Provocation-Based Selling

While it’s tough to find sales success stories in recessions, especially ones as severe as this, Dublin, California-based Sybase Inc. has a good story to tell.

The story starts inauspiciously: In the spring of 2008, while Bear Stearns imploded and the crisis in the US capital markets was just coming into focus, Sybase Inc., the $1.1 billion information management and mobile software company, launched a new, integrated software platform named RAP – The Trading Edition, which was aimed squarely at the hard-hit financial services industry.

Sybase RAP (Risk Analytics Platform) was a complex sale sporting a price tag ranging from six to seven figures, depending on the size of the implementation, the number of licenses purchased, and the desired support and maintenance. It was set to launch, says Mark Wilson, Sybase’s vice president of corporate marketing, “just when sales cycles were getting much longer as a result of all the turmoil. Purchases had to go through more reviews, and they had to be approved by people higher up in the organization. Discretionary budgets were the first to go, and even nondiscretionary budgets were being cut. The idea of trying to sell something new into a bank was really difficult.”

It could have been, probably should have been, the product launch from hell. Instead, says Wilson, “it was the most successful launch in our company’s history. Just over a year later, we have twenty-two customers on a product that traditionally would have had a much longer sales cycle, and we are greatly exceeding our targets for new customers.”     

How did Sybase accomplish this feat? As it prepared to launch RAP, the company also redesigned its solution-based approach to sales and marketing. “We saw that the market was starting to change at the end of 2007, and we realized we couldn’t go with our traditional selling and marketing methodologies. They just wouldn’t work,” recalls Wilson. “We needed to find something different – a way to sell in a market that is going through turmoil, particularly in a down market.”

What Sybase found was a new concept called provocation-based selling. The brainchild of Geoffrey Moore, the high-tech marketing guru and managing director of TCG Advisors, the process hinges on engaging customers with an initial statement so compelling that they are provoked to consider a new offering and willingly enter and shorten the sales cycle to get it. (The concept was formally introduced to the management world in a popular article in the March 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review.)

At Sybase, “that meant coming up with a stronger, nonstandard point of view around risk management that was going to be a little bit shocking or a little bit different from how customers were thinking about that problem,” explains Wilson. “We knew that banks had separate departments that understood their own risks, but we also realized that they didn’t have a holistic view of risk. As a result, they were significantly misjudging their overall exposure to risk. So our provocation was, ‘Hey, the way you’ve traditionally looked at risk is flawed. You need to understand it at a much, much deeper level, as well as at a much broader level across the enterprise.’”

With 20/20 hindsight, it’s easy to see that Sybase had come up with a compelling message that turned out to be perfectly timed. But that wasn’t so obvious before the banking meltdown in 2008, and accordingly, the company put a great deal of effort into honing RAP’s provocation. The marketing and sales departments worked with TCG Advisors to frame it. And then, to ensure that the message would connect in the marketplace, Sybase tested it on its customer advisory board of senior banking executives.

Once RAP’s provocation was formulated, the company’s marketing and sales functions worked together to decide where it should be delivered. This required very careful customer segmentation in order to identify the prospects with the highest sales potential and to avoid diluting the new sales message. In fact, Sybase altered its provocation for different customer segments, including large and small banks, large and small hedge funds, and other adjacent industries, such as insurance.   

It also trained the financial services sales team in the new process. “You need to train your sales teams to act differently,” says Wilson. “They need to do a certain amount of legwork around selling that is not needed in traditional solution selling. They need to do research within the account to understand if the provocation is appropriate, as well as to understand the customer’s environment. When you have the first customer meeting, everything has to be lined up.”

Further, to ensure that the right people heard the message, the sales team had to set up initial meetings as close to the top of customer organizations as possible. “You have to go high within an organization to get to a level where people understand the issues that are systemically affecting the industry, and you don’t necessarily get that at a line-manager level,” says Wilson. “You also need to make sure you are going in at a level where there are decision makers for big procurements.”

For these reasons, provocation-based selling is a front-loaded process. “You do a lot of legwork in terms of understanding the customer before you have that critical meeting with the senior executive. You are not going in and asking customers what keeps them up at night. You are telling them what should be keeping them up at night, because you understand what is happening in their environment today,” says Wilson.

It also requires more time and effort on the part of senior management. “Your senior team needs to be more involved in helping build the connections into those accounts. And the salesperson has to prep them and bring them in at the very beginning.

“This is a big difference between solution selling and provocation-based selling,” Wilson continues. “In traditional solution selling, the big investment in the sales process happens at the end. With provocation-based selling, it’s flipped. You put your most expensive resources at the very beginning of the sales cycle. You do a better job of qualifying up front, identifying those accounts where the nonstandard point of view will resonate, and then networking across your executive team and your board members to get that high-level senior meeting.” This all adds up to a lot of work. But, for Sybase, the effort has paid off in a compressed sales cycle and a high closing ratio.

Should you adopt provocation-based selling? It depends. When there is no urgency in your customer base, Wilson suggests, “you may not want to disrupt your sales momentum, especially if there are other things you could do. If you want to innovate, innovate on something else.”

But he adds, “When you are in a down economy and discretionary budgets are being cut and it’s easier to say no to things than it is to say yes, it works very well. We are looking at how we can roll it out to some other products, and I would use it in certain other industries, such as telecommunications, automotive, and media.”