Using Success Frameworks in the Sales Process

Ever been shopping for a new car? Or even just fancied a bit of tire kicking cosplay at the Aston Martin showroom? What do you want to hear from the salesperson? A detailed summary of how a V12 engine works? Or do you want to feel a sense of luxury, a sense of speed, of having achieved your goals? Unless you’re a real car nerd it’s probably the latter. 

Back in the day, sales old timers used to call this selling the sizzle not the sausage. i.e How will having the car make you feel (razzing up the seafront imagining the crowd swooning at your prowess) versus describing the vehicle. 

Back to Raskin

In B2B SaaS we are way more sophisticated than this, or like to think we are, but the essentials remain the same. And there is a specific spot in the sales process where we can land this sizzle. You might recall several months ago we spent two newsletters running through the Raskin Matrix. I named this framework after Andy Raskin, because I have  built on top of his thinking in order to help Revenue leaders structure their own version of the Raskin presentation. 

Here’s a quick reminder of the Raskin deck and why it works so effectively. The goal is to lower the Buyer Defences and nudge them to ask for the pitch. i.e. “Wow that’s fascinating, can you show us how you help with this?” etc.

Raskin’s structure runs through five steps, each of which needs to be delivered correctly. 

1. Paradigm Shift - describe the big change in the world that gives your product its context. You can think of this as a Perfect Storm.
2. Winners & Losers - who succeeds, and who fails in this new environment?
3. Common Thread - what did the winners notice which enabled them to plot a course to victory.
4. Success Framework - specifically, how did they do it? What was the methodology?
5. Social Proof - demonstrate that you have what it takes to make this all come true for your prospect.

We are going to focus our time here today on Step 4. I have a slightly different interpretation of this to Raskin (he calls this the Magic Gifts i.e. when you wave your wand, what do they get), and when I am working with high growth SaaS businesses we tend to pull this step out and take a whole afternoon working through it as for me it’s the strongest component to really blow the mind of the prospect you are sitting in front of. 

The Art of War

Sun Tzu’s thinking is my favourite example of a Success Framework and the strategic insight it delivers to any leader, not just to a military commander. In The Art of War he first defines the Common Thread - that the winners successfully understand their enemy’s centre of gravity and the centre of gravity is always the enemy’s mind & their morale. This in itself is Paradigm Shifting as most military commanders start instead from the idea of force & confrontation.

He then defines four elements that, when executed well, deliver victory. 

In his case each is captured in one Chinese character, which makes them hard to translate. Here they are summarised in English by Victor H. Mair, arguably the best of the English translators:

• Assessment
  • The origin of this word in Chinese is “to weigh”. What do we know about our enemy?
• Configuration
  • What are the factors which must be considered prior to an engagement?
• Time to Act
  • When does the Configuration align most propitiously for victory?
• Strategem
  • What is the operational plan that extracts the most value from the psychological factors which will allow us to affect the centre of gravity. Just a military plan would be purely an operational plan and would not have the extra edge to be termed a Strategem.

So if you want to win a conflict, these are the headline labels which need to be mastered to ensure Success.

The Invitation to Pitch

Racing forward several thousand years, this is what I would call a Success Framework. In other words, in B2B SaaS: what must our prospects do in order to win in their market? It is our job to come up with this for them in order that they can perceive a route to being a Winner, and not a Loser. When presented to them they should respond in one of two ways:

1. "This is exactly how we are thinking. This vendor understands how we are thinking and could be a useful partner."
2. "We hadn’t thought of it like that. I wonder if we can get a copy of the deck as this is very insightful and we ought to consider it."

In accomplishing this we position ourselves not as vendors at all, but rather as strategic partners. This has some rather pleasant side effects:

• Even if our product is basic, this technique will always have the effect of raising its perceived value.
• It will give us leverage when it comes to a price negotiation.
• It makes it more likely that we get in front of decision makers as we have elevated the discussion to the the strategic level. 

However the most vital thing it does for us is shatter the “buyer beware” defences at the most important juncture. When the Buyer Defence crumbles this is the moment when their response shifts from “send us a deck”, to; “can you tell us how you can help us with this”. In other words it’s the invitation to pitch that we require if we are to maximise our chances of winning their business.

Constructing a Success Framework

So what’s the framework for a Success Framework!? How do you go about building one that achieves all the things we have discussed above?

I always start with these ten questions. These are the questions we can ask that will help us get to the root of the Success Framework:

1. What is the Strategic Imperative for this ICP?
2. What could cause the Casualty to lose their job?
3. What are the Risks in their market?
4. What competitive threats are they under?
5. What are the Winners doing in this market?
6. What are the Losers missing?
7. What are our own Messaging Pillars?
8. What are the top three Pains we identified for this Casualty/ ICP mix?
9. What measures did we identify when we built the NDV Chain?
10. What strategic outcomes can we demonstrate that we have made come true for our current customers?

I didn't use Sun Tzu's framework by chance. It's the foundation for the Success Framework. Let's restate it in slightly different language:

1. Assess - Outline the key phases our ICP must go through in order to win in their market. Label each one with a high level word or phrase.
2. Configure - Examine the Risks which may result in their failure. What are the pitfalls that must be avoided to deliver against these effectively. Outline the strategies they could deploy to neutralise them. Give these Labels too.
3. Time to Act - Sequence some or all of these Labels to present a clear narrative that shows them the methodology by which they can move to a state of success. This cannot be easy. If it were easy everyone would do it. Find a graphical way to present this so it can be brought to life in a deck.
4. Strategem - This is the mapping to our product. Whilst we will not include this in the final Success Framework narrative, if we do this right they will ask for a Demo. We must be sure that when we come to present our Demo, our product is integral to their success. We must be uniquely able to help with the challenge which may prevent them from winning.

Example

Let’s finish by translating this into a B2B example. We will return to the made up example I have used throughout these newsletters.

Imagine one more time, that we run a marketing focussed SaaS business which helps optimise & prioritise inbound leads. 

Our product is used by marketing managers to automate lead-flow. We have a Risk that we will be considered too low level for the CMO to want to spend time on this problem. Probably one of the advantages that a marketing manager would appreciate is the time saving we can provide but this is unlikely to excite a CMO unless we get lucky and they happen to be on a time & efficiency drive. 

So for our example maybe we come up with the following:

CMOs at SaaS Businesses between Seed & C Round have 6 steps they simply have to nail if they are going to deliver on their organisations strategic objectives.

Predictability, Control, Understanding, Velocity, Repeatability, Scalability.

The first of these is Predictability - for an organisation to have forecastable cashflow, a believable pipeline, and consistent sales they have to deliver a Predictable baseline. This means knowing precisely who are we targeting on an ongoing 12 month time horizon, knowing how we deliver our messaging to them, staying ahead of our competitors messaging, and ultimately enabling the sales leader to have 3-6 months of foresight of what is coming down the line.

But that in itself is not enough. Before we can do that we need Control at every stage. So that means control of costs - our CAC must be permanently managed. We can never deliver Predictability with an absence of Control.

Control of course is critical, but completely impossible without Understanding. And that means being permanently on top of market trends, shifts in channel efficacy, real time monitoring across multiple geographies, markets, currencies, and a host of other hard to monitor variables. 

But even Control is not enough. To truly achieve Predictability we need to layer in Velocity. Velocity is the component by which we know we have Leads with the the correct potential ACV, that will close inside the right timeframe, are delivering sufficient & sustainable SQOs, and indicate that they will close at the correct ratio. 

Delivering these three critical elements allow us the possibility of Predictability. 

I’m not going to continue with this entirely made up example but hopefully you can see that as we layer each new element we look like we have a clear understanding of how to win in their market, whilst simultaneously landing that there is a very high risk of failure. Finally we have shown that there is a route to win, but it’s not straightforward - it will take application & effort. The natural assumption is that we are uniquely able to help with this.

Now our product is not a tool to help marketing managers save time, it’s a critical component for CMOs to deliver Predictability, which leads to investment, to growth and to their own personal success.

That in turn means they will now give us the response we need - “How can you help with this?”

 Exercise

1. Build out a Success Framework for your ICP
2. Turn it into a diagram or similar graphical representation
3. Construct a narrative to walk your prospect through the Success Framework. Remember this must not be about you or your product, that can come later.
4. Try it out internally or with trusted customers - does it elevate your solution to the strategic level?

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