Be an Instigator, Team Player or Catalyst, but beware the Change Agent
Choosing wisely will bring you success and prevent terrible suffering.
How can you get someone to move when they don’t want to? What do complex sales need to succeed? How can you provide a key element needed at the right time? And how can you ensure you and your career are never consumed by a deal?
Instigator
She shook her finger at me, saying sternly, “You started this, didn’t you, you instigator.” It wasn’t a question. It was a charge, an accusation, really, that I heard countless times growing up. Usually used as an attempted shaming insult as in “You instigated - you started something that shook up the otherwise peaceful status quo.” Over time, I came to learn that instigation was one of the most valuable tactics imaginable. Someone has to start things, after all. Identify a pivot point, a fulcrum of balance, or some other key element that is blocking movement. This is where the status quo finds its peace. Now, give it a good, hard, strategic kick. In sales, instigation is an incredibly valuable approach. Instigation was one of my favorite tools in selling on my own.
Examples of this include
Often people who purchase products for companies aren’t even aware when a competing product is being used widely. Identifying, quantifying, and outing the hidden or secret use of your company’s product to decision makers shows that what they purchased from your competitor isn’t being used enough to warrant remaining exclusive. Now they should also provide your solution!
Providing a key decision maker with information that demonstrates that they can’t get where they desperately want to go by the status quo. Then showing them how your solution is the most compelling way to do so.
Influence a customer’s evaluation criteria by broadening or shifting focus to criteria that favor your product - and tilt the competitive playing field.
Team Player
Often, you’re on your own to make everything happen in your deal or role with your own two hands. Well, your hands, your computer and your phone. Not in this deal. This deal was big, complicated and a tough nut. I was working an organization with a very well entrenched competitor. Multi-year contracts were in place. There were lots of people with lots of love for the competitor. Our goal was to open the account up to get them to take a fresh look at us. After tons of research, (well, OK, maybe a couple of hours) I learned who we needed and how we needed them to play.
Our company’s CEO had a contact on the prospect’s board. He leveraged that to set up a meeting discuss their organization’s goals and share some stories how we’d helped others to accomplish those.
Our CIO knew their CIO. They met to compare notes on technology stacks and in the course of that, discussed our work and how it benefits companies with similar situations.
My Sales Engineer was an expert in a core technology used by the chief evaluator. We arranged for them to have a meeting where this resonance came up.
Together, we got the prospect to consider us, through a concerted effort that spanned months. I was a team player assembling and leading the effort, play by play. There were many steps to identify decision maker, influencers, people who would be roadblocks and to find a champion. We couldn’t have cracked this one open without a team.
Teams can
Deliver an entry point where you don’t have one yourself
Move past a blockage by having well placed team members at various levels in your client organization
Provide you with incredible intel - the client will tell a buddy or someone they relate to an amazing amount of information
Help you to identify key drivers of sales you would otherwise miss
Your job is to do the research and look for the right team members. Then you’ll prepare those team members with background and a specific “ask” so they know what they are there to do.
Not every organization is friendly toward using teams. Some companies feel that the salesperson should do everything herself all the time. But even in those organizations, you can often assemble teams if you approach people with finesse, don’t do it too frequently, and make the “ask” something bite-sized.
Got a complex deal that’s worth a lot? Consider using a team.
Catalyst
Do you have the ability to share a vision that excites clients? Are you super creative and can find ways to use the energy and creativity you have to suggest dynamic, new approaches to solving client problems? You may be catalyst.
Catalyst:
a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change
a person or thing that precipitates change
-New Oxford American Dictionary
Your car probably has a Catalytic Converter in it, a clever device that converts noxious pollutants into much less noxious exhaust. The cool thing about the catalyst, is it doesn’t wear out after one use. You can use them over and over.
When you possess a complete mastery of your solution set and have a creative mind, you can be a catalyst for your clients. And like the converter in your car, this is a process you can easily use over and over for your entire career without “using it up.” Cool, right?
My newest assignment was a miserable bear. Several other reps had turned it down as it looked like a “no win” situation. Look how awful this was. Our client had just paid a lot of money to go down a solution path that resulted in a broken system. What they had bought had caused them endless grief: the solution didn’t quite work right, and it was super expensive to run. Worst of all, it had been designed and installed by my company. I was brought in to try to save this ship before it took on so much water that it sank.
Working with the client, we first did a comprehensive review. Looking at all the elements, there were some really big things wrong with what we had deployed. Big blocks had to be moved, yet the client’s belief in us had been nearly shattered. We proposed a staged replacement solution that would rebuild their confidence - by providing opportunities for showing success at each stage. The client would sign off on each stage, giving them control of whether and when we moved forward. It preserved most of the expensive elements of their previous solution, to save political face, but provided a dramatically reconfigured architecture that would be simpler and much more reliable.
Oh, and it cost a lot.
The client grudgingly went along. Then we started succeeding. Each success made the client happier, until at the end, they were thrilled.
Putting this together, required a deep knowledge of the solution set and client situation. This should not be your first rodeo. The client needs to be able to smell that you know your business.
Catalysts
Use creativity and solution mastery to combine solution elements to transform client experiences
Use domain and product expertise to establish and build client confidence
Are unafraid to propose comprehensive and often dramatic solutions
Agent of Change
We’ve all seen those Mentos/Diet Coke videos. Some guy drops Mentos mints into a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke and it creates an enormous gusher. But what happened to the Mentos? They are gone. Transformed. The Mentos is an Agent of Change. Agents of Change are often consumed or destroyed by doing their job. Do you want to be an Agent of Change?
Sometimes an organization wants a person to take on a role that is completely expendable. You won’t be told that it’s an expendable situation but often you can figure it out. Their best case is that combining you with the client will create a reaction that will improve the company’s situation. Your professional (and sometimes even personal) survival is optional. But often the company is desperate when they bring in an Agent of Change and they will be happily willing to risk you and your career.
The company gave me an assignment: win some extremely high risk new business by leading a team to identify requirements, build out working model demonstrations, assemble and present the proposals to beat out a major competitor. We were “running off” against a competitor. The customer would decide at the end of six months which of us won.
I was in my 20’s, unmarried, and ambitious. “I’m in.” I said. And at that particular time in my life, it was an incredible opportunity. We designed and assembled solution elements together in novel ways, designing and proving out concepts that we felt would show competitive advantage. And we worked just about every hour of every day for a full six months to accomplish this.
I was the Mentos jumping into the Diet Coke.
We won. It was an incredible boost to my career. But it consumed and transformed me.
I was sick for weeks afterward because I was so run down. And the resulting contracting and delivery process after the announcement that we were selected was so consuming, it lasted for years and I had no time for serious relationships or any meaningful social life.
I was an agent of change, jumping into to the Diet Coke to see if I could create the desired reaction. This is quite unlike a Catalyst, which remains intact, unchanged. An Agent of Change is consumed, transformed. You come out different at the end. You can’t do that too many times in your life and walk away in a good shape.
Would I do that again at that particular point in my life? Yes. Would I ever choose to be an Agent of Change, at this point - now?
No.
How do you know if an opportunity will require you to be an Agent of Change?
Criteria:
Will it burn you down if it fails? Unsuccessful Agents of Change are often discarded.
Will it burn you down if it succeeds? Sometimes winning is so hard it burns you down. Or you have to stay with the deal after you win to make sure everything works. That can cost you your future.
Does it require you to consume yourself to make it succeed? Will pursuing this role cost you a life that you could have had that would be more desirable?
As you look at opportunities and roles, consider how you will be able to operate. Choose carefully whether to Instigate, Team Play, or Catalyze based upon the opportunities in front of you.
Instigator can be pulled off as an individual and you can really stand out, get noticed. By shifting balance and disrupting other people’s status quo, you’ll often take a lot of heat, but the change in equilibrium produces great results in many cases.
Team Playing will be required in most Enterprise or other large scale opportunities. It also is super helpful if you’re offering a new service to a new market (where there will be a lot of skepticism) or trying to crack deeply entrenched competitors (where there are multiple resistance points in an account.)
Catalyst will be a play for you if you have solution and domain mastery and possess a bunch of creativity. You’ll differentiate by taking a full, broad look at everything in place, all the inputs, possible elements and combinations and masterfully offering your client novel solutions that deliver value the likes of which they’ve never seen.
But if you’re presented with an Agent of Change situation, consider carefully whether you are up for something that will transform you — and may consume you. There are times in our lives when these make sense and then you should grab them. But there are other times in your life when they can be very harmful to your career or well being.
Choose wisely!