How B2B Technology Vendors Can Make an Emotional Connection With Their Customers
Post-COVID - Know Your Dynamic Demand Profile Trigger to Identify Growth Areas
Source: HBR October 2020 Edition
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Narendra Modi
Background
Appearance
Engagement, Communication, Clothing
Summary
By analysing the appearance, engagement, communication and clothing style of Narendra Modi, it is evident that his primary element is Earth, and the second element is Fire. His tertiary element could be attributed to Space (Metal).
In terms of his engagement with others, his primary element, Earth, means that he finds it hard to work with people with Air and/or Water as their primary element because Air and Water are in a non-parental child relationship with Earth. People with Fire and Space (Metal) as their primary element would work well with him. These two elements are in a parent-child relationship with Earth, giving way to harmony prevailing among them.
Image Credit: Pinterest
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Previous articles can be read here
Weekend Reading
Excerpt from my upcoming book at amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales"
Next: Coming up
Excerpt from my upcoming book at amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales"
Next: Coming up
Excerpt from my upcoming book at amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales"
Next: Coming up
Excerpt from my upcoming book at amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales"
Next: Coming up
Excerpt from my upcoming book at amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales"
● preparing, modifying and negotiating a legal framework for contractually engaging with buyers like the master service agreement (MSA), statement of work (SOW) and purchase order● do due diligence, provide assessment and guidance on the following risks:o business
▪ lock-in commitment and its implications▪ probability of damages arising and the magnitude of the impact from such damages▪ service continuity plans for events arising from insolvency or government actions or regulatory requirement
▪ exit options and handovers▪ syncing or adapting the agreement with the current situation, an example in today's world like adapting force majeure to include a pandemic
o finance
▪ the right balance of warranties offered and excluded▪ managing cost spillover arising from certain clauses▪ additional cost or taxes, usage charges like overage charges▪ insurance expectations to cover the risk
o legal
▪ legal compliances like sanction, privacy, data privacy and anti-bribery▪ licensing issues, if any▪ reasonable exclusions and limits on indemnities and liabilities● managing the risk matrix and governance approvals● ensuring the deal is closed and signed off
o driven by a minimal risk appetite and fear of failure means these natives are pedantic across exposure to any business, financial and legal risk
o slow in drafting and preparing and sharing with stakeholders, semantically strong, their attention to detail is good, and they prefer long term agreementso they are driven by relentless effort and status quo; the emphasis is on using the standard terms and conditions, ringfencing the scope with a maximum toleranceo they are not open to any financial penalties or liabilities in case there is a failure or delay in deliveryo they are slow and sluggish in following up with the customer for closure
o they have a lot of patience and are good listeners, hide information,o they lack transparency and principles, can often be deceptive or employ pressure tacticso they are accommodative and let others take control and respond only when necessary
o they speak slowly with a deep voice, sluggish in response and react at their own paceo they are good listeners and are structured and semantically driven
Next: Coming up
Excerpt from the upcoming book at amazon.com - "Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Elements of Nature Meet B2B Sales"
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Negotiations - Influence to Win
The business to business (B2B) sales negotiation is a conversation between a seller and a buyer to reach an agreement that is beneficial to both. To reach a zone of potential agreement (ZOPA), both engage in multiple rounds of discussion. The back and forth nature of these discussions are driven to gain an upper hand over the other side by finding their reservation point (breaking point), or their BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) or any useful information which will assist in bargaining.
To win negotiations in sales a lot of preparation is required. This includes the collection of information about the other side's negotiation style, motivation, risks, BATNA, concession, reservation, and timing. Without preparation and gathering of this information, the chances of winning negotiations are minimal. Having said that, sometimes even after gathering information and preparing, negotiations can still be lost or suspended indefinitely because of change in the political landscape, financial upheaval, change in priority, a pandemic outbreak or any other unseen factors.
The gathering of information and preparation for negotiations is time-consuming and is often challenging. To overcome this challenging task, elements of nature and their attributes are leveraged in preparing the groundwork to influence and win negotiations.
Let us explore how a seller or a buyer leverages elemental attributes, learned in previous sections, to position and influence their respective stakeholders with the intent to win.
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Space (Ether, Metal) Natives Negotiation
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Persona Mapping with Elements - Buyer and Seller
In the world of business-to-business (B2B) sales, the buyer and seller relationship plays a significant role in winning or losing a transaction. Creating and nurturing these relationships across multiple stakeholders is a challenging, lengthy and time-consuming process.
To assist in the relationship-building process, one of the key activities and constituents of a sales plan is to build the buyer's stakeholder persona. Mapping of these stakeholder personas reveals the type of levers that can be used to build and nurture long-term relationships, with the intent of winning and expanding the sales pipeline. Without the intelligence of the buyer's persona, the sales execution effort will be challenging and profoundly inefficient and ineffective.
Besides, it reduces the risk of losing a sales representative, because by capturing and documenting the buyer's persona you can ensure that gathered intelligence and levers applied in building relationships and influencing negotiations are not lost with a change in guard at the seller's end.
The framework for the creation and destruction of five elements is applied to overcome the challenging task of mapping and building the persona. The inherent attributes of each element are mapped to the personality of the stakeholders at the buyer's and seller's end in different scenarios.
Let us explore how these elemental attributes assist in building persona maps.
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Earth Elements Human Traits
Appearance - Well Built, Square Face
Body Attributes
● well-built body, thick calves, large muscles in men and breasts in women
● natural roundness and plumpness to the features
● the face represents, lips, mouth, lower cheeks, upper eyelid, nose bridge
● full lips, thick nose bridge
● round or plump lower cheeks next to mouth
● less prominent chins, angled jaws, protruding cheekbones so the forehead and chin look comparatively narrow
● eyes wide apart, round nose tip
● roundness in stomach
● deep voice
Organs
o stomach, spleen, pancreas
Famous Personalities
● Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Dolly Patron, Rene Zellweger, Ed Sheeran, Mister Rogers, Princess Diana
● Narendra Modi (PM of India)
Earth means Nurture, Calmness, and Stability
● Key Traits – calm, strategic, hardworking, speak with gravitas, ready to serve
● Role
o Buyer - strategic, long term deals, relentless
o Seller - advisor, bondsman, hardworking
● Upside - determined, patience, practical, relationship builder
● Downside - lazy, deceptive, fixated, don’t forgive, indecision
● Risk Appetite (Low, Moderate, Considered, High, Extreme) – moderate
● Win Desire (Low, Moderate, Considered, High, Extreme) - high
● Deal Loss - protect people, worries for future, confusion
● Engagement Style (Top-Down, Bottom-up, Hybrid) – bottom-up
● Sales Territory Approach (Hunting, Farming, Hybrid) - farming
●. Communications Style - slow in communication and action, slow response, good listeners, structured, semantically driven, speak with gravitas and purpose, deep voice
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Earth is the most stable element among the five elements. Like a mother, it is providing resources to all living beings to live and grow since the inception and evolution of humankind. Similarly, earthly natives are like a mother who provides resources to her children to live and grow. They provide unflinching and unconditional support to others like how a mother provides for her children. Their inherent ability to guide and nurture makes them a good mentor and a trusted advisor.
The bond between mother and a child is everlasting, similarly, these natives are regarded as a bondsman for their friends and family members. People can count on them for their support during challenging times. In sales, these people protect their team members when a deal is lost.
The Earth remains mostly calm, except when rare volcanoes erupt or earthquakes or cyclones occur, causing grief to those affected. Similarly, earthly natives remain calm and stable in their day to day life. They lose their cool and calmness rarely, like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
A mother raises her children with patience, and determination, and works hard to ensure they get a good life. Similarly, earthly natives are determined, hardworking, and patient to achieve better outcomes. They are relentless in their effort.
Earth represents the late summer season when fruits are ripe, days are longer with higher temperatures, forcing people to stay indoors, take rest, and life appears to move lazily. Furthermore, earth signifies the afternoon, when people tend to be sluggish after having their lunch. Similarly, earthly natives are less active and cherish sitting in one place like a couch or an armrest chair. Besides this, the earth is the heaviest and slowest mover among the five elements. Thus, earthly natives move at turtle's pace, speak slowly with gravitas, and have a deep voice. These natives communicate and respond at their own pace, so if you send an email to them, then don’t expect an immediate response. Their ability to listen calmly like the slow-moving earth makes them good listeners.
The Spleen's main function is to filter our blood, by removing old, malformed or damaged red blood cells. This means, earthly natives can transform slowly with time, they can discard old habits and adapt to new ways of life. In sales, selling half-hearted ideas or window dressed old ideas to an earthly buyer will be caught and discarded. These buyers keep their ‘crap’ filter active and switched on.
Like a mother, the earth generally represents relationships, harmony and patience. This allows these natives to be good in building and maintaining relationships with friends and family members. Furthermore, the constant churning underneath the earth is carried out slowly and calmly by the amalgamation of many layers and items. This implies that earthly natives are collaborative and gel with others easily.
In sales, these sellers prefer bottom-up engagement, underpinned by their ability to build and maintain relationships. In terms of approaching a sales territory, they prefer farming because their risk appetite is low, and slow churning or status quo is their mantra. The rapid and cutthroat environment is overwhelming for them.
Earth represents fear, fixation, and relentless effort because any imbalance in the stomach and spleen causes the mind to be unstable and makes it wander from one thought to another, leading to obsessional thinking and constant worry. Besides that, any imbalance in these organs disrupts their continuous effort to supply energy and nutrients to other organs. In sales, fear of failing haunts, earthly sellers. So, to overcome that, they put relentless effort into winning a deal. Their fixation on not failing at any cost gives them a higher desire to succeed. When a deal is lost after putting in enormous effort, they start worrying about the future and drive them to a state where they get overwhelmed by it and become indecisive. Earthly buyers prefer long-term instead of short-term contracts because they are sluggish, and the status quo gives them comfort and accomplishment of security. Moreover, they don’t cherish rapid changes in their environment like an airy or a fiery buyer. Positioning a short-term deal to an earthly buyer is futile.
Earthly natives are deceptive because the earth represents the stomach and that needs a constant supply of food. To gather resources like money or food, often these natives will employ deception and cheating. This trait is primarily prominent in earthly natives and to a lesser extent in metal and airy natives.
Earthly natives have a well-built bodies with thick calves and large muscles in men and breasts in women. They have a thick nose bridge, eyes are wide apart, the nose tip is round and the stomach is round. In general, they have roundness and plumpness to their facial features.
Buyers persona matters in B2B Sales and Marketing, without this your sales execution is inefficient.
I have highlighted this in my upcoming book on Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus.
More on this in the coming days, in the meantime some insights on why buyers' persona matters are here.
