In the first two chapters of the book, we explore how B2B buying and selling has changed in the past century and what buyers today want from suppliers. Chapter 1 offers a historical look at concepts about selling from one of the earliest books published in America on selling, William Miller’s The Art of Canvassing, through the more recent works that offer advice on how to sell your products and services to other businesses. We called this chapter “The Death of Selling” because selling, as it has been known and practiced for the past century, is virtually dead in the contemporary world of B2B business development. Increasingly global competition, the professionalizing of purchasing, the growth of supply chain management, and other factors have radically reshaped the world of selling today.
Chapter 2, “The Changing World of Buying and Selling,” presents the results of our research into B2B purchasing today. Over nearly a year, we interviewed dozens and dozens of senior executives, supply chain managers, and purchasing directors for some of the largest B2B buyers in the United States. We asked them what they look for in suppliers today, whether their expectations have changed in the past ten years, and what they have experienced from the worst and best of the suppliers they have dealt with. Their answers are illuminating, to say the least, and provide considerable substantiation that behavior is critically important today in B2B selling.
Chapter 3, “The Chemistry of Preference,” discusses how customers determine which suppliers they prefer to work with and elucidates the principles of behavioral differentiation. This chapter will be familiar to any readers who have previously read Winning Behavior. For other readers, this chapter summarizes the concepts and is an important prelude to the rest of the book. In Chapter 4, we describe our model for the B2B business development process: It is like the game of chess and can be viewed as having an opening game, a middle game, and an endgame. This metaphor will help you identify the different challenges in B2B business development through the life cycle of marketing, building a customer relationship, pursuing a particular business opportunity, and completing the requirements and events that typically precede a contract award.
In Chapter 5, we discuss opening game in depth, including everything that smart companies do to condition the markets they serve. Opening game represents about 20 percent of your win probability, so it is crucial to get it right. A failure in opening game means that the rest of the business development process will be considerably tougher. Chapters 6 through 8 describe middle game—the part of the process where you seek to condition the customer and build preference in your favor. Middle game accounts for about 70 percent of your win probability, and we divide it into early middle game (Chapter 6), mid—middle game (Chapter 7), and late middle game (Chapter 8). Much of your opportunity for BD during business development occurs during middle game, so it’s even more important to get middle game right. Chapter 9 describes endgame, which includes the proposals and presentations that are typical in B2B business buying and selling. Although endgame accounts for only about 10 percent of your win probability, there are numerous opportunities here to differentiate yourself behaviorally, and failing to do so could cost you a contract.
Chapter 10, “Creating a Behavioral Differentiation Strategy,” is a serious “how-to” chapter. It describes the process we use with our clients to help them create and implement an overall BD strategy for their company. It also describes the Differentiation Needs Analysis, or DNA, tool that we recommend for creating a differentiation strategy for an opportunity pursuit. We show throughout the book that positive differentiating behavior during business development can make a significant difference in your ability to win new business.
We further contend that behavior can be managed. Business leaders have the opportunity through behavioral differentiation to substantially improve their business results—if they have the skill and the will to do so. And this brings us to our final chapter, which explores why B2B companies find it difficult sometimes to institute and sustain BD. In researching this book, we also surveyed a number of companies and asked how they did or did not use behavior to create a competitive advantage, as well as what their operating values were. The results showed us why some companies find it difficult to achieve and sustain BD.
The bottom line of our books on behavioral differentiation is this: Behavior is one of your last, best opportunities to create and sustain a competitive advantage in your markets. You can have fine products, flawless execution, and great service and still be middle of the road today because it’s so easy for your rivals to copy what you do and how you sell it. However, it’s difficult for rivals to copy BD because it requires a level of skill and will that many business leaders don’t have. First, they fail to recognize the competitive potential of behavior, and second, they don’t have the wherewithal to implement sustainable BD throughout their organization. If you are reading this book, then you are at least aware of the competitive potential of behavior, and if you have the determination and leadership strength to see it through, you can implement behavioral differentiation throughout your organization and give yourself a substantial behavioral advantage.
*Behavioral differentiation is a mouthful, so throughout this book we often use the abbreviation BD to signify behavioral differentiation, behavioral differentiators, and other variations of this expression.