Truffle Pig
Every so often, in your professional life, you will happen upon a metaphor that you fall in love with.
Sometime in my late 20s, I heard someone refer to someone else as a “truffle pig”. I wish I remember the context, but I do remember asking the caller what he meant by that. He explained that truffles, a kind of high-end mushroom, was a delicacy…very expensive, very sought after, quite valuable. Also, quite hard to find…they grow underground. But, he who finds the truffles can sell the truffles and that is quite lucrative.
At some point in history, some pantalooned entrepreneur who pursued truffles for a living (one calls such person a ‘trifolau’) found that dogs and pigs (female pigs) could find them. Pigs were used first…the truffle, apparently, smells of pheromones that female pigs respond to.
Net net, if you were in the truffle business (and historically, a truffle was as good or better than coinage, so truffle=money pretty much literally) you’d do well to have a truffle pig on your side.
And so it is with sales. When you are in a very high-end kind of business as Infusion is (we are selling high-end resources to high-end clients, a higher quality but, frankly, a higher cost/higher quality onsite alternative to what you get with development outsourcers) you find that you can’t rely on the obvious forms of sales opportunities. For example, in most cases you want to avoid: RFPs, open bids, consulting position postings and, wherever possible, vendor managers (companies your clients hire to manage all their vendors for them.) You want to avoid these things because, by the time something is formalized, homogenized and publicized, that opportunity is effectively “ized” as in “commoditized.” The business purpose becomes secondary and the lowest bidder wins…almost always. And if you enter that fray and try to win it, you end up becoming a very different kind of company: you can’t focus on quality or solutions, your business and full-time mental occupation becomes all about finding the lowest cost resources you can and marking them up as high as you can which, even then, gives you only a sliver of a margin. In an earlier blog post, I talk about why I don’t want to be that kind of company. It isn’t why I got into this business.
So, if you can’t pursue the “obvious” above the ground opportunities, or, to use a metaphor that I also like, “low hanging fruit”…how do you find the true, precious, buried opportunities? You will, no doubt, anticipate my response: truffle pigs.
I suppose you can say that great salespeople are pigs. Few might disagree…but I see it as a compliment. I have this one fellow in particular, we’ll call him TP. TP is not a salesperson officially, but he has a sales component to his job. TP is not attracted to obvious opportunities…TP finds neglected ones. Specifically, he looks for companies that have significant need, significant revenues but are, nonetheless, not paid proper attention to by vendors for some reason. A good example of such a company is a hedge funds. Now, a single hedge funds may control 10Bn worth of capital…they are huge companies in a monetary sense…but they operate with very few people (almost always <200..some may only be 5 staff members.) So they are “big littles” and, as such, they are often not paid proper attention to by vendors…I mean, if you are a consultancy, how many of your guys could they actually hire given their small compliment of full timers? And if you are selling software, how many licensed seats to they actually have? But, says TP, those are the wrong metrics to look at…what you should be looking at is, “how much is a given solution to their problems worth to them?”
The Waiter
To continue the story of TP, I need to digress and talk about “The Waiter.” Then I’ll try to bring all this together.
When you think of a waiter, it is not much of a stretch to see the waiter as a salesman. In essence, that is what he is. For those of us who have been waiters, we can tell you…while it seems the waiter is there to provide a simple service (take orders/get food) there is a lot more to it…many lessons valuable in any kind of sales.
I once worked for “Ruby’s Autodiner” in Laguna Beach California…a hip, 50s burger place. It is a pretty successful chain, not unlike Johnny Rockets. My career was short, I was fired ultimately for being a terrible waiter (another blog post perhaps). But well worth it. They had a very sophisticated orientation and training program, their own kind of “BurgerU.” A lot of good lessons there, but the key one was the “up sell”. And the up sell involved those items that cost very little to the restaurant, but had tremendous margins. Interestingly, turns out, you don’t make all that much on the burger, but if you suggest grilled onions on that burger (costs 5 cents, sells for 79 cents) there’s your spread. That shot of lemon or cherry extract in your soda for 49 cents, pure profit. And don’t even get me started about the margins in the deserts! My god, 100x ROI on the basic chocolate cake or ice cream Sunday. And fountain sodas? Like printing money…syrup and carbonated water, maybe 2-8 cents per glass, but you are selling it for $1. If only I could get margins like that in my business!
So, you learn your, “would you like grilled onions on that?” and “now, how about a hot fudge Sunday with 2 spoons!” but the key lesson you walk away with is that the money isn’t where you think it is…if all you had were folks coming in and buying straight burgers with fries and not ordering sodas, you wouldn’t be in business long…it is all about the onions, toppings, beverages and deserts. (As a related tangent, my brother (film director) once explained to me that movie theaters make most their money in concessions…historically there have actually been movies where the theaters made no money on the ticket admissions (he claims Annie in 70s was one) where all revenue was expected to come from concessions. Movie theaters are, in essence, restaurants. And isn’t it interesting that they typically don’t get that involved in the burgers, and heavy foods, but it is all about sodas, toppings, popcorns…nothing but the high margin stuff.)
Anyway, the point I hope to make is that the waiter is really a rather sophisticated salesman..he moves you through many different buying situations over the course of the meal yet you don’t notice you are being sold to: eating out is a constant sell when you think about it. Every fifteen minutes you are being marketed and sold to: would you like the wine list, flat or sparkling water or is tap fine, our specials tonight are:, can I interest you in an appetizer, would you like to look at the desert menu, how about an after-dinner drink…and it all ends when he gives you the check, and a good percent of the time you’ll find a hand-written remark on the check, “It was a pleasure serving you! Brad.” I.e., “tip please.”
So isn’t it just so interesting that you are not bothered by any of this in the least. Here is a guy who is selling you all night long, doing everything he can to extract the maximum revenue from you, and you are fine with it…if he does this enough, your response is likely to be, “wow, what excellent service.”
Now why is that? Why are you ok with it? Well, you are ok with it for a couple reasons. The first is, you, as the patron, are fully in control…or at least you perceive yourself to be (you chose the venue/vendor after all). The second is that all the “selling” is absolutely, clearly and unambiguously targeted and directed at a clearly defined problem set: you and the salesmen agree implicitly; you and he are, in essence, designing a solution together.
Truly good sales is like this. Great salesmanship doesn’t come across to anyone like selling. If someone feels you are selling them, it means you have lost your way; it means that you and the sellee are out of phase on the problem you are solving, it is always an artifact of misunderstanding between seller and sellee.
I have great respect for the “waiter” type salesperson. I respect their salesmanship. But the waiter has a great weakness, a tragic flaw. And that is: the waiter waits. Put another way, the waiter expects a context, but he doesn’t create one. He can only operate in a clearly defined situation, where an individual enters the environment expecting to be sold and where the protocol is relatively clear.
In a business context, the problem with the waiter is that no matter how sophisticated he becomes, he is, at heart, and order taker. Someone needs to come to him and express a want, but he doesn’t go out and bring the customers into the restaurant…and that can be a tragic flaw.
Of Pigs and Waiters
About a month ago there occurred what my president and I term, a “bad Friday” (we touch base after work every Friday and elect the given week “good” or “bad”) A major client of ours (we had about fifteen people there) was not going to renew contracts for 5-7 of them. End of the day, that meant we were losing 5-7 billable positions. It was a “bad” Friday.
Now, the thing was, that client loved us. We were brought in for a sophisticated, “can’t fail” application and we’d worked tremendous hours to make the client successful, and they were. The CIO himself told me what a good job we did. Yet, here it was. Why did it happen?
The reason, fundamentally, was that while we paid attention to the execution, from a sales perspective we were acting as “waiters” and not “truffle pigs”. We stood around and waited for the order, but we didn’t find another opportunity or another group to move our people to. And guess what; our client was satisfied with the meal we sold them, but now they were “full.” I mean, no matter how much you love the service or the food, you don’t sit in the same restaurant and order a second dinner. And since we did not uncover another buried opportunity, one Friday we were surprised, and we now had over 5 people to place elsewhere.
The Sales Offsite
After a “bad Friday” is decided upon, Alim and I select an action and move on it. Our action was, call for an immediate Sales Offsite for anyone who directly or remotely sells. The offsite was set for next Saturday.
The purpose of the offsite was to look at what happened with this client and ask ourselves collectively if this wasn’t telling us that there wasn’t something wrong with our sales approach fundamentally. We brought all the account managers, salespeople, anyone who has anything to do with sales. And the question we asked was this:
While we, as a firm, have grown 20-30 percent a year and enjoy growth overall, why is it that, in spite of clients loving us, do we bloom in a given client but then shrink in that client slowly over time? Every sales textbook will tell you, it is easiest to sell more to clients you have than find net new clients. But when we looked at the numbers and the staff, we realized: we had all our truffle pigs focused on new accounts and new verticals. But in all our existing clients, we manned them with waiters.
It was kind of a “eureka” moment…we were always in two modes: heads-down into execution of the clients we had and finding new clients. What we were not doing is applying a truffle pig’s sensibility to the clients we had.
Of Pigs and Waiters
The “net net” is that you need both; truffle pig and waiters in your clients if you want to continue to grow. If you have just one or the other, you’ll experience different problems. For example, if you have only Pigs, but no waiters, you might get more work, but you’ll also risk putting off your client and getting a rep as a vendor who is a bit of a pain in the rear. This is because truffle pigs, but their nature, tend to be aggressive, pushy, and can be insensitive to the politics of a situation; that is what makes them great. For example, in technology, a truffle pig is the kind of person who might talk to a manager at the client and say, “hey, you’re using X for this? Man, you should absolutely be using Y! You could do things in half the time, let me show you Y and if you like, we can do this for you.” Now, some client managers really appreciate that, but others may become very defensive. There may be a reason, political or otherwise, that they are using X instead of Y. Or they might not have known about Y and don’t want to be made to feel or appear “out of touch.” So, a truffle pig can find new opportunities, but they can also do collateral damage as they gain. Historically speaking, female truffle pigs were ultimately retired in favor of dogs because while the pigs would find the truffle, they would then go and devour that same truffle themselves or at least grab a quick bite if you didn’t yank them away…and you try yanking a fully grown, highly-motivated, truffle pig from its prize. So, you kind of end up in a zero-sum game with pure pigs. Waiters are great, but, here again, they don’t tend to push into new areas, or challenge the existing context; they try to function within it. And if you keep serving the same meals, to the same people, in the same situation…they get full. Sooner or later, you do finish your projects and you must move on.
You will not be surprised to hear me say, you need both. You need to pair your pigs and your waiters. And if you are lucky and you train folks the right way, you can get people who can act both as the truffle pig or the waiter. These people are able to push into new areas, challenge assumptions, and find new business, but not ruffle too many feathers as they do so. This is what I consider myself: a truffle pig in a tuxedo.
What is key, is to look at your sales force (and your people who, while note “sales people” do, in fact, sell…many of your leads begin with your field people) and determine for yourself whether they are more truffle pig or waiter, and make sure you balance one with the other.
Epilogue
After our sales offsite, we made some changes. We matched pigs with waiters and we redirected some of our truffle pigs from new, prospective accounts, and had them root around our existing accounts, led by the waiters finding new opportunities. Then we had the waiters standing by to more fully develop the “truffles” the pigs uncovered. Within four weeks, our sales numbers jumped well over 25%; not only had we placed all the folks we’d had free up, we went into a resource shortage relative to the sales queue we had.