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The One B2B Buyer Tactic Salespeople Must be Prepared for – but Most Aren’t

My dog Lou Lou gets her dinner every night at 6:00. At 5:55 on the nose, she starts her cajoling to get us up off our home-office chairs and onto the important business of providing chow. How she knows that it’s time, I don’t understand. But everyone with a dog will be shaking their heads right now in recognition of the phenomenon.

As soon as she’s done eating her own dog food, she’ll look to see whether the cat has left any tasty morsels behind that she can sink her teeth into.

The expression “eating your own dog food” in the business world means something else entirely. It means that a company uses their own products–the very products and services that they ask their customers to buy and use.  There’s an obvious reason for that. Imagine an Apple executive at a customer meeting excusing herself to take a call–on her android mobile phone. Or Pepsi choosing to serve Coke in their cafeterias instead of Pepsi. It’s just not going to happen.

It isn’t reasonable to expect customers to use your products if you don’t use them yourself.  It would be an indication that you don’t believe in your own products or that they’re so complicated even you can’t figure out how to use them. Buyers know to look for this. If you’re a salesperson you had better watch out for a new tactic that your prospects are using to weed out companies that don’t eat their own dog food.

It happened to Etien D’Hollander, CEO of Front Row Solutions and he recounted the story in an interesting blog post, “Dogfooding: Is it part of your CRM Selection Process.” Seems he was calling on a very savvy prospect who had given great thought to the 4 features he felt were most important. Then, he proceeded to meet with his prospective suppliers including Front Row and put them each to the test.

When Etien’s meeting with the prospect came to the end the prospect said, “Ok, so you just had a sales meeting with me. I want to watch you submit your sales report from your mobile device into your CRM system.” Gasp! Not to worry. Etien promptly retrieved his cell phone from his suit pocket, tapped a few buttons, and the call report was completed. The prospect was duly impressed and shared the results of his experiment. Turns out seven CRM reps were asked to perform the same task and only 5 of the 7 could do it.

It’s not surprising to me. Many products only work the way they’re described when it’s a perfect world scenario. In a perfect world, those CRM reps would be intimately familiar with their call reporting system because they use it all day, every day. But the perfect world isn’t often the case.

If your salespeople are proposing a product or service that they themselves should be using, they better be prepared to be tested. Fortunately, this is also the case for your competitors. And that’s where you can gain a competitive advantage if you play your cards right. Unlike the prospect Etien called on, many prospects don’t know what or how to quiz the salespeople that call on them. Use that to your advantage.

Create a handy list of suggestions—a “guide”—that can be given to each prospect. The list should include the key activities they should ask each vendor under consideration to show them. If you happen to know that your CRM’s sales call reporting capability is the slickest on the market, that should go on the list of must-see-in-action features.

If you can encourage prospects to ask specific questions or require the demonstration of certain features important to the prospect and which, coincidentally are ones that you triumph in, that’s a good thing. It’s not enough for your reps to demo the features alone. The handy guide is key to the strategy because your prospect WILL NOT remember. Reps can even use the guide as a talking point to learn which areas are the most important for the prospect. It’s a helpful exercise for prospects and it will help your reps know where to focus the conversation as well as the demo. At the end of the meeting, the rep should suggest that the prospect use the list with each vendor they’re considering. This is a great technique to trip up your competition and possibly cause them to reveal their weak points or the fact that they don’t eat their own dog food.

Think about your products and your salespeople. Are they eating their own dog food? Can they readily demonstrate that to prospects? What would happen if prospects asked your salespeople to prove it to them like Etien’s prospect did? Would they be able to rise to the occasion with equal aplomb?

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When you’re selling B2B solutions, at some point in the sales process you’re likely to end up doing a demo.

Too bad. Most demos are useless.

They usually don’t help the prospective customer make a good choice. They just confuse and bore them.

And they don’t help the vendor make the sale, either. That’s especially true for software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

A demo isn’t a sprint

When most vendors prepare a demo for a prospect, they treat it like it’s the speed round on a game show.

The Account Rep or Sales Engineer – all wired up and ready to go – look at the demo as a sprint. How many features can they show in whatever amount of time the prospect has allocated?

The demo they put together is all about the features… and as many of them as possible.

Lost in this approach is one fundamental notion:

The customer doesn’t care about features. They care about solving their problems.

Even the label, “demo,” is all wrong. Demo means “we’ll demonstrate our product to you.”

Instead, it should be called something like “solve,” as in “we’ll show you how to solve your problems using our solution.”

For SaaS, feature fixation is especially pointless

For SaaS companies, in particular, demonstrating one feature after another is especially pointless.

For one thing, many SaaS companies will add new features regularly over the life of the subscription. Whatever you demo today will be out of date in a few weeks or months anyway.

Besides that, customers are buying more than a set of features. With SaaS, they’re buying support, reliability, performance, integration, and security as well.

Prospects are making their purchase decision based on whether they think you understand their problems and you have the knowledge, resources and commitment to solve them.

They’re buying into a relationship, not a set of features.

Build trust, solve problems

Demos don’t have to be useless… but you need to show prospects more than feature, feature, feature.

You need to talk about your experience in their industry, about other customers you’ve worked with and their results, about the entire scope of your solution.

In short, you need to solve their particular problems, address their particular concerns, and help their business.

Stories beat features every time

I’m not saying you can avoid showing the product. If you’re selling an enterprise solution, you’ll invariably get pulled into shoot-outs and bake-offs.

I’ve been through lots of these, sitting on both sides of the table. Most of the time, every provider does a good job ticking through the complete list of tasks that the customer has specified.

In fact, after 3 or 4 of these demos – “We can do this. We can do that, We can do this too.” – all of them look the same. The prospective customer can’t tell one solution from another based on the features.

Here’s what sets the winner apart:

They provide context. They explain how the solution helps the business, how it solves problems, why it will make the customer more successful.

The winner doesn’t do it with features alone. They win with the story that goes with them.

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