Missionary / Visionary / Strategic Selling

Definition: Missionary selling = having to sell the concept and then having to sell your solution and your company. Usually creating a new market or selling a revolutionary or disruptive solution.

Technology visionaries see how it should be. They see the blatant inefficiencies, stupidity and  wasted money. They create fantastic solutions from leading edge technologies that can change how we work and live, whether the market is ready or not. The visionaries, with great energy and enthusiasm, start preaching “the changing world” and how things should be and thus their solutions are introduced to the market.

“People NEED to change”
“Businesses NEED to adopt new ways to compete and stop the wastage”

But people won’t change until the market tells them to do so and not just because there are efficiencies to be gained. There is risk in change and there are vested interests in not changing. When a market begins to decline, innovative solutions come to play from existing market players or from new entrants.

When an industry’s players are making money in the current industry structure how do you get in with a disruptive offering?

Geoffrey A Moore has written much on this. A great author. Great books. I’m currently reading and highly recommend “Dealing with Darwin”. It was recommended to me by a client, Kevin O’Leary, CEO of Qumas.

I’ve seen this, experienced it and learnt the hard way. When you sell the visionary sell, it’s very hard work to get things moving. The visionary becomes an evangelist with unwavering belief converting a number of strategic thinkers in senior positions in key target client companies. The business can become a sequence of paid pilots and trials rollouts or projects to demonstrate the value to their operating teams. But slow to grow to full scale projects.

How do you get over the hump of “just too many vested interests keeping things as they are”?
“The market will change, it only makes sense!”,
…quoting a great Irish technology business leader “But will they starve in the meantime?”.

You see this visionary thinking within university research projects, and rightly so. They are projecting years ahead on how things should or will be done and providing solutions to meet this need, not taking the challenges in the current market structure into account. If it takes five years to change the industry, what’s going to feed us in the meantime?

So how can visionaries get to the market and build a business to reap the rewards of their efforts; like eating an elephant, bit-by-bit and not a whole elephant on a plate.

Firstly, how do you know if you’re visionary selling?
1) You have no direct competitors. Others are likely solving the business need very differently and maybe even labour intensively
2) It’s a regular discussion on the various ways to communicate ‘what it is’ and every sales presentation may be different (making very difficult to learn what works)
3) If you had market success, some businesses types would be no longer needed in the marketplace
4) The passionate visionary tends towards seeking appreciation for the creation or idea from like-minded people and finds it difficult to talk to the tough decision makers
5) The visionary takes it personally, when its suggested we focus on solving more mediocre problems and not the revolutionary sell

So what do you do?

1) Don’t give up on your vision
But don’t be so firm on every detail. Think about what you want but don’t get caught up in the detail of how you will get it. Lets work that out on a step-by-step real world basis.

2) Sell at an operational level and get faster decisions
Change the language and consider the needs at at operational level and how these needs may change over the years. Unless you have loads of investment, stop trying to stomp all over the structure of the industry and work within the current structures to start the change.

3) Sell what the customer wants today
Consider the baby-steps towards the vision. Breakdown the value in your solution and offer it bit-by-bit in easy to swallow low-risk chunks of success for your client.

4) Make it easy to buy. Make it easy to say yes.
Low pain, low risk, easy to get started, clear value proposition, no great dissenting voices…

5) The greatest competitor of the full vision maybe a great partner in the bit-by-bit approach
Can you help the other solution providers move towards the vision? These are the companies that are operating successfully in the market. They have the relationships and have the money. Do you have an offering for them that can improve their business without threatening to take away their lunch?

6) Build slowly by nurturing good beta customer relationships
Bit-by-bit, step-by-step, crawl-then-walk-then run. When you’re clients say you have something then go talk to 10 potential clients, with the same message. Learn, change and progress from there.

7) Learn from leaders
Remember how Google started; slowly, offering something of value and low-risk from the start.
Remember WebVan; crazy, huge investment and changing the world.
Remember how Amazon started; slowly, low investment and learning with every sale.

8 ) Work with good advisors and find a strong industry partner to help commercialise your idea

9) Read Geoff Moore’s books