Ends versus Means

The age old moral dilemma, “does the end justify the means?”; who knows, who cares, and frankly does it matter most of the time?  Well in B2B sales it does but in a different context.  Specifically, it appears that in B2B sales, most sales people seem to focus on the means, and spend little time on the ends.

The ends in this case is the actual ultimate impact for the buyer, the tangible difference and advantage the buyer will have by virtue of buying, implementing and using the seller’s offering.  The means is the product itself, which while important to the seller and stakeholders in his company, is of little direct consequence to the economic buyer who is much more concerned about the outcome, hopefully improved in some ways by the seller’s offering.

This not that new of a concept, but by simplifying it in some ways we find many sales people are able to deal with it without many of the distractions they normally have to deal with in a sale.  The means here represent not only the product or solution, but the messaging Marketing wants you to deliver, which often the buyer does not appreciate.  Not because it is not a “work of art”, but rather it deals with the deliverable not the outcome.  Many marketing people, sales managers and sales people, get so enamoured with the product and it’s advancements over the last generation or the competition that they forget that the buyer really could care less about the “uniqueness” of the product/solution, and are much more driven by the impact it has on their end situation.

Research companies are forever trying to impress their buyers with their methodology, “proprietary process”, the thoroughness of their algorithm, and so on.  But they forget that the end user, the real economic buyer, the VP of Marketing, CIO, Product Manager, cares about how they will use the output of the research firm’s glorious process.  Sellers fail to realise that often the “end” user, the person using the processed information, not the person doing the processing, often only deals with aspects of the service, and usually in conjunction with other inputs, brought together in a way that allows the ultimate recipient to make decisions.  The measure of worth here is the impact and quality of that decision not the myriad of inputs and sources that went in to it.  Stated another way, what counts, no, the only thing that counts, is the end, not the means.

At times sales people embrace half this idea, they focus on their own ends, the sale, not the buyer’s ends which is the successful resolution of their issue, be that a problem or an opportunity.  First challenge is to fully understand who the real end buyer is.  A marketing manager may be making the purchase of a report or a subscription; an IT manager may be buying a solution, software/hardware or both.  In both cases these people may be the ones transacting and interfacing with the sales person, but they are not the end buyer.  Right away, it needs to be asked why the rep didn’t approach the end buyer.  Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, no access (we’ll deal with that another day), even then the approach should be based on the end goal of the ultimate users, not the specs of the intermediary.  The intermediary is (or should be) aware of the ultimate end of the project, not every detail but they know the end goal of the person or group benefiting from the work they will do with the goods or services you sold.  If they didn’t feel or know how they can serve that end with your product, they would not buy it, waste time talking to you.  But knowing how the game is played they get you to focus on price competition and other distractions, rather than allowing you to build value based on the end goal.  That is if you let them, do you?

You should be aware even and especially when they are not, this way you can lead the process and have the discussion at that level on the specs and views of an intermediary.

Executing the sale based on focusing on the end rather ha the means is straight forward, not easy but straight forward.  Use the discovery process to demonstrate your ability to positively impact their end goal in the buyer’s terms; conversely the risk to the end goal if they don’t buy from you.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto