Traits of Top Salespeople

"Top salespeople are optimistic: they have a positive outlook, no matter the situation."

Author: Sean O'Shaughnessey
Welcome To The Power Matrix

Welcome To The Power Matrix

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As you meet people and develop a sales opportunity within your prospect, you need a tool to help you make sure you develop relationships with the correct people with the appropriate power and influence to help you.

The Power Matrix is a great tool to understand the organization. I promise you, if you can successfully fill out the Power Matrix in every account, you will be phenomenally successful.

There are two different versions of the Power Matrix. The Small Power Matrix is for deals that are relatively small. I advise salespeople that the cutoff for a smaller deal is one that is less than approximately 5-10% of your annual quota. This should be varied depending on the product that you sell and your industry in general, but it is unreasonable to use the Large Power Matrix (see below) more than 20 times in a fiscal year – it is just too much work for deals that are smaller than at least 5% of your annual quota.

The Small Power Matrix encourages you to map out nine different people at your prospect. These nine people are in three levels of the organization and three different departments. Graphically, the Small Power Matrix looks like Figure A.

Figure A – Small Power Matrix.

The people in this matrix are people who are in the Decision Group that you can learn about in other posts on this site or in my book Eliminate Your Competition (see below for info). They may not be all of the people, but they will be the most influential. If you think that your Decision Group is smaller than nine people, then I encourage you to do more investigation. There are very few decisions made by organizations that have fewer than nine people that are affected by the decision and therefore do not have an influence on that decision.

It is important to understand that the Power Matrix is not an organizational chart. Rather, it is an influence chart. These are the nine people most likely to influence the decision. Therefore, the end-user in Department 3 doesn’t have to specifically report to the coach’s level of Department 3. Rather, the end-user should respect the opinion of the coach and vice versa.

Similarly, the upper management of Department 3 may not necessarily have the Department Coach as a direct report. However, the upper management person must respect the opinion of the Coach in the Department.

The easiest way to understand the three levels is that people on the same horizontal row have virtually the same organizational power. One person may be a Director, and the other column may contain a Vice President, but that may not be a reflection of power. Often, titles are a reflection of employment tenure and not true power in the organization. It is not unusual for a very bright Director to have as much influence in an organization as a Vice President. This can be especially true between different Departments that may have larger or smaller communities. Don’t let titles sway your analysis; rather, observe the reactions and respect of others to make sure you have the correct person.

I like to put my primary Coach’s name in the center of the chart in the Department 2 column. The Department that the Coach belongs to will be the part of the organization that will most benefit from the final decision. Therefore the upper management person directly above the Coach should be your best possible Champion.

It is possible that your primary Coach is not in the department that will most benefit from the decision. If that is the case, you must consider that you need another Coach. A Coach is most effective when there is a direct personal gain from the decision. Since you can have multiple Coaches in any individual selling campaign, you should consider finding another Coach who is in the department with the most to gain.

In fact, everyone at the Coach level of the Power Matrix should be considered a Coach. One of the goals of the Power Matrix is to try to force you to develop three Coaches. The primary Coach will be the one who has the most to gain, but you should find and develop Coaches in other departments. You can never have enough Coaches to help you win your deal.

The Power Matrix is not an organizational chart, it is an influence chart

Large Power Matrix

The Large Power Matrix is very similar to the Small Power Matrix. The Large Power Matrix is used for sales opportunities that are forecasted to be more than 10% of your annual quota. In other words, these are decisions that, if guided correctly, could significantly enhance your earnings. With a reasonable win rate, it is doubtful that you would have to do more than 10 of the Large Power Matrix analyses in any given year.

The Small Power Matrix is a 3×3 matrix. It is asking you to have in-depth conversations with three people in three different departments. The Large Power Matrix is more of an investment in time; it is asking you to identify five people in five different departments. It is a 5×5 matrix and is shown in Figure B.

Figure B – Large Power Matrix

Similar to the Small Power Matrix, the Coach with the most to gain should go in the center of the Power Matrix. I encourage you to put Departments that have less to gain on the outside (columns 1 and 5) and those with more to gain next to the middle column.

In the Large Power Matrix, it is even more likely that it will not line up with an organizational chart. It is not uncommon to have several Vice Presidents and several Directors in any given department. The virtual influence on this one decision may be larger with one Director than another even though both are at the same organizational level. The more powerful person would be higher on the Power Matrix. Also, other Departments may not be devoting as many people to the effort, and therefore the rankings on any given column are different.

Below the Coach level are the end-users. In a larger decision, some end users will be more affected than others. Also, one end user may be asked to be involved in all aspects of the decision, but another will only be asked to occasionally help. The occasional user would be listed on the lowest row of the Power Matrix while the more active user would be listed closer to the Coach.

You should begin to use the Power Matrix to keep track of whom you know and how well you know them. You will need to put a plan together to meet and understand the people who are openings in your Power Matrix.

If you are confused about how to use the Large or Small Power Matrix, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via my contact form.

You can also get more information about the use of the Power Matrix by reading my book, Eliminate Your Competition. You may purchase my book, Eliminate Your Competition, from your favorite book retailer. The ebook version is available at the most popular retailers such as Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. The paperback version is also widely available at such retailers as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million.

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Marketing And Sales Is Like Football

Marketing And Sales Is Like Football

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In a complex B2B sale, the salesperson’s job is to enhance and personalize the marketing message for the buyer. The salesperson is supposed to deliver the information from the company to the decision-maker in a way that effectively shows the product and company in the best light for that particular prospect. 

The easiest way to show this is via a vector diagram. While I understand that vector mathematics may be scary for some readers, they are not that difficult to comprehend.

Figure A: Marketing message for commodity products.

As we can see in Figures A and B, the goal is to convince the prospect that the company’s product is the best product for this purchase. Marketing has to deliver content to all prospects, so it cannot perfectly align the message to the specific goals of the individual prospect. Also, since Marketing has no knowledge of which competitors are in play in that particular situation, they cannot efficiently deliver traps in most cases. Therefore, we see that the messaging from Marketing is not the shortest distance from your company to the finish line of winning the decision by the prospect.

In Figure A, the product sold is a commodity-type product. In this case, the marketing message is entirely adequate to convince the prospect to buy the product. Even though the message is not perfectly aligned to the prospect’s specific needs, the product’s benefits are sufficiently understood to get across the line.

In Figure B this is not the case. In Figure B, the message is still not perfectly aligned to the prospect’s needs, and it is not adequate to make a decision. It may not be enough information, and it also may not be the correct type of information. Therefore, a salesperson needs to fill in the information to cover the gap.

Figure B: Marketing and sales message for non-commodity products.

This information gap is why it is so important for salespeople to exist. They need to take the information that is created by the marketing department and efficiently deliver it to the prospect. Great salespeople need to package information so that the prospect can make the desired decision. 

It is impossible for the marketing department to create a targeted value pitch to every prospect. The more efficient the salesperson is in packaging this information to control the buying process, the more products that the salesperson will sell and the higher his or her commission.

The above analysis is not to give the marketing department a break in delivering fantastic content. It should be the goal of all marketing departments to provide content that can be easily repackaged and tuned to the needs of the trap-setting salesperson. The marketing department needs to acknowledge that they are unable to convince the majority of the prospects to make a favorable decision and understand that if they work with imaginative salespeople, sales will come more frequently.

Let me try to explain this with some sports metaphors. In American football, the quarterback and team don’t go straight down the field. They do a series of plays going left and right but always trying for a net forward position. Some plays will be a run to the left, a pass to the right, or a run up the middle. 

Football is very analogous to a sales campaign. The amount sideways that the player travels doesn’t matter. It is only the forward progress that matters. The goal of the football team is to advance the ball to cross the end line, and it doesn’t matter if that is through the middle of the field or in either corner.

Your goal is the same as the football team. You are responsible for getting the ball into the end zone or, more accurately, for closing the order. In football, the offensive team has the goal of moving the ball down the field to the touchdown. They have this goal if they receive the ball on their 49-yard line. They also have this goal if they receive the ball on their 2-yard line. The goal doesn’t change based on the position of the ball on the field. It also doesn’t change for you based on the quality or source of the lead.

By accepting that you cannot use the excuse of a bad marketing department in your success or lack thereof, you will become more successful. Your job is to take the leads that you receive and make them orders. Your job is to take the content that you receive from the marketing department and make it understandable and persuasive to your prospect. The ultimate failure is yours, not your marketing department. It is your job on the line. It is your commission on the line. You must take what marketing has prepared and use it to be successful.

It is not the fault of your marketing department if your literature and website are not perfect matches for your prospects. You need to bridge the gap between the standard marketing message and the fine-tuned and tailored message that will resonate with your prospect.

Take the ball and get it down the field to score. That is what you are paid to do. The great quarterbacks of the NFL do not complain that they always get the ball on their own 15-yard line. They put a plan together and do everything in their power and the power of their team to score a touchdown. You need to do the same. You need to do the same thing because there is no crying in sales.

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Curiosity May Not Kill The Cat, But It Definitely Kills Your Quota

Curiosity May Not Kill The Cat, But It Definitely Kills Your Quota

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Salespeople are often told to “pitch” their products and services. This is ineffective because it leaves the prospect feeling like they were manipulated and ignored. Instead, the successful salesperson should use curiosity; curiosity is an emotion that encourages people to find out more about you or your company. 

If you want to increase your success rate at closing deals with prospects, try incorporating curiosity into your conversation by asking open-ended questions.

Podcaster Robert Gillette recently interviewed me for his podcast, Reclaiming Sales. In that podcast (which you can listen to here and read the transcript here), I said that salespeople fail because they are not curious.

Some sales trainers will encourage salespeople to be incredibly knowledgeable about a prospect’s business to show situational awareness. In almost all cases, this is a bad strategy. Why would you know more about how that company runs than the managers of the company do? To suggest that you are more capable of running your prospect’s company than they are leaves you open to appearing overly pompous. It is much better to be humble and ask sincere questions about their operations.

“You make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie

For decades, marketers have known that the best way to keep someone’s attention is by piquing their curiosity. If they’re interested in what you’ve got, they’ll stick around and interact with your message. It seems like such a simple idea, but it’s one of the most powerful tools in marketing today.

The same principle of generating curiosity applies to salespeople, too: if prospects are curious about what we can offer them, they will be more likely to invest time working with us on their request or inquiry than not engaging at all. For this technique to work, though, there has to be something worth being curious about–something that captures people’s imagination.

Recent research suggests that salespeople who are curious about their prospects and customers are more likely to close deals than those who only focus on what they need from them. Curiosity helps us get our prospect’s perspectives to understand better how they think and why they act as they do, which allows us to connect with them on an emotional level and make them want to buy from us.

Salespeople have a unique ability to create curiosity. They can do this by asking insightful, thought-provoking questions that pique the interest of their prospects and customers. To maximize their success in creating curiosity, salespeople must be knowledgeable about what they are selling and how it can benefit the customer or prospect. A salesperson creates curiosity when there is an air of mystery with an underlying promise of satisfaction for those who invest time learning more about the product or service.

The best salespeople create curiosity and capture the attention of their prospects. They do this by creating a dialogue about themselves, their company, or the product they’re selling. You accomplish this through storytelling, humor, and empathy. These are the three legs of your offering that I often discuss on this site.

There are a few ways to use your presentation skills to engage with your audience and generate curiosity. Here are some examples:

  • Quote someone famous, like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, who has said something about their business
  • Give them a story from just last week or last month where they helped someone solve a problem they were having
  • Ask, “What are your biggest business challenges?”
  • Ask, “How do you measure success in your organization?”
  • Ask, “How did you justify that old purchase to your executives?”
  • Ask, “What’s essential in life for you?”
  • Ask, “How do you feel when this happens?”
  • Ask, “How does that work?”
  • Ask, “How did you decide to do it that way?”

In addition, by asking prospects about their company’s goals, salespeople can better understand how they work and what tools they need to succeed.

If you’re a salesperson, it’s essential to know the business problems your customers are facing. That way, you can make sure that what you offer will be relevant and valuable to them. It also helps if you have some ideas for solutions. At least have a list of questions about what they’re looking to accomplish and their company and personal goals. The more information you have about their needs, the better you’ll identify potential solutions and put together a tailored proposal specifically for them. So next time someone asks, “What do I need?” remember these three key points:

  1. Ask why they need it;
  2. Figure out how this will help solve their problem;
  3. Make sure it fits with other items on their agenda.
Using LinkedIn To Drive Relationships

Using LinkedIn To Drive Relationships

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Much has been written about how to find prospects on LinkedIn. There are good LinkedIn prospecting strategies and bad strategies out there in the wide open Internet, but in this article, I want to discuss how to cultivate great relationships with someone that you have identified as being a prospect for your product.

You should probably focus on the top five to ten companies you want to increase your relationship with. If you haven’t already built your A, B, and C account list, I suggest you start there. If you don’t know how to build that list, I suggest you read my book Eliminate Your Competition.

If you do not know someone at one of your top 10 accounts, that is not a reason to skip them. You must build that relationship.

You will create these relationships by leveraging:

  • Your best clients.
  • Your former employers and former co-workers.
  • People that your prospect respects.

The best way to make a connection to your unknown prospects is via the social platform LinkedIn. The site is arguably the most important social platform for business and especially for salespeople. According to HubSpot, 65% of B2B companies report that they have acquired a customer through LinkedIn.

According to Jim Keenan, the social sales specialist in the “The Impact of Social Media on Sales Quota and Corporate Revenue” report, 78.6% of salespeople using social media to sell outperformed those who weren’t using social media. Also, social media users were 23% more successful at exceeding their quota by at least 10% than their non-social media peers. In a recent study, non-social media users were 90% or less of their quota 15% more often than social media users.

LinkedIn is often identified as the place to go to look for your next job. Certainly, it is used extensively by recruitment consultants the world over to find and approach candidates. But to look at it this way is to do the network a significant disservice.

LinkedIn is a great way for you to build your personal brand. As I have explained elsewhere, customers buy from you based on three criteria – your product, your company, and you. LinkedIn is an excellent way to build that third component of your value portfolio.

It would help if you were using LinkedIn as a source of new leads and tangible revenue. In fact, for business to business (B2B), LinkedIn is a critical tool that can make your prospecting faster, smoother, and, ultimately, more profitable.

Contacts are the power of LinkedIn. If your contacts are predominantly family, friends, and old school pals, you’ve got some work to do. Your first-level contacts open up a route to a full range of second and third-level connections. This is how you scale your network. Strike while the iron’s hot – whenever you meet anyone (online or off), always follow up quickly with a connection request while you are still fresh in his or her mind.

It would be best if you used LinkedIn to map out the decision-makers within your target prospects. In a complex sale, there are numerous people involved in making and influencing a purchase.

When you meet an individual, you can learn a great deal about that person. Many people are quite open on their LinkedIn profiles. You can frequently discover which team they’re on, which office they work out of, and what projects they’re focusing on. With a little detective work, you can quickly build up a picture of who you should be talking to, what they’re like, and what they’ve done before. Make sure you read the recommendations that they have written and written about them, as this gives you an idea of who influences them.

With LinkedIn, you can almost always learn enough about someone to make your call more relevant and useful to them. And it’s not simply a case of digital stalking.

You should pay particular attention to changes in profile, status updates, connections in common, and anything they’ve posted to a group (which can be reason enough to call them in the first place).

One of the easiest ways to become known to a prospect is to like or comment on anything that the prospect has posted. This won’t propel the prospect to reach out to you, but at least you will not be a stranger. After a couple of appropriate comments, the prospect will likely be much more interested in having a conversation with you.

Commenting on your prospect’s activity is also important within the forums or groups. You should join the groups that your top prospects frequent. When you are viewing your prospect within the group, you can follow their activity. Following a prospect allows you to have their updates and conversations in your LinkedIn feed.

If you are not connected to the prospect, then use InMail to make that first introduction. InMail is LinkedIn’s internal email system and allows you to send an email to any LinkedIn user. It ensures your email gets through to their inbox. LinkedIn claims that an InMail is 30 times more likely to get a response than a cold call. You can also ask to link to them. However, you should be very careful that you don’t abuse this privilege. Too many LinkedIn connection requests that are denied will make the manager of LinkedIn suspicious that you are using their platform as a spam tool.

LinkedIn has a fabulous search function. With their advanced search, you can find people by title, company, location, or keyword. By intelligently mixing the different filters, you can get deep and identify key individuals quickly and easily.

You can also save your search criteria and get a weekly report listing anyone new who matches the criteria. For example, you could save a search for Database Administrators in the retail industry within 50 miles of Atlanta. Then, each week, you will get an email with anyone new who matches the search criteria.

Information is king. This statement is particularly the case when it is account news. With information, you can make appropriate decisions. As any salesperson will know, change creates opportunity. People join, people leave, companies make important announcements – any change can present a good reason to get in touch and offer to help. More than that, information on your prospect allows you to:

  • Respond to the events affecting your customers and prospects.
  • Have background talking material during your sales calls.
  • Find opportunities.
  • Establish financial justification for your opportunities.

There is a lot of information to gather about your accounts. You need a quick and convenient way to review the highlights of your account news so that it doesn’t overwhelm you. LinkedIn makes discovering these changes easy. You can follow any company that has a LinkedIn page. That way, you’ll see anything that changes directly in your updates. It’s an easy way to stay up to date and spot new opportunities.

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Top Sales People Want To Work On The Best Teams

Top Sales People Want To Work On The Best Teams

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I recently met with one of my clients to discuss the company’s sales team. They had ten salespeople on their team.

Five of the salespeople had brought in about 40-45% of the company’s revenue, and two others also brought in about 40-45% of his revenue. A bigger problem, though, was the remaining three that only brought in 10-15%. Those three were dragging down the team.

The biggest problem that the President was starting to realize was that the top two performers were becoming disgruntled and would probably leave the company. As I did my initial interviews with these two, they confided in me they had become frustrated that every time the company needed more revenue, the challenge was given to them to bring it in the door.

To keep their spirits up, I told them that these challenges were an honor. Like in basketball, you have your best players on the floor when the score is tied, with a minute left in the 4th quarter. One of them replied, “But if the 7th man would have made his four free throws, two layups, and grabbed those two defensive rebounds in the 3rd quarter, the score wouldn’t be tied at the end.”

Great people want to be surrounded by great people. Top athletes want to play on the same team as other top athletes. Top salespeople want to work in the same company as other top salespeople.

Every salesperson knows that s/he is only part of the manager’s number. The manager’s number is probably 90% of the sum of the team. If there are ten people on the team and three of them are not doing their job, then the manager’s pressure doesn’t go to the struggling three; it goes to the top salespeople. They are challenged to bring in more deals in the quarter. They need to be creative and sell more product upgrades or pull in a sale from next quarter by offering a great deal. They don’t want to do this, but the manager needs the revenue. This deal-making puts the top salespeople an opportunity or two down for the next quarter. Now they have to push even harder to get to even.

Just like in football, the team doesn’t win if everyone isn’t doing their job. Linemen need to block, running backs need to run fast and not fumble, and wide receivers need to catch the ball in bounds. Every individual position contributes to the success of the team.

Good salespeople on an underperforming team feel like Sisyphus trying to get the stone to the top of the hill. Nothing they do is good enough. They are frequently asked to do more while seeing their less-skilled peers praised or even rewarded for just getting by.

The solution is obvious, but it may not be easy if you are not an experienced sales manager. You need to “trade up” on sales reps that cannot perform. Yes, you need to train underperforming contributors, but at a certain point, you cannot wait anymore. Underperforming salespeople will frequently perform better in their next job, so do not despair too much. Those at the bottom of the leaderboard are seldom happy and content. If they are content, then you have an even bigger problem.

The next step in trading up is even more critical. You need to find talent that will perform. This isn’t easy, but it also isn’t rocket science. Don’t advertise in all of the usual places. You will be inundated with applicants, and finding that needle in the haystack is virtually impossible. Rely on a competent recruiter to find you qualified candidates and only qualified candidates. This will cost you a bit of money, but it will be a fraction of the cost of a bad hire, and it will be faster and use less of your resources.

Once that recruitment agency has found you 2-4 high-quality candidates, you should put the candidate through a test. There are many of them out there, but I suggest PXT Select Specialized Behavioral Assessment for Sales. PXT Select is a unique selection assessment that fills the gap between the resume and the interview. Powered by the latest assessment technology, PXT Select drives a suite of reports that that are useful throughout the employee lifecycle. Its suite of sales-specific reports focuses on an individual’s approach to critical sales practices, helping you gain insight and confidence in hiring the right salespeople.

The most significant risk in having a sales organization with too many non-performing salespeople is that your top performers will get frustrated and leave. Top people want to be around other top people. If you do not have a strategy to improve continually, you may find yourself in real trouble as your best salespeople become free agents and join a championship team.

Take my free online Sales Agility Assessment or contact me via my contact page to learn how I can help your business build a top-performing sales team and process.

I originally published this article with a different title on the blog for one of my business partners, Breakaway Sales Recruiting.
36 Weeks Before Glue Works, Inc. Purchase Order Case Study

36 Weeks Before Glue Works, Inc. Purchase Order Case Study

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This is a week-by-week case study of four salespeople

  • Amy Gatherer,
  • Ben Farmer,
  • Carla Hunter,
  • and Dave Trapper

as they sell to Glue Works, Inc.

Each week, these individual salespeople present the status of their territories to their managers. We will focus on their discussions of selling to Glue Works.

If you have joined this case study in mid-campaign, we encourage you to go back to the opening video where the description of the challenge is laid out. We then encourage you to continue from the beginning.

We hope that you enjoy this case study and you learn some valuable skills. To interpret what each salesperson is doing correctly or incorrectly, we suggest that you read the book Eliminate Your Competition which is available wherever books are sold as paperbacks or ebooks.

Case Study – Glue Works, Inc – 36 weeks before the order

Transcript of the video

Amy Gatherer meets with her manager every Monday morning, and the subject of Glue Works comes up weekly. She details the consulting orders that she is billing, some personnel problems with the various onsite consultants, and a customer event that she recently hosted with some Glue Works executives. The status of Glue Works as a customer continues to be very profitable and the outlook is quite positive. 

The subject of selling the new artificial intelligence (AI) tool to Glue Works doesn’t come up. Her manager is pleased with Glue Works but is a bit distressed that Amy just had a 90% drop in billings at a different customer, ABC Plane Parts. ABC Plane Parts selected Premium Software. Amy explained her plan to her manager. “I think I can increase my billings at Glue Works by taking some new business away from DayDream Consulting to offset the decrease in revenue from ABC Plane Parts.”

Ben Farmer also talks to his manager every Monday, but his conversation occurs in the afternoon, as he has appointments on Monday morning. When the subject turns to Glue Works, Ben tells his manager, “Steve and Alice are loving what we are doing. They are pretty adamant that they don’t want to switch to Everything Consulting, even though there is some pressure from executive management. I think this initial consulting order will be successful, and we will grow that relationship, but we may have to drop our price to keep Everything Consulting out.” 

When asked about selling the artificial intelligence-based product, Ben replies, “Glue Works is a solid, old-fashioned company that values human relationships. I don’t think they are going to go for the new stuff.” 

Finally, Ben’s manager asks if he had heard the rumor about ABC Plane Parts buying artificial intelligence-based software. Ben replies, “That doesn’t surprise me. I am not close to anyone there. I know one guy in the human resources department, but we are not very close. I have tried to invite him to golf and various sports events around town, and he is never really interested. They seem to be much more cutting edge and hard charging. I will look into the rumor.” Ben will look into the rumor, but he will never tell his manager what happened unless asked again. Ben subscribes to the theory that salespeople should only tell management about bad news when it is absolutely necessary.

Carla Hunter’s meeting with her manager was filled with frustration. Carla had spent a lot of time over the last ten to twelve weeks at ABC Plane Parts but had come up short on a decision they recently made. She and her manager complained that the customer obviously made the wrong decision, even when given a massive last-minute discount. By the end of the conversation, they concluded that Focused Software was never given a fair shot at the business and it was wired for Premium Software from the beginning.

Carla and her manager never discussed Glue Works, as she has never made a call there and isn’t aware of any reason to discuss the account. She did mention several RFPs that she was responding to with the help of her inside sales team and her technical team.

Dave Trapper’s meeting with his manager is more of a celebration than an account review. Dave, his extended team, and the management team just closed a very large sale at ABC Plane Parts. Much of the meeting was spent talking about that successful campaign, with appropriate congratulations to all of the team members who contributed to the success. 

The meeting ended with Dave’s manager starting to think ahead. “Great job on the deal! I hate to go straight to business but you are on a bit of a streak right now, and we need to keep building on that momentum. Let’s skip the discussion on Glue Works, Suncar Auto, Spinning Energy, Four Star Homes, and Hot Food Restaurants for this week. We can focus on those next week. My treat for lunch today at Tony’s Steakhouse.”
Explanation Of The Glue Works, Inc. Case Study

Explanation Of The Glue Works, Inc. Case Study

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This is a week-by-week case study of four salespeople

  • Amy Gatherer,
  • Ben Farmer,
  • Carla Hunter,
  • and Dave Trapper

as they sell to Glue Works, Inc.

Each week, these individual salespeople present the status of their territories to their managers. We will focus on their discussions of selling to Glue Works.

If you have joined this case study in mid-campaign, we encourage you to go back to the opening video where the description of the challenge is laid out. We then encourage you to continue from the beginning.

We hope that you enjoy this case study and you learn some valuable skills. To interpret what each salesperson is doing correctly or incorrectly, we suggest that you read the book Eliminate Your Competition which is available wherever books are sold as paperbacks or ebooks.

Video Script

This case study will help you to understand the Trapper selling methodology. This fictionalized case study is used throughout the book Eliminate Your Competition to explain the more difficult concepts.

The company in this case study is Glue Works. 

Glue Works doesn’t know how to achieve one of its major goals and is looking for outside assistance.

In this case study, we follow four different salespeople who sell management consulting software that can help companies focus and align their products. This type of software replaces management consultants. In this case study, there are no major technical limitations in any of the four software products. Any of the four products will work, and therefore it is primarily sales skill that differentiates the products and influences the sale. While each product will work, there are individual features of each of these offerings that can be used to differentiate the products.

The four salespeople in this story are:

  • Amy Gatherer,
  • Ben Farmer
  • Carla Hunter,
  • Dave Trapper

Ivytown is probably very similar to your city. It has its problems with keeping roads paved, keeping its parks clean, and providing adequate opportunities for its youth. Ivytown has had its share of very good mayors in the past, and it has also had a few mayors that probably should never have been elected. There are a few medium-sized universities in town that occasionally have a good year with one of their sports teams, and this incites quite a bit of pride in the community. Like your home city, the top weatherman can never seem to predict the weather but is still popular.

One of the largest companies in Ivytown is Glue Works ink. Glue Works is one of the largest manufacturers of adhesives in the world. The company started about 100 years ago and now has a very diverse line of glues and adhesives. Its products are sold to consumers and industrial companies. Their consumer products are a hit with young students, and the marketing of the consumer products is imaginative. The industrial customers range from book publishers to automotive companies. Their tagline on their website is “We Keep Everything Together.”

Amy Gatherer works for Everything Consulting. Glue Works is the largest of the five customers that she manages for Everything Consulting. Glue Works is about 40% of her revenue. 

Everything Consulting is a global consulting company with many different practices. Most of their revenue comes from the teams of consultants that advise companies on a wide variety of disciplines. A few years ago, Everything Consulting acquired a Scandinavian company that developed artificial intelligence software to help companies align the skills of individual people and job functions. This product is quite good, but it is competitive with the consulting operations of Everything Consulting. The software product, therefore, is typically only discussed with new prospects and not existing customers.

Ben Farmer works for DayDream Consulting. Ben has sold a few small consulting projects to Glue Works. Ben always goes to Glue Works on Mondays; he has a cup of coffee with Steve and Alice in manufacturing. Steve is an old college friend, and they enjoy talking about the status of their alma mater’s sports teams. Steve was instrumental in helping Ben get the previous consulting engagements. Alice attends the same church as Ben.

DayDream Consulting is a regional consulting company with extremely talented consultants. They also re-sell, in an exclusive territory, a software product that uses artificial intelligence techniques to help companies align the skills of individual people and job functions. This product is quite good, and the publisher of the software is willing to help any of their resellers successfully sell the product. DayDream Consulting doesn’t get many leads for the software, but it does receive a steady stream of RFPs (Requests For Proposal) to fill out. DayDream is very diligent about filling out these RFPs, but Ben regularly complains that they need better resources to complete those RFPs.

Carla Hunter works for Focused Software, where she won the top salesperson award for two of the last four years. Focused Software creates a software product that uses artificial intelligence techniques to help companies align the skills of individual people and job functions. Carla loves working for Focused Software because they give her a lot of latitude in going after opportunities, give her well-written collateral, and are extremely flexible on pricing and terms. Focused Software has never sold anything to Glue Works.

Dave Trapper works for Premium Software. Premium Software creates a software product that uses artificial intelligence techniques to help companies align the skills of individual people and job functions. Dave doesn’t think Premium Software has great marketing and always wishes for more leads, but knows that he needs to generate his deals. Dave is one of the top salespeople in the company and understands that the company’s management is at his disposal to help him win business. Premium Software has never sold anything to Glue Works.

We will watch these four salespeople as they discuss their territories with their management over the majority of a year.

You may purchase my book, Eliminate Your Competition, from your favorite book retailer. The ebook version is available at the most popular retailers such as Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. The paperback version is also widely available at such retailers as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million.

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