I had the pleasure of recently attending a presentation by a Managing Director of one of the top Wall Street firms. His topic was “How to Sell to Wall Street” for small companies, specifically IT ones. It was a great presentation and the entire audience had his full attention. What I found most interesting was that many of his points were not focused on how the sales rep sells to Wall Street. Rather, much of his focus was on setting the vendor’s senior management straight on their obligations to ensure success. I just wonder how many senior managers in the room understood the “what not to do’s” were targeted at them!

Wall Street firms spend money on solutions to:

• Reduce their costs now. Not in 2-5 years but right now.

• Support expansion of their high growth market areas. Don’t waste their time on incremental gains in saturated markets. And don’t expect them to tell you what their high growth markets are.
• Stronger risk & control systems. The current economic crisis is affecting financial services firms worse than the bubble of 2001 did for technology firms. If you have system that helps them reduce risk and improve compliance, they want to know about it. But remember that everyone is pitching “compliance solutions” nowadays.

Selling at the CIO level isn’t the best bet:

• There are multiple decision makers, all below the CIO level.
• Tech decisions are made bottom-up by really smart people with a great mix of technology and business savvy.
• CIO doesn’t have time or desire to pick your solution. They pay their people a lot of money and empower them to make the right decisions. Or get fired. Either way, your only hope with the CIO is that they refer you to one of the decision makers.
• Work the administrative assistants. Don’t screw with them because they can be your worst enemy.
• It’s a long sales cycle and they’ll demand aggressive pricing.

The Managing Director said that Wall Street and the metro NYC market is larger than continental Europe. Larger than the next 3 US markets combined. Therefore, “…get in anyway you can….make it easy to buy…legal, pricing, best tech people….but don’t give it away.”

His practical advice for selling to Wall Street:

• Understand your customer. Yes, this is obvious but remember that the customer knows how important they are in the biggest market in the world and therefore how important it would be for them to be your customer.
• Remember who has the money. The one with the money (the customer) is the boss. It’s their rules or no money.
• Don’t out-arrogant arrogant people. They’re successful Wall Street people and you are who?
• Send them your best. They’re the best so send them your best.
• Don’t send them resellers. Wall Street wants to work directly with the manufacturer.
• Give them consistency in sales. Don’t send a new rep every 6 months or worse, a new Sales Engineer every 3 months.
• Don’t break the process. Use their NDA. Use their license agreement. Don’t redline the agreements so that they look like your agreements. Let your business people review the contracts, not your legal team. Don’t make it hard for Wall Street to do business with you. They won’t.
• Have a local NYC presence. A rep traveling in from Los Angeles or even Boston doesn’t cut it. Wall Street is the biggest market so invest here.
• They all talk to each other. If you have cool stuff, they’ll tell the rest of Wall Street. If you fail to heed the advice from above, especially the parts about being too arrogant or not sending your best, they’ll tell the rest of Wall Street that, too.

He summed up his practical advice by repeating “…get in anyway you can….make it easy to buy…legal, pricing, best tech people….but don’t give it away.”

How well do you know the real reasons why your customers use your solution? The more you know the why the better you will be at selling the how. Features are rarely the reason. Sure, features are important but your competitors have features, too. What about the benefits of those features? Yes, more important than features but even junior sales reps right out of Dale Carnegie can recite features. Your company marketing department may supply you with glossy customer success literature to hand out to prospects but nobody reads them and rarely believes the platitudes printed on them.

You want your prospect to engage with you; to think of you as an expert, to move from disbelief to want to need. Your goal is to share brief customer success stories in conversations with prospects so they can see themselves benefiting from your solution in the same way.

The best way to engage with your prospect is to throw those PowerPoint slides that marketing gave you away. “Death by PowerPoint” is an all too-true cliche. I carry only 2 slides with me, printed out and laminated back to back. One side has the logos of all my company’s customers. The other side is diagram of my solution. By only showing the customer logos slide, I can engage with a prospect for 30 minutes just by mentioning the one-line successes each of these customers has had with my solution.

This means:

* My prospect realizes I have important knowledge to impart
* I know my customers, why they buy from my and the value they derive
* Therefore, I am not a transaction-based feature-benefit sales weenie but a trusted advisor

And where is the prospect’s attention focused? Not up on the wall, reading the slide faster than you can talk but rather focused on you. Where it belongs.

So learn your one-line customer success stories by heart, throw away your PowerPoint slides and get back to selling!

I’ve been reading a new blog from Geoffrey James over at BNET called SalesMachine. He’s generated some controversy, both intended and unintended, about selling. This is good for his blog, of course, because it’s getting people there to comment.

He recently posted a commentary on, “Should Sales Run the Company” where he quickly said -

Absolutely

He feels that the sales function in a for-profit organization should be leading the way. Not running the ship, mind you, but the group that leads the rest of groups to the destination. I titled my blog posting, “Preaching to the [sales] choir” because sales people already agree with his posting - we’re the only ones out on the street talking to customers and prospects alike on what’s going on and getting feedback from the only people who matter - those who buy our offering.

Of course, lots of non-salespeople are reading his blog….and disagreeing. His follow-up posting responding to these comments is an even better read than his first post. Much like one of my favorite sports columnists, Michael Silver, Geoffrey takes their comments and comes back swinging. Yeah, this is fun!