To sales guru Jim Holden, selling is not an art, it’s military science. “Too often,” writes Holden in Power Base Selling , his widely-read book, “salespeople don’t think like generals. You may be your company’s foot soldier, its first line of defence and attack, but you don’t have to think like one.”
Holden’s approach is reminiscent of that of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese warrior-philosopher, someone Holden quotes liberally through the book. Author of two other bestsellers, Worlds Class Selling and The Selling Fox, he was recently in Mumbai to promote his sales management company, Holden International, and reveal his selling tactics to select managers. That was when he spoke with Aanand Pandey.
Your selling strategy pertains to business-to-business selling. Is that right?
Yes. It does.
Most of your clients are in the technology sector. Any particular reason?
We also work in other sectors such as banking and pharmaceuticals, but the competition is not as pronounced as it is in the technology sector, where we are very well known.
You said in your presentation that you prefer indirect selling to direct selling. Please elaborate.
If nothing about your product, brand or presence in an account gives you an edge over competition, you should avoid a direct strategy. Moreover, if you are a smaller force, going head-to-head against another company that is dominant in an account, you must definitely not try the direct strategy.
You will have to think unconventionally — discover sources of competitive advantage the competitor is not aware of. The indirect strategy is powerful because when you think about altering the balance of power within an industry, it requires that you are able to develop an asymmetric advance in dealing with competition. This is what the strategy of power base selling is all about.
If you tell us how and when the idea of “power base selling” occurred to you, it will help us understand the strategy better.
I devised this strategy when I was working for Teradyne [Teradyne, Inc is a US-based supplier of automatic test equipment] in Chicago in the mid-1970s. At Teradyne, I sold test equipment to big electronics companies such as Western Electric and Bell Labs.
Like all new salespeople, I wanted to know what made the real difference when we won a particular account. “Obviously, we had the best product,” was a refrain I often used to hear. However, we were competing with HP [Hewlett Packard] and Techtronics that also had great products. To understand the real difference I began to document everything that transpired during sales calls.
I observed that there was one factor common to all successful deals: the power base of that organisation that had a cross-functional influence. Around this time, we were invited to Western Electric (WE) to pitch for a board test application order. Till this time, we, at Teradyne, had never sold a single board test system to this company. At WE, I noticed that there was a department chief whose opinion was sought in areas clearly outside his authority.
I discerned the official agenda of this powerful individual — who I will now refer to as “the fox” — and formulated a board test solution that would directly advance his official agenda. When I came in to present my solution, the other senior engineers present in the committee could not relate to the issues I was talking about, but the fox listened intently.
[Interrupting] How did you map the fox’s official agenda?
By evaluating strategic decisions he was involved in and looking for a common denominator. In addition, I used to ask him certain questions directly that gave me an idea of the real source of influence.
For example, I would ask him to define the company’s strategy or company values. I would also ask him who drives change in the company, because the real influence becomes visible only in times of change. There are a number of ways of finding the real source of influence — we group these ways under the term Ten Dimensions.
How do the foxes help a salesperson beat the competition?
These foxes can give you the insight you need to determine how to provide unexpected value. And all this is legitimate, because you are actually providing a solution that resonates with what really drives a company.
This can help you beat competitors in ways that they won’t understand because they are thinking traditionally — they are focused on the direct decision makers. Foxes that you are aligned with are so powerful within an organisation and their influence is so disproportionate to their authority that their input can make a dramatic difference to your proposal.
So, were you able to win the Western Electric account?
After the presentation at Western Electric, I received a call from the fox at my Teradyne office in Des Plaines, Chicago. He said, “I want you to understand that I know what you did. I support it.”
The next week, we were told that we had won the business. That day on, we dominated the board test business at Western Electric and it was all due to the political alignment of our solution. Once I began to understand this and capitalise on this strategy, my sales grew dramatically.
I realised that I had stumbled upon a non-traditional source of competitive advantage. I began to see that there was an influential body within customer organisations that play a decisive role in finalising the vendors.
It also became clear that there is always one person who is extremely powerful at the epicentre. Having developed the first programme based on the power base strategy, I started Holden International in 1979. Today, we work in 25 countries, and we have trained over 400,000 people.
