we're trying to expand the volume that we're generating from these accounts. We're trying to standardize our solutions inside of these customer accounts. We're competing for larger portions of the business. We want to become embedded inside of these companies operationally and we want to create long term relationships and partnership with these customers. The bigger the opportunity, the more important the organizational alignment becomes. In some situations, transactional. One relationship might be enough. But in strategic growth, eventually it requires operational alignment, leadership alignment, and all the different areas of the business that we talked about in across, high, wide and deep. One of the mistakes that, that I made as a seller and that, that I see a lot of other sellers make making is becoming single threaded. That one relationship, that one champion, that one department. But that's a very fragile position to be in and it's a very fragile strategy to have inside of an account because we know, as we've talked about, sales is not a game of perfect. So broader relationships create strength for us inside of our strategy. It creates resilience to our plan. It creates leverage for us inside of our opportunities. Strategic growth rarely happens through a single single relationship. It happens through organizational alignment. And when sellers become more strategic, they stop thinking about that immediate purchase or that immediate problem or that immediate transaction, and they begin thinking about things through an operational mindset, the growth initiatives of the customer. This is how we're going to scale this business. The efficiency that we can bring to the business.
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We start to think about the risk reduction that we can create for that customer and the opportunities for long term value creation. That shift changes our entire sales motion. Now discovery deepens, relationships expand, positioning changes. And one of the beautiful things about deeper discovery is that it naturally reveals where relationship expansion is needed. Discovery shows us who matters, who influences who owns the initiatives, who feels the pressure, who controls the budgets, who can create the momentum inside of the account and who can stop the momentum inside of the account. As discovery deepens, relationships naturally expand and need to expand high, wide and deep. So how does strategy actually get built? Strategy gets built through intentional choices. And it's important because strategy is not about doing more or chasing everything inside of our customer accounts. It's not about reacting faster or having more activity. Strategy is about deciding. One of the things that makes strategy real for us is when we write it down. Writing things down makes them real. When strategy stays only in our hits, and I've had a lot of sales reps to me say when I Ask, well, where's your account plan? Or where's your territory plan? Say, right up here, Dennis, it's right up here.
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And when they tell me that, I know that their plan isn't real, because their plan isn't fully formed. It's vague. It's not something that can be tested. We want to write our plans down so that we ourselves can test them. We want to be able to look at it ourselves and read it and know that it makes sense when it's not tested, when it exists only in our heads. Strategy gets influenced by whatever the pressure of the day is or the pressure of the week is. But when we write it down, we force ourselves to think clearly about it. We force ourselves to define where we are trying to go, what matters the most to us, which opportunities matter the most, why they matter, how we plan to compete, and what we intend to focus our time and energy on. Over time, writing things down creates clarity for us. It creates intentionality. It creates accountability. Top sellers write things down. They write their account plan, their territory plan. They write their goals, they write their strategies, they write their sales stories. They write their written white space and their execution plans, because writing things down again makes them real. And once they become real, they begin shaping our behavior. It's one of the reasons strategy becomes so powerful once it's formalized, because now we stop reacting as sellers and we start operating intentionally. Strategic sellers decide their focus, where not to focus. They decide which accounts matter the most, which opportunities deserve the majority of their effort and investment, and they decide on all of the other things that we've talked about, the relationships and where we can create the greatest impact and how we're going to differentiate and all of those different elements of what we've talked about in terms of enterprise selling. One of the things that my good friend Mike Weinberg teaches is that the core foundational elements of our job in sales is to identify targets, to build weapons, and then to plan and execute the attack. And I think that framework is incredibly powerful because it gives us, as sellers, the foundation and the foundation of strategy. Mike teaches the foundational disciplines required to compete effectively at sales. He he teaches sellers that how to identify the right targets, how to prospect intentionally, how to build the right messaging, how to sharpen our sales story, how to create a real pipeline and to constantly be creating pipeline, how we operate with a discipline and how we execute consistently. That foundation matters to us in sales because without that foundation, nothing else will work.
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What we teach at Horizons west and what we build is what we build on Top of Mike's foundation, we layer strategy on top of those fundamentals, we focus on scaling our opportunities. The territory growth, the strategic account and white space, the organizational selling that we need to do, the strategic positioning, we focus on building out our ambition and understanding the real potential of our accounts, the long term leverage that we can develop across our territory and inside of our accounts and, and the execution systems that we need to have in order to be able to do this and realize and build a business that is repeatable, predictable, scalable and forecastable. None of that works without the foundation being in place first.
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It's one of the reasons why I connected so strongly early on with what Mike teaches years and years ago. When I first read Mike's new Sales Simplified and then later Sales Management Simplified was, I recognized that those foundational principles were absolutely critical for me in selling paper rolls and in growing my sales territory, in building a regional business or pursuing transformational enterprise opportunities. Later, when I was at Teradata, when the scale changes and the complexity changes, the foundational disciplines still matter. It's one of the things that our strategy really helps us to do. It helps us to layer intentional growth thinking on top of the found sales disciplines that we all know at our core. Because strategic selling is not a replacement for the fundamentals. Strategic selling is what allows those fundamentals to scale. One of the things that strategy forces us to do as sellers is prioritize. Not every opportunity deserves equal effort, not every customer deserves equal investment.
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Not every deal is going to be changing the game for us.
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We understand this as strategic sellers and it's one of the hardest shifts for many sellers to make because our instinct to hustle tells us go chase everything. But strategy says focus on where you can have the greatest impact. And that's the very different mindset. And building strategy starts with understanding all of the pieces that we've talked about, where the greatest opportunity exists, where our strengths align best, all the things that we've talked about in terms of really putting together that strategy. Once we identify the right opportunities and the opportunities that we have to be transformational, then we could be a concentrating force and allocate our time, energy and resources and preparation towards the most important things that we've identified through our strategy. We become much more intentional about how we sell. And that's how strategy for us creates leverage. Because it helps us to gain the leverage that we need to be the most impactful. With the time and resources that we have available to us, we stop spreading ourselves thin across every possible opportunity. Instead begin intentionally Building toward the opportunities that can truly change the game for us. One of the beautiful things about strategy is how it creates clarity. We begin to understand the most important things that we need to focus our time on now. Our activity will have direction, it will have purpose, it will have prospecting, will have purpose. Building relationships will have purpose, and our execution has purpose. This is where strategic sellers intentionally build toward opportunity. One of the biggest things strategy can change is how our customers see us. Transactional sellers are often seen as vendors, suppliers, product reps, interchangeable resources with our potential competitors. Sales becomes a commodity game. The customer begins comparing features, functions, pricing, discounts, delivery methods, terms, and when that happens, price then becomes the only differentiator that we have. Strategic sellers want to position themselves differently. Strategic sellers stop focusing on the products, the demos, the transactions, the immediate purchases and isolated problems. Instead begin focusing on the business outcomes, the operational impact we can have, the growth initiatives of our customers and aligning ourselves to those efficiency, scalability, transformation, and the long term value creation that we can bring to that customer that changes the conversation that we can have with our customer. As I mentioned in the ambition episode, we want to make big changes to big things, not small changes to small things. And so we want to think about the things that we need to do in order for us to focus on the right strategy for the accounts to be able to take us to playing, making those big changes to big things. As strategic sellers, we want to stop sounding like vendors, we want to start sounding like partners. And that's when strategy really helps us to begin changing the game. Because once they begin to see us as strategic, valuable and trusted and aligned to what they care about, the problems that they're trying to solve, the things that matter the most to them, the entire sales motion changes.
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We can begin competing at a completely different level inside of our customer accounts. Strategy changes the level of the game that we get to play. Without strategy, we, as sellers, we spend our time and our entire sales career reacting, scrambling, chasing, fighting uphill, again, trying to cobble together enough incremental small opportunities to achieve our quota. Hustle matters. Hustle will always matter. But strategy changes scale. Strategy changes leverage. Strategy creates intentionality. Strategy creates focus.
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Ultimately, that's what strategic selling is. It's about intentional growth. It's about intentionally deciding where we focus, how we focus, where we invest our time, and how we begin to think differently about the business. Again, it doesn't matter what we're selling, doesn't matter if we sell paper rolls or painting services, or roofing services, we can still have a strategy, and we should be purposeful about developing that strategy, because those are the ways that we can begin to change the outcomes for ourselves. The industries, the products, the solutions, the things that we that we sell may be different, but the principles all remain the same. The principles that Mike taught us and the things that we're talking about today in terms of strategy all remain the same. That's when strategy can begin to change the game for us. I want to thank you very much for joining me today for this episode of the Think Big, Win Bigger podcast. Again, I'm Dennis Sorensen. Until next time, when I will have my good friend and business partner, Lee Priest joining me for a continuation of making strategy real in the field. Until then, I appreciate your time, and I say just win.
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Sa.