Engaging Executives

Are you being provocative enough in your selling?

In this month's Harvard Business Review, Geoffrey Moore (known best for his work on "Crossing the Chasm") and his colleagues at TCG-Ventures outline an approach they call "Provocation-based selling."

Provocation-based selling goes beyond the conventional consultative or solution-selling approach, whereby the vendor’s sales team seeks out current concerns in a question-and-answer dialogue with customer managers. And it differs dramatically from the most common approach still in use—product-based selling, which pushes features, functionality, and benefits, usually in a generic manner. Provocation-based selling helps customers see their competitive challenges in a new light that makes addressing specific painful problems unmistakably urgent.

They argue that provocation-based selling is particularly important in a downturn, when discretionary budgets disappear and decision-making moves higher in the organization.

They outline three steps to the approach:

To begin a provocation-based sale, you must do three things well:

• identify a problem that will resonate with a line executive in the target organization;
• develop a provocative point of view about that problem (one that links, naturally, to what your company has to offer);
• and lodge that provocation with a decision maker who can take the implied action.

Provocation-based selling is a good example of how thought leadership and sales enablement come together for what we've been calling conversation enablement. 

I do wonder if the term "provocation-based selling" is a bit risky.  It's a good headline for a Harvard Business Review article, but it could be misinterpreted by the sales team.  After all, the first meaning of provoke in the dictionary is "to incite to anger or resentment."  A bit like how the desire to become a  "trusted advisor" made companies think they had to always be giving prospects advice.

Whatever you call it, we agree on one thing.  The way to get the attention of a senior executive is to have something meaningful to say that gives them fresh insight, to engage in a conversation that shows how that insight can apply to their business, and to connect that insight to one's own product or service.  That is conversational selling at its best.

(Thanks to Margaret Malloy at Gerson Lehrman Group for making the connection to the article.)