Sales in the Info Age: It's about people, not product

BURLINGTON, ONT.

To learn what makes people tick, there are few better ways than driving a taxi.

When Adrian Davis became a cabbie at 18 after boredom drove him from high school, he quickly learned a truth that still serves him well.

“Everybody’s going somewhere,” said Davis, 49, who now sports a business suit and a Bay Street business card. “Our job is to help them get where they’re going.”

Davis, president of management consultancy Whetstone Inc., is poised to do just that for Waterloo Region’s small and mid-sized tech companies. On Feb. 1 at 8 a.m., he will kick off Communitech’s Level Up Event series with a talk on how to align sales efforts with customers’ business strategies.

‘Help’ is rarely the first word that springs to mind when we think of sales (unless it’s followed by the words ‘get me out of here’). This is largely because businesses are still applying Industrial Age methods to an Information Age audience, as Davis explained to me over tea at a Burlington café this week.

“We invest a great deal in research and development, we build great products and we go out and educate the marketplace about how great our product is,” he said of this “product push” approach.

“It’s a hostile approach towards users; it’s an arrogant approach that assumes that we know better than the customer what is right for them, and that we just have to educate the customer in order to help them understand our value,” Davis said.

“Rather than selling, we need to shift and help people buy,” he said. “We need to understand that everybody is trying to get somewhere; everyone is trying to solve something, and we need to align with that natural energy that the buyer has.”

That energy resides in the buyer’s strategic priorities, not just in their immediate needs, Davis said. Understanding the difference between those two things is crucial to the buyer-focused sales approach.

“Needs are not the same as priorities,” he said. “Every company has more needs than it can fund…(but) strategic priorities definitely get funded.”

Lower-level managers are often well-versed in a company’s needs, since they are under pressure to solve pressing problems and keep the company functioning day-to-day. Needs, in other words, often relate to fear.

Strategic priorities, by contrast, are the domain of “C-level” executives – the CEO and other top-tier leaders – whose roles are to set longer-term goals and steer their companies toward them. Priorities are therefore more positive, since they relate to desire.

In his talk to Communitech members, Davis will share “a very simple methodology” to help salespeople to approach C-level executives with confidence; to talk to them in a way that “will facilitate uncovering the client’s strategies” and connect with their deeply held desire to execute them.

This kind of interaction makes the product’s price less of an issue and lifts the conversation out of the commodity context.

Davis said technology companies are especially susceptible to fixating on the product rather than the people they want to buy it. This can be a grave mistake, because a technical pitch tends to put the audience into an analytical, if not critical, frame of mind, in which they are inclined to look closely for flaws or gaps.

A pitch that tells a story, on the other hand, “gets me to take my critical-thinking cap off,” he said. “With storytelling, they just completely relax, they’re seeing pictures which are memorable, and now they’ve got the whole story.”

Davis’s own story is as interesting as it is unconventional.

Tired of Grade 12 subjects for which he couldn’t see any practical need, the Scarborough teenager quit school and was promptly thrown out of his family’s house. He spent some time on the street before he turned 18 and could get his Toronto taxi driver’s licence.

“For two years I drove cab and it was a slog,” he said. “I remember one day in particular when I did not have enough money to pay my rent, and it wasn’t the first time, so I was facing eviction.”

He drove for 48 hours straight, fuelled by stimulants, until a final fare took him from downtown Toronto to his hardscrabble Jane-Finch neighbourhood.

“It gave me enough money to pay the rent,” he said. “I went home and I collapsed and slept for two days, and when I woke up, I realized, ‘I need an education; I can’t do this; this is crazy’.”

Davis returned to finish high school, enrolled at the University of Ottawa and earned straight A’s, along with a sideline income from a business he started.

“I went around the city on my bicycle selling advertising to retailers who wanted to reach the student population,” he said. “That’s when I really discovered sales, and I just loved it; I thought, ‘This is me, this is what I want to do’.”

Fresh out of university, he took a job as a telemarketer with a technology company and read everything he could on sales. He was eventually promoted out of the call centre and into the field.

“I’ve always been in technology; initially it was financial systems, then it was CRM (customer relationship management) systems, then it was billing systems,” he said, “so I was always selling enterprise technology.”

Having chosen sales as his Plan A career, unlike many who simply end up there, Davis was methodical and diligent about learning as much as possible, and took on important accounts.

“I was working for a company out of Silicon Valley (Portal Software); I was their Canadian representative, and we were selling some really sophisticated software,” Davis said. “We were selling billing systems to internet companies, and everybody was doing well.”

As employee #102 out of an eventual 1,400, he rode a rocket as the company went public, twice split its stock and made its young founder, John Little, an early internet billionaire.

Then, “suddenly the party was over,” due to the dot-com crash of 2001.

Davis’s colleagues, many with MBAs, started losing their jobs because they couldn’t keep their numbers up, but “not only was I making my numbers; I was doing 300 per cent of my quota,” he said. “I was flying, and I wasn’t even selling everything I could, because the company wasn’t servicing what I was selling, so out of conscience I couldn’t sell if I knew that the company’s not going to deliver.”

With no formal sales training, Davis wondered, ‘What is it I’m doing that no one else is doing?’ He boiled it down to two things: Disciplined work habits and a practice of selling to strategically-minded people on the business side, such as marketing VPs and CEOs, rather than to IT managers and technologists, who were cutting back at that time.

Exposure to these power brokers and a willingness to learn from them had unwittingly given Davis an invaluable education in strategy, though he had always considered himself a technology guy.

He eventually found himself telling clients how software would help them implement their strategies, which invariably were focused beyond the depressed climate of the day.

“When the internet bubble burst, their strategy didn’t go away,” he said. “All these inflated valuations of internet startups were going away, but the internet was not going away.”

Davis continued making multimillion-dollar deals until he returned from a trip to California to find that his young daughter had learned to walk. He left his job, took a year off to reconnect with family life and then began informal work as a sales coach at the request of someone who had heard him speak at a Toastmasters event.

“That was the beginning,” he said, “and as I started to coach more salespeople, I realized this new way of selling was not just about skills; it was really about a culture.”

Since cultures exist in groups of people and not individuals, “I realized I had to go from coaching to consulting.”

Davis began with startups, then moved on to young funded companies. As his confidence grew, he graduated to some of the world’s largest companies, but “then I realized our best value is not with the Global 2000 (largest firms); they treat us very transactionally. It’s the small and mid-sized companies that we can really create a lot of value for.”

Through it all, Davis has learned that salespeople need to be seen not as a mere “tactical resource, a way to generate revenue,” but as “a strategic resource” who can serve as the ears of their companies, rather than their mouthpieces.

By listening to their C-level clients and reporting back to their own chief executives, salespeople can help their employers to choose their customers more strategically, he said.

“The only companies that survive today are the companies that continue to create value for their customers,” Davis said. “Since the customers have the power and they decide whether or not you’re creating value, you’re going to be in a very difficult spot if all of your customers are completely diverse and have nothing to do with each other.”

Once you decide which customers you can best help, you can collaborate and create value continually, over the long term.

In other words, everybody’s going somewhere, and it’s the salesperson’s job to help them get there.

“I like to say that everything I needed to know about sales I learned when I was driving taxi,” Davis said. “I would always find out where they wanted to go, and I would take them there and give them an enjoyable experience along the way.”

To register for Davis’s Level Up presentation, click here.