“You All Are a Bunch of Coal Miners in a Gold Mine”

When I first heard these words come out of Hank Johnston’s mouth – they stung. I wasn’t sure why they stung, but I knew it was not meant as a compliment.

Hank was the new member on the board of directors. Our CEO had sent him to me to talk about our sales engagement process. Hank had recently retired from EDS and had spent many of his years there very close to Ross Perot. After I described our engagement process, he shook his head, lifted his feet up and rested his cowboy boots on my desk. He put his hands behind his head and said, “Son, we got some work to do”.

I asked him what he meant by the coal miner statement. He said, “Your sales people slog through this long, dark tunnel every day in order to hack away at the wall for a few sacks of coal. On their way through the tunnel, they keep kicking these yellow rocks out of the way. What they don’t know is those rocks are gold.”

What I came to learn and appreciate was that our sales people were closing $50,000 deals when there were $500,000 deals to be closed. They were tactically focused when there was a strategic opportunity.

That’s when I learned to focus on the business issues of the customer. If they have a business issue that you can help them solve, your solution is worth a lot more to them, and gets higher level attention. We started closing bigger and bigger deals. Soon $5M, $10M and $20M deals were coming in the door.

I conduct lots of opportunity reviews for my clients. Partly to add value to each individual sales rep, but also to reinforce the process I’ve previously introduced. Each review starts with a question about the customer’s current business issues. Most often I hear about the initiative they have to change THIS technology, or implement THAT capability. The concept escapes most sales people, even if they’ve been trained to understand the difference between a business issues and a technology challenge or solution.

I think it’s because they take their customer’s word for it. When they ask their customers what the most critical business issue is, the customer tells them what they think they want to hear… “we’re looking for a solution to do “X””. But that’s not what we’re asking. We’re really asking “why are you looking for a solution to do “X”? What’s driving this requirement? Is it tied to revenue generation? Cost management? Quality problems? Regulatory changes? We want to find the story behind the story.

Soon after my encounter with Hank, one of our top sales reps was delivering his territory plan for the year. When his largest account had a zero next to it on his spreadsheet I had to ask what was going on. This account had generated over $1M a year for several years, and now he was forecasting zero for the entire year. He went on to explain that they canceled 4 of their 5 products. As a result of their scaling back, a majority of their people were looking for new jobs. He concluded they would be quickly oversaturated with our products and the place would be a ghost town.

Our top tier sales rep was looking at this as a justifiable buying objection, but the more I dug in, the more I saw yellow rocks and concluded this as a business issue that we could solve. I told him to get an appointment with the general manager of the division.

When we met with the GM, he explained that the market had consolidated and their broad product line was no longer necessary, so they were scaling back to their flagship product. But a byproduct of this scale back was their best people were shopping their resumes. They concluded it was a sinking ship so they should get out while the timing was good. Now he was concerned about his basic ability to deliver the next generation of their core product.

We came back to him with a creative proposal: Sell us your entire team for $1. Then contract with us directly to design your core product. Your people will land in a growing and interesting company, they won’t have to relocate, we can have them work on other projects, and we can deliver your product to you on time. He was ecstatic. The result was a $75M services contract that set the bar for our largest deal size, and we found a staffing solution to our fast growing services business.

There’s hardly a day that goes by that I’m not reminded about Hank’s statement. There are lots of coal miners out there. The real question is, how much gold are you leaving on the table by not digging deeper for the real business issue?

Let me know if you’d like to see how much gold is on the table. I will conduct three opportunity reviews for $900. If I don’t earn that back for you in spades, you keep the money.

My offer alone has some implication. Are you the coal miner or the gold miner?