Selling Complex Things in a Noisy Market: The Drill & The Birdhouse

If you know me, you know I love analogies. Not only are they an effective tool to convey a point, they can test your understanding. What better way to get your point across than to explain how a process is (or isn’t) like building a house, or running a marathon in penny loafers?

In every QBR (Quarterly Business Review) with my team I try to drive home one simple takeaway with an analogy (or five). Among the presentations, data, updates, and deal reviews I hope everyone can leave with a simple concept or image we all can use to better execute as a team.

I suck at powerpoint and slides. After years of making ugly slides and staying up late struggling with formatting I decided to just stop trying and find another medium that got the point across. I found Google Images to be a wonderful source of any visual I need on-demand and a way to make content that needs minimal design work. Since joining Pivotal, I was particularly inspired by the brilliant presentations by Onsi Fakhouri and his now famous emoji keynotes and town hall presentations. I’d be happy being 1/50th as effective as Onsi.

I’ve done a few of these over the years and found it to inspire some great conversations. I’ve also been meaning to get back into writing and figured some of these messages would make for a few good blog posts. I’ll probably cover a wide variety of topics from various corners of my brain in subsequent posts, but to get this rolling here is the blog version of the one installment from the Binder Analogy Series:

Selling Complex Things in a Noisy Market

Put simply, Enterprise Sales comes down to effectively connecting the outcomes your product/service creates to the outcomes your customer needs (or thinks they need). The hard part comes in articulating that connection.

The challenge intensifies along a few vectors:

• Complexity of the Customer: Existing solutions and process, number of stakeholders, bureaucracy, competing priorities, general chaos.
• Complexity of the Outcome: How easily can you articulate what drives the outcome. For example “being healthy” is broad and attributed to many subtle factors.
• Nascency of the Market: If people haven’t bought your stuff before because its new and never existed, you will have to overcome a lot of knowledge gaps, mis-information, and marketing buzz from your competition, while fighting the status quo… since they survived this long without whatever you are currently peddling.

My company helps the largest and most complex organizations in the world be great at building software. The landscape is changing by the day and new trends (say cloud, containers, kubernetes, whatever) are emerging and evolving. In other words, we are essentially working on a 11/10 on all of the above.

As my team navigated this landscape, I felt we all needed to get out of the weeds and focus back on those customer outcomes in order to be effective. I articulated what the market looks like with the following analogy….

“The Drill & The Birdhouse”

Your customer will tell you they want to buy a drill.

What they said they wanted.

But what did you do when they asked you for a drill?

The Enterprise Sales Rep all hyped up and ready to show off the tool.

… and what did you make your Platform Architect (pre-sales engineer, solutions consultant) do?

The technical specialist jumping right in and showing off an awesome demo and deep dive.

But what did the customer actually see?

There are a dozens of drills, hundreds of ways to buy them, and more information at their fingertips on the internet than they know how to digest. Everything looks the same.

But what did the customer REALLY want??

… A HOLE?

Or many holes…?

Or maybe they wanted something like this.

Or something super ambitious like this.

Or perhaps what they wanted, at the end of the day, was to provide shelter for a bird.

Or MANY birds. In production at scale.

But you never asked them what they wanted to achieve. So there you are:

Pretty proud of the tool you’re selling.

So what SHOULD you have done?

Asked them what they wanted.

Shown them what their neighbors have built.

Told them where to get some wood.

Provided a plan.

and sell them the full set of tools to get the job done.

Over the last 6 months I’ve had my team and others who attended the QBR share their experience of realizing “the customer was asking me for specs on the drill and I asked them what they were trying to build” or “I realized we were in a drill comparison RFP”. Small realizations like that make a huge difference in an engagement with a customer and are rewarding as a leader.

While Pivotal has the best drill, tools, and plan in the market — we are most proud of our customers’ “birdhouses”. Over the years, Pivotal has done a great job of changing the conversation from a tool set to focused on the customer outcomes. Check out some of the great examples including T-Mobile, Kroger, and Ford.

I’m excited for the opportunity to share more analogies, thoughts, and various topics from my experience in order to better engage with all of you.

Thanks for reading and look forward to your comments and feedback!