Are Your Sales a Bake Off, a Trade Off or Do You Lift Off?

Over the years, I've probably seen hundreds, if not thousands of commercial deals. It applies to any competitive bid, where you're up against two, three and five competitors and you're duking it out to win that contract.

I see really three types of campaign when I view these and bundle them all together. That would be:

• the bake off
• the trade off and
• the lift off.

Now, the Bake off is like a competition for selling pies. The best pie wins.

So the sales team who are in the Bake Off, they believe so much in their product or service that they know that if all they do is to present the attributes and the capabilities of their service, that the buyer will automatically realize it's the best mousetrap and the one to buy.

With this belief system, in the bakeoff, that you have the best product attributes, the best service attributes, leads to some complacency. And I don't mean that they don't work hard on the bid, but they become complacent about certain aspects of the bid and they fail to differentiate themselves across other dimensions.

If you've listened to some of the earlier podcasts, I advocate that people tend to buy three things in this order of priority.

• First: they buy from people that they not trust and like.
• Second: They buy from companies they know trust and like.
• And lastly, they buy the product or service that they know trust and like.

So in the Bake Off, when we're leading with our product, we're neglecting those other two avenues that will help us differentiate in that process.

What is the trade off? I see this frequently happening where right at the very end of the sales campaign, the salesperson will say, hey, can I have last look on this deal? And they get to see the other players. Sometimes they'll get some insight on the other sales players prices. Or the buyer might say you're probably 10 to 15% too high. If you could come down 15, 16%, you could probably win this deal.

And so they will trade off their margin for a lower price in order to win that bid.

They're very transactionally focused. They're interested in closing that particular deal and a lot of their energy goes in right at the very end of the deal at the 11th hour.

Now, contrast that to the rainmakers. The rainmakers deals, they just lift off from the get go, they clear that launch pad and they're up in the stratosphere before you know it. The lift off salespeople tend to win the bulk of their deals maybe four out of five, whereas the others might be winning one or two out of five.

Certainly the tradeoff practitioners may win one or two out of five, but at much, much lower margins.

The liftoff salespeople always get much higher margins. And the most distinctive attribute of the lift off campaign is that that campaign starts incredibly early, well before anybody else.

Well before the bake off people have arrayed their cakes on the stand and way before the dealer, the wheeler dealer in the trade off campaign is thinking about how we can finagle the price to the lowest level.

That lift off salesperson has been in there shaping, helping the buyer think about the opportunity even before it goes public.

So you can now begin to understand, and I'm going to go through a number of elements that would differentiate these three types of campaign so that you can see where you are and how you might improve your overall process.

But just thinking about the nature of their bidding type activity, the lift off salesperson, the tipping point for the sale, happens very early on. They win the deal in discovery before the bid goes public, sometimes when the prospect might be saying, hey, can you help me put together some numbers? Can you help me put together a budget for this program?

The trade off salesman says, I'm not going to do that. That's a lot of work. I'll wait until the bid is born, then I know it's real and then I'll put some effort into it.

But the liftoff salesman plays the long game. He plays the relationship game. He's focused on value, but he gets in very, very early.

So I'd say that the tipping point for the liftoff sale campaign is predawn before it even gets light.

Now, once daylight starts to come into play, the bake off guy, he's awake, she's awake. She knows what the land looks like, she knows her product is really, really good and she starts arraying her cake on the table and talking about those attributes and presenting it. And all throughout the campaign, she will present the features, very happy to answer questions, very happy to present the features and talk about that product.

So the tipping point for the bake off sale is that bake off tends to have the same kind of cadence all the way through because there are questions and features and presentations and attributes being talked about all throughout the sale. There's no high pressure, there's no particular point at which it flips. It just happens over time. And the diligent, careful coordinator does that well and will often win a lot of the deals with that level of professionalism and that level of presentation and counting on the features and attributes of her offering.

Now, the trade off salesperson, where's the tipping point on that sale? Where do you think?

They come in when their hobnob boots at the 11th hour saying, come on, let me have a sniff. Let me have a look at what the other people give me some clues and I can come in and I can undercut that price and I can give you the lowest price. So I call them the 11th hour. That's when their sale tips in their favor or out of the favor.

The liftoff guy gets up before everybody else. Predawn, pre sunlight. The bake off people are active during the day for a long period of time and the trade off guy shows up at the last minute at the 11th hour trying to win the deal.

Have a little think about which one of those you are and I'm going to help you double your conversion rate.

Many of you sizzlers will be driving in your car and not able to take notes. But don't worry, everything is at sellthesizzle.net  Notes are all there, so you'll be able to get them.

And I'm going to now take you through those three sales offers, those three sales campaigns, the bake off, the trade off, and the lift off, and give you some attributes of those so that you can distinguish them and you can start to see which type of behavior do I exhibit on most of my sales.

The first thing I'm going to talk about is the engagement style, the sales engagement style.

In the bake off, as I've said, it's very passive. I'm presenting my materials, I'm presenting my attributes. It's pretty steady all the way through. I'm not really doing any deep probing or penetration. I believe so much in my mousetrap that I don't need to do that. All I need to do is to present my wares very passively.

Now, the trade off engagement style is very reactive, right? Because they're not setting their stall out based on their values and based on, you know, what they know they're reacting. They're reacting to what the competition is doing and they're saying, what's the price? I can beat it. Instead of setting their own price, setting their own value based on what that is, and if they can't beat the price, then they'll start taking elements out of their bid and swapping things in and out. They're very reactive people.

But the liftoff salesperson, very proactive, calls the prospect before the bid even goes out.  He picks the key people that he wants to sell to.

As you're setting up your year, who are the five or six general contractors that you want to work with? Who are the key people in that enterprise that you want to build relationships with?

That's the lift off salesperson. He's thinking about those people and then he's calling them when they don't have a project. He's calling them to get to know them, to get to know about their careers and their families. He's building those relationship channels, building an emotional connection and offering to help, offering to build budgets, offering to do idea sharing or problem solving.

Highly, highly proactive kind of relationship.

The next attribute of the sales officer would be when is the tipping point?

And we talked about this earlier, the bake off tipping point, it goes all the way through and the sale is pretty steady all the way through. So I say it happens during the daytime.

The tipping point for the trade off guy is the 11th hour.

And the tipping point for the liftoff salesperson is predawn. They win the deal before anybody else even gets to see it. It's really quite startling and it must be quite depressing.

I was with one salesperson and they were bidding on a particular job and put a lot of effort in trying to win it. And I was talking to another salesperson in another company who was bidding against them and they said we always get this work. We designed it, we're going to get it, and we're going to get it at high margin.

Obviously, the prospect has to put out a competitive bid. They have to solicit three bids, but we know we're going to get it. And because they've got the inside track, they've got the relationship, they've put in the equity ahead of time and there'll be many of those bids if you don't have the inside track.

My old boss, Gerry Burke, I must tell some Jerry Burke stories on the podcast.!He told me, look, Mick, if you don't have the inside track on the deal, you can be sure that somebody else does.

So if you're the bake off or the trade off person, there's been a lift off person in there who's been speaking into the ear of the decision maker. You might not have even met the decision maker. We'll have a podcast on that too. So just think a little bit about that.

The key attributes on which these campaigns are based, the bake off person, the key attributes are very standardized. It's a standard mousetrap. It's a very good mousetrap, but it has standard elements. It's very particular.

Now, the trade off person, I would use a term, their offer is bastardized. In other words, they're willing to swap out one element of that bid for a cheaper product or a cheaper substrate or a cheaper mechanism to get it done in order to win the deal. So they don't have a standard product. They'll mix and match and put things together in order to win the bid.

Now, the liftoff salesperson, they're trying to understand the particular risks, the particular needs, the needs of the ultimate owner, and they're crafting a very, very personalized response. It attends to emotional needs as well as physical needs and technical needs. And they spend a lot of time with the decision maker and the team understanding what those needs are and crafting those into their bid.

Now, how do we perceive the seller? If you're the salesperson in the Bake Off, you see it as a very professional vendor, right? You're portraying, you're presenting, you're telling us about the features, you're telling us about the attributes. It feels as though you're a professional supplier.

When you work with a trade off person who's the wheeler dealer, used car salesperson, they feel like a trader, a street trader, feel almost a little unclean. And we'll deal with those kinds of people if we get a really, really good price. But it's just not a very pleasant experience, is it?

And then the lift off seller is seen as an advisor, a strategic advisor. And when they've got problems or when they come to an impasse or they want some ideas, they call the advisor. What do you think about this? What would your best suggestion be? What material do you think would best serve this need? How do you think that we should put these elements together and manage risk? And because they have that advisory role, they get invited to the inner circle of the buying team more frequently and build those intimate relationships.

Now, what is the method of supply of the product or service?

The bake off, right? I've got a mousetrap. It's off the shelf, right? Here it is. Got it in red, got it in blue. I've got it in this length. I've got it in that length. I have it, it's available, it's off the shelf, it's standardized.

Whereas the trade off guy, his stuff is off the cuff. I went around the warehouse and I found a couple of barrels of this particular glue to glue these elements together. I can get you a deal on that. It's not standardized. Right? It's bastardized. We'll put anything together, we'll hodgepodge the deal. It's off the cuff.

So you got off the shelf, off the cuff, but the liftoff guy, man is off the charts because it's very personalized, it's a lot of attention has been put to it.

We've drawn strategic sourcing in order to put together this complex and complete bid that nobody else can match.

What's the nature of the sales deal?

Well with the bake off, right? It's very, very it's tangible. It's tangible attributes. I can touch them, I can read about them, I can see them. It's very, very tangible.

The trade off guy is what I would call fungible. Fungible means that you can substitute something for something else. It doesn't matter whether you pick this one or that one, they both serve the same use. And because the trade off guy has bundled stuff together, put all cheap materials together in order to get a low price, anybody else can substitute. There's nothing unique about their offering and they haven't built relationships, they can't differentiate on their quality of people or the quality of their organization because they swoop in at the end and throw these bids together and focus at the last minute.

So tangible with the bake off, fungible with the trade off. But the lift off is memorable. That's the nature of it feels memorable. Everything it's revealed, these moments of genius are revealed over a duration and they remember the salesperson, they remember everything about that deal and it has much more connection with them.

What are the factors of demand?

What creates the demand in the bake off? The product attributes they sell or they don't sell.

In the trade off, I'm competing and the factor of demand is price. I'm competing on price. The bake off is competing on attributes. The trade off trader is focusing on price.

The lift off guy is focusing on value. Value can only be perceived in the eye of the buyer. So you've got to get inside the buyer's head, you've got to probe, you've got to be, you've got to be proactive to try to understand what's important to them, what this deal can do for them personally, for their company, how it mitigates risk, how you work with them.

If you understand all of those things, you can talk about the value, which is much, much higher than the price of a product. So compete on value.

In summary, you really want to be trying to be the lift off salesperson, you don't want to be the trade off person.

I was reviewing somebody's pipeline a little while ago and they had 300 deals in the pipeline and the average gestation period of these deals was about nine months on average. Some were 18 months, some were six months, some were three months. So 300 deals in the pipeline.

That person's win rate was less than 5%.

What was happening was he was putting in lots of bids in the front end and then doing nothing. I would ask him what is happening on this bid?  He’d say -They'll let us know if we win or they'll let us know and give us last look.

So he would occasionally at the end get the opportunity to put in a lower price. He had no other mechanism for winning the deal, which explained the fact:

1. that he didn't win very many and
2. when he did win them, they were at such a lousy margin that they couldn't make money on it.

And I could not for the life of me, convince him to call up people early in the sales process and start build those relationships in order to turn it into more of a bake off and then ultimately into a lift off.

But the bake off people are good. There's no doubt about it, right? They present their products well. They present very professionally, but they're presenters. They're not selling.

Selling is all about understanding the customer's needs and getting an emotional connection to the lift off sales. That's where you want to be talking. You want to be identifying your targets ahead of time. You want to be building relationships with those key decisions makers. If they ask you to help put together some numbers and a budget, you jump all over that.

You're starting to win those deals even before they've actually got out onto the official public domain or the bid board.

Yes, you're still going to have to compete, but you've shaped it. You've got the inside track, and your price might be 20% more than somebody else's. You can still get that deal. It's highly personalized. You're seen as an advisor and, and your customer feels like they've gone to Disneyland.

With the bake off person, the customer feels okay. I feel like a client. I feel as though they're being responsive. They take care of me.

The trader, I just feel as though I'm just a user. I'm not important to them.

But the lift off, they treat, they think of their customers as guests. They want to create this tremendous experience that permeates not only the product, the delivery of the product, the aftercare, but the whole process feels more intimate, more personalized. It's an experience to be enjoyed. It's memorable, and it's focused on value.

I would urge you to identify your key targets, build those relationships, probe for their needs, and then be very, very proactive.

Always, always. Before you submit the bid, call the prospect up and ask them about the bid.

Tell them that you're preparing the bid when you've created the bid, ask for a bid review.

Ask that you personally can come and talk them through it. Right? You put all that effort into it, cost a lot of money to the takeoffs, the estimates, et cetera, the risk management, internally, everything present that bring your team members. Show the breadth of your team. Set your stall early.

Please do that now if you want to double your bids.

Lastly, I've distilled the essence of the rainmakers, the lift off people, and I put it into a book called

The Ultimate Formula to Winning Work with General Contractors.

A lot of the things I've talked about today and more are in this book. Go get it on Amazon or@sellthessizzle.net.

Please, if you enjoyed the show, go to Apple podcasts and leave us a review. Five stars would be perfect if you think I earned them! Let us know. Put some comments in there. That would be fantastic.

See you next week.