During my years of managing services delivery organizations for enterprise software companies, I have had contact with many great customers across a wide variety of industries.  The customers have been both large and small and have been located all around the world.

One distinctive group of customers I call the PSO’s Best Customers.  In each company, these Best Customers are small in number, but they are very large in value.  These Best Customers usually have interesting requirements that many times seem impossible to achieve.  These Best Customers present great challenges, but they also work closely with the PSO to resolve issues in ways that empower the pursuit of success in the PSO’s solution delivery activities.

These Best Customers get to know the PSO really well, and they are never hesitant to provide great references for the PSO.  Their references pave the way countless times for other customers to do business with the PSO, and largely due to these references, the PSO is able to grow its business at a brisk pace.

At times these Best Customers exert influence with prospective customers that seem all out of proportion, and watching that influence go to work in the PSO’s behalf is great to see.  These Best Customers routinely provide the PSO with great insights about the environments into which solutions are delivered, but the Best Customers are strangely absent during most of the implementation activities.

The Best Customers result in millions of dollars of revenue for many PSO organizations, but paradoxically the Best Customers never pay for the services provided by the PSO.  These Best Customers are well known to be sources of great business benefit both for the PSO and for the rest of the company, and the Best Customers are held in very high esteem by company management.

These Best Customers are not classic external customers, but rather they are the top few salespersons in the company.  These Best Customers are so important to a PSO that the term Top Salesperson is capitalized in the remainder of this article.

Cultivating, selling and closing these Best Customers is not easy, but of all the activities that you do, landing the company’s few Top Salespersons as your top customers may well be your most productive accomplishment.

Like all external customers, Top Salespersons have needs, and they are vocal in expressing their needs.  Top Salespersons live in professional pressure cookers, and they usually figure out how to share that pressure with the PSO.  Fortunately, Top Salespersons are very adept at turning difficult situations into positive outcomes, and they enjoy engaging in activities that result in the attainment of value propositions that are mutually beneficial for their customers, for the company, and for themselves.

The pursuit of these Best Customers is multifaceted, but in this article I am just going to briefly focus on meeting the primary needs of Top Salespersons and establishing mutually beneficial value propositions with Top Salespersons.

Primary Needs

We all know that the primary needs of Top Salespersons are closely associated with closing large deals.  However, exactly what this means to the Professional Services organization is usually not obvious.  Surprisingly, the top needs of Top Salespersons are rarely associated with substantially cutting prices or giving away services.  Top Salespersons are experts at forming relationships and selling value propositions.  They rarely feel that giving away services is a very good route to success.

The primary needs of a Top Salesperson are dependent on the individual Top Salesperson’s expertise and upon a variety of other factors within the company and within the marketplace.  I have always had marginal success in guessing the top needs of individual Top Salespersons, but I have had great success in asking about the needs, listening carefully, and figuring out ways to address the primary needs.  Top Salespersons know that the clear expression of needs, along with good listening skills and a decent product, generally lead to positive solutions.  Top Salespersons will always be willing to let you know their top needs if you take the time to ask them.  Usually, after the top needs are expressed and understood, addressing the top needs of a Top Salesperson is not very difficult to do.

In doing research for this article, I performed an informal survey of several Top Salespersons who have histories of being super-performers in their companies year after year.  These salespersons are revered within their companies because they have always exceeded their sales quotas by huge amounts.  Each of these Top Salespersons has indicated to me that the PSO organization is a critical component to his or her success.

The primary needs as expressed by the several Top Salespersons with whom I talked are:

1. Provide excellent product and functional knowledge - (3 votes)
2. Deliver the project on time and on budget - (2 votes)
3. Provide solid communication and well-constructed project documents to the customer - (2 votes)
4. Add credibility to the solution (validate what the sales person has told the customer) - (2 votes)
5. Provide appropriate assistance during the sales cycle - (2 votes)
6. Provide deep technical knowledge - (1 vote)
7. Be exceptionally responsive both during the sales cycle and during project implementation - (1 vote)
8. Provide a high quality project manager to run the project and then perform the post-project hand-off activities - (1 vote)
9. Differentiate the solution through value-added competency - (1 vote)
10. Provide solid assurance to the customer that a successful project is achievable - (1 vote)
11. Be flexible in order to address the needs of the specific opportunity - (1 vote)
12. Deliver projects that can serve as references for future prospective projects - (1 vote)
13. Continue to build competency within the PSO - (1 vote)

None of these primary needs is particularly surprising, and each individual Top Salesperson regards some of these needs as important and some as unimportant.  Your challenge is to determine which key needs apply to which Top Salespersons.  This would be very difficult to do if there were scores or hundreds of Top Salespersons that you have to deal with, but fortunately, by definition, there are only a few Top Salespersons within each company.  Because these Top Salespersons have huge influence within the company, it is in your best interest to thoroughly understand the key needs of each individual Top Salesperson.

Attainment of Mutually Beneficial Value Propositions

Top Salespersons spend major parts of their professional lives figuring out value propositions that will result in mutual benefits for their customers, for their companies and for themselves.  Top Salespersons are extremely skilled at formulating and selling value propositions that make sense to all parties.  The classic three-way value proposition of a software deal involves the Top Salesperson presenting and selling a solution that addresses important customer needs, the customer reciprocating by paying large amounts of money and providing references that are useful to the company and to the salesperson in establishing credibility with other prospective customers, and the company paying lots of money to the Top Salesperson.

The value propositions between the PSO and Top Salespersons are not quite so straightforward because there are no cash payments between the parties, so determining mutually beneficial value propositions that provide the basis for productive long term relationships between the PSO and Top Salespersons may require some effort on the part of PSO management.

Establishing good value propositions with each Top Salesperson may be somewhat fluid because the sales landscape is always changing.  However, because Top Salespersons usually focus on selling a small number of key benefits to their customers, they are usually very open to the concept of being satisfied if the PSO can fully meet a relatively small number of their key needs.  In my experience in dealing with Top Salespersons I have found that if I can identify the top 3-5 needs for each Top Salesperson, then I can build a great relationship between the PSO and the Top Salesperson.  The relationship is based on the PSO satisfying the top needs of each Top Salesperson, and the Top Salesperson satisfying the top needs of the PSO.

It will be up to you to work out the mutually beneficial value propositions with each Top Salesperson within your company.  Various examples of commitments that could be made by the PSO to meet the needs of Top Salespersons are provided in the results of the informal survey in the prior section of this document.

Some examples of major commitments that you could ask from Top Salespersons to meet the needs of the PSO are:

• Positioning the PSO in a positive light with new customers
• Assisting in setting customer expectations that are consistent with the realities of the implementation project
• Assisting the PSO in booking the implementation services at a price that enables the PSO to meet its financial objectives
• Not wasting the time of scarce and valuable PSO personnel resources
• Assisting in minimizing the non-billable time that the PSO must invest in selling and delivering the implementation project
• Involving the PSO early in the sales cycle
• Keeping the PSO informed regarding upcoming deals
• Positioning the PSO for positive relationships with partner organizations

As with any exchange of value propositions, the value propositions do not really count unless they are documented in some way.  Clearly you do not need a formalized agreement with your Top Salespersons, but at least establishing an informal understanding via a well-constructed email is a good thing to do.

None of these commitments require rocket science to understand, and Top Salespersons are usually willing to make these commitments as their part of the mutual value proposition with the PSO.

In a nutshell, if the PSO is positioned to be an asset that empowers the Top Salesperson’s selling process, and if the Top Salesperson is positioned to be an agent for closing clean and efficient PSO implementation projects, the mutual value propositions will work out well for both parties.

Conclusion

The small number of Top Salespersons in your company should be your very best customers because Top Salespersons have unrivaled influence with external customers, with other salespersons and with company management.  Establishing superior working relationships with Top Salespersons enables the PSO to achieve increased revenues, improved margins, improved reputation, and improved job enjoyment for all personnel within the PSO.

Landing the Top Salespersons as your best customers is not terribly difficult to do, but you have to put in the cycles to truly understand the most important needs of each Top Salesperson.  Top Salespersons are very bright and motivated, and they live and die on the basis of the relationships that they form.  If you meet their top needs, they will reciprocate by providing assistance in meeting your top needs.