Keep it simple, different, and memorable.

Convincing advantages will help you stand out and position you to win.

Note:  I recently wrote about messaging vs. convincing advantages (read it here) and launching your competitive advantages (read it here).

Here are three must haves for your convincing advantages.

• Simple – must be easy to remember – easy to connect to real and relevant value.
• Differentiate – what’s unique to you must be crisp and clear to your prospects.
• Memorable – craft so they don’t forget – memorable advantages transform “outsiders and strangers” into engaged and effective “insiders” – aka people who buy you.

This simple and powerful transition will have you cutting through commoditizationCommoditization Absence of any perceived value, making it so that price becomes the only determining factor. Whether there is real differentiation or not, if the prospect’s brain cannot or will not distinguish this differentiation, it doesn’t matter., confusion and no decision in no time!

There are too many instances of “messaging” hitting your prospects. Consider using the convincing advantages approach to stand out from the crowd.

As you’re out competing to keep existing customers and gain new ones, the importance of messaging becomes evident very quickly. It’s purpose is to drive a clear and differentiating buying advantage for you and your team. To that end, I’m asking you to reconsider the whole concept and – specifically – rethink “messaging”. The move you need to make is to transform messaging into your “convincing advantages”.

With tens of thousands of competing messages hitting your prospects on a daily basis, it’s important that your communication is clear, convincing and focused solely on how you solve your prospect’s pain. (Because that’s ALL they’re interested in.) You’re not just trying to “out-message” your direct competitors, you’re also wanting to drive your prospects’ prioritization of you up – by shutting down the distracting noise from other, unrelated solutions.

It’s your choice. A messaging output that is forgettable – OR a convincing advantages strategy that stands out and positions you to win.

Increased product and service offer commoditizationCommoditization Absence of any perceived value, making it so that price becomes the only determining factor. Whether there is real differentiation or not, if the prospect’s brain cannot or will not distinguish this differentiation, it doesn’t matter. and customer indecision are severely reducing the effectiveness of the sales operation, says Bryan Gray of Revenue Path Group. Taken together, they form one of the Five Great Threats to revenue growth through effective selling.

Hanging on the Telephone – Fully 88% of Sales Calls Are USELESS !

There’s a stark truth every business that depends on sales growth needs to take on board. According to Forrester research, around 88% of sales calls are viewed by customers as being ineffective; i.e. they add no value at all to the customer’s life. Paying anyone to succeed only 12% of their time at work in any role is a terrifying thought. But when that pitiful strike rate applies to the very engine of the company’s growth – sales – it’s enough to leave the most seasoned business leader screaming!

The situation may be tough. But at least there are no mysteries surrounding this level of failure. The customers surveyed by Forrester confirmed they don’t respond to that mighty 88% of sales calls because there’s nothing in it for them when they do. It’s just more noise and more stuff –“cognitive overload” if you want a technical term.

The people making the calls are unable to communicate the full value – or any real value – of their sales message. They often don’t know enough about their industry, their market and their solution to be convincing. And when you know less about what you’re selling than the guy you’re trying to sell it to knows, it’s a fair bet that you’re in trouble.

What Other Operational Area of YOUR Business Would Accept a 12% Success Rate?

Of course there are organizations that would regard a 12% success rate as adequate. Successful even. They would see themselves as keeping pace with competitors. Maybe even outpacing them. So that’s ok? Well sorry, but no it isn’t ok. Not if you want to create a profitable organization, fuelled by vigorous sales led growth. Drill down into the successes – those times you do get through and have your message listened to by a customer. Even in that situation of viable opportunity, you’re likely losing out around 76% of the time. How so?

Credible data suggests that 16% of sales lost will be to competitors. Again, you might think it perfectly ok to retain well over 80% of your closable sales. That looks like a home run … until you dig deeper. Competitors leave you with four fifths of the potential pie. But it’s not your commercial rivals who are eating your cheese (and whatever other filling you have in your pie). The culprit isn’t an honorable foe in a clean fought battle. It’s the miserable, skulking, creeping fog that is customer indecision.

Customer Indecision – Accounting for a Pretty Decisive 60% of Lost Sales

Indecision accounts for around 60% of lost sales. Customers take an age to make their minds up. Somewhere along the way, the love and enthusiasm die. And you lose out. What are the reasons for this very undesirable situation? And what can you do to improve it?

Start with a deep realization: there is no advantage to you in letting customer indecision creep in and take root. You need to stand out fast. You need to stand out enough to trigger a decision – even if that decision goes against you. And you either need to make the sale or make your way out of the situation and on to the next opportunity. The long sales cycle never makes you a winner. Take a hard look at your current pipeline. If it is clogged with sluggish, wannabe deals that are not really going anywhere, examine the root causes and take action.

Effective action depends on making a second realization. Most customers are “indecisive” for a small number of important reasons. The key driver is commoditization. Customers do not see what you are offering as being different in any significant way. They could find it somewhere else, with at least a couple of viable alternatives and maybe dozens, or even hundreds, of other choices. And the first rule with any commodity is that you always buy it for lowest price not top dollar.

Can You EVER Win a Race to the BottomRace To The Bottom This happens in the procurement sale phase where there’s little to no vendor differentiation in the prospect’s brain. Price becomes the deciding factor, and vendors many times get pitted against each other to win via the lowest possible price. Organizations may hope that later this pricing position can be reclaimed (after the initial sale is made, in future sales), but this rarely happens. on Costs?

Buying for lowest price means a race to the bottom for your costs, your margins and any prospect of a decent profit. You can only win this game if your whole operation is configured around delivering lowest price and you know you can work on wafer thin margins. BUT … If you need to make the best profit you can on the most sales you can achieve, you literally cannot afford the luxury of a bunch of “indecisive” customers. And you must, therefore, wake up and get real.

Think of the commoditized market as a Roman gladiator arena. You and your fellow combatants are out there on the sand under the burning sun. You’re the ones sweating and straining. Literally giving your life’s blood. In the end only one of you can win. Along the way, you’re providing entertainment for a bunch of guys sitting in the shade, in no hurry to put their thumbs up or down, as long as the show continues. Unlike a real gladiator, fortunately, you have the chance to walk away. So do that. Leave the arena. Work on some new moves. How?

Don’t be afraid to look very rationally – critically – at what you’re selling. If it is a commodity, re-configure to make the sale on a new basis: price led, fast, no prisoners. Thumbs up or down in a quick clean fight. If however you truly believe that your offer is stand-out, that it deserves real, focused, positive customer attention that leads to winning the business, then equip yourself to be a winner.

Get Yourself Some Lethal Weapons

Your new sales armory will include three lethal weapons:

Lethal weapon 1. Make Your Offer A “Must Have” Some estimates say that we are faced with around 35 thousand decisions a day. Even if the figure is closer to 350 or 35, that’s still a lot of decisions. So, clarify and tighten your offer. Strip out the “cognitive overload” and make choosing you – quickly and decisively – a no-brainer for your customers.

Lethal, weapon 2. Make Your Sales Team Make Sense Become certain, through message clarification, training and real understanding, that every time one of your sales people makes a sales call, they will add value to the customer, drive a positive decision and eliminate indecision.

Lethal weapon 3. If You Don’t Win, Don’t Lose Out In The Sales Process Stop confusing activity with achievement. As soon as it becomes clear that your “customer” is just playing you, disengage. Cut your losses and move on. It’s a certainty that you will save resources and protect your credibility. It’s not impossible that some of those “indecisive” customers will quickly realize that you are exactly the kind of confident, successful and determined supplier they need.

Extended sales cycles are NOT an indicator of positively developing relationships, argues Bryan Gray of Revenue Path Group. Quite the opposite. They are one of the Five Great Threats to revenue growth through effective selling.

Don’t Let Yourself Get Sold on the Long Sales Cycle

Let’s be honest. There can’t be many of us who haven’t, at some time, allowed a sales cycle to drag. Even if in our hearts we know it’s going nowhere. The reasons for allowing this sorry soap opera to play out are many and varied.

We may truly believe that the other guy is about to sign. All those rain checks and requests for a little more work on the numbers are part of a real decision process. So we cut some slack and then some more slack. And, somewhere along the way, we lose sight of the fact that the rope has gone slack.

We may need something to put into our time management system. Maybe business is a little slow and something, anything, to feed the job justification machine is welcome.

It may even be that we come to like the guy at the prospect’s end of this elongated ritual dance. So we can’t bring ourselves to think he would knowingly jerk us around.

Whatever the reason, it’s time to throw a big pail of very cold water over the extended sales cycle. The initial shock will be bracing, horrendous even. But the long term effects – feeling alert, clear eyed, ready to look reality square in the face – will be worth any immediate pain.

It’s Time to De-clutter the Pipeline

Looking honestly and rationally at your current sales cycles is the corporate equivalent of a home de-cluttering. Today, you may be comforted and reassured by those bales of unread magazines in the garage or that fancy exercise machine that’s still in its box, even though any day now you’re going to set it up and put it through its paces.

Tomorrow – after the passing pangs of getting rid – you’ll realize that you can live without them. You’ll enjoy room to maneuver more easily and headspace to plan better replacements for the stuff you just threw out. Heck, you may even get around to reading today’s paper or going to the gym for real!

In business, you’ll have the same sense of freedom to do something better, something more effective. Note too that this new freedom is not simply desirable. It is imperative. Why? Because other people don’t play fair. You’re sustaining a long-drawn-out sales cycle (that in reality isn’t leading to a sale). Meanwhile, your competitors won’t respect your investment in sales time, effort and cost.

The Other Guy WON”T Play Nice

In the already far distant past, the sales dance floor was level. Nobody had any spectacularly different techniques than anybody else. Today, while you’re slow dancing your way through complex wannabe-customer footwork, your rivals can burst in body popping and ram you right off the floor.

Under no circumstances will they wait in a gentlemanly queue until your dance is, finally, over. They will jog your elbow, spill your drink and muscle in on your desired date. Make no mistake, they have the moves. A timely (timely from their perspective, potentially disastrous from yours) email. A webinar. A special offer. A new product or service fronted with brutal efficiency on social media. These techniques – and many more – are easily accessed and implemented. Competitors will use them. And all your elaborate tail feather display can end up as just so much wasted effort, as a rival sashays off into the sunset with a triumphant arm around that signed order.

Long Sales Cycles FEED Your Competition

In more strictly business terms, each extended sales cycle contributes to a dangerous asymmetry for your revenue generating operation. Meaning? The effort is entirely out of whack with the rewards. You take time to engage with a prospect who isn’t committing. Then you take more time. And more time after that. All the while, the prospect is learning more and more about you, about your market, about the product or service you’re selling. So they’re growing in knowledge. They’re gaining deeper and deeper exposure to your pricing structures and your willingness to do deals. So they’re growing in negotiating strength. They’re increasingly tying down your sales teams, setting the sales cycle timetable and deciding the key events and outcomes. So they’re growing in power.

Short version: you are paying for someone who isn’t even your customer to gain knowledge, strength and power. And all the time you’re doing this, your own position is becoming weaker and weaker. You could end so weakened that you find yourself relying on the psychology of the roulette wheel: you’ve already staked so much that you may just as well keep going and hope the next spin rolls your way. At this stage, you are no longer a rational sales operation. You are a love struck suitor living in a state of desperate hope!

The Last Shall Be First, And the First … 

Meanwhile … a competitor who has invested nothing in the very sales cycle that has siphoned months or even years of your energies can come in at the eleventh hour and steal the prize. Fortune favors the brave and this guy can afford to be brave! After all, he has nothing to lose. He can make an offer. He can fine-tune his offer (assuming he even wants to) against benchmarks you kindly provided during your endless detailed negotiations. He can say, “take it or leave it” and really mean it because it’s your skin in the game not his!

From your prospect’s point of view, this guy is the new hero on the block, complete with heroic powers of agility and flexibility. From your perspective, you have unintentionally bred a ‘super-competitor’ by pumping him up with your resources.

Sadly, the typical outcome of the extended sales cycle is the long goodbye. And its destination is the land of unintended and unpleasant consequences. You started out in the belief that it would go somewhere. It went nowhere. You thought it would build a relationship. It encouraged exploitation (of you). You thought it represented safety and security. It brought uncertainty and competitor threat (driven by the competitor advantage you inadvertently created).

So …

The next time you are even contemplating engagement with a commitment-phobic prospect. The next time all the signals indicate a long-drawn-out but ultimately fruitless courtship. The next time you find yourself saying “they’ll surely sign any time now”. STOP. Now remember the insightful advice offered by Beyonce: If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it!