The Rule of 95 in Sales: The One Thing

When you’ve been in sales as long as I've been, you identify patterns about human behavior on both the sales side and the buyer side.

I’ve assembled a number of these patterns into a collection of what I call Observed Truth of Sales.

I’ve collected these over the course of a long successful sales career; spanning hundreds of millions of dollars in orders closed across six different continents; and helping transform the sales behaviors of hundreds of sales teams and thousands of sellers to achieve the results they desire.

These are not science. There’s been no rigorous quantitative or academic analysis of these observations. (Which means they have as much validity as 95% of what passes for research and data into sales these days.)

They are just my observations of the predictable situational behavior of sellers and buyers.

Today I’m sharing...

"The Rule of 95"

The Rule of 95 simply states: "95% of a buyer's ROI on a product they purchase will come from the outcomes achieved with just 5% of the features they tell you they require.”

Typically that 5% is what I call the "One Thing.” There’s One Thing that’s most important to your decision maker(s) that's driving the purchase decision (and choice of supplier.)

It’s essential for you to identify what that 5% is before you propose a solution.

If you can’t confidently tell your manager what the buyer’s One Thing is, then you haven’t completed your discovery or truly qualified the opportunity.

Here’s an example...

Once a seller on my team was working on a multi-million dollar deal to sell a communications system to a large cruise line.

It would provide high-speed internet services and VOIP calling for passengers as well as a secure communications from a ship's crew to their company HQ.

The buyer narrowed their search down to us and one competitor before issuing an RFP.

The heart of the RFP was a compliance matrix listing the buyer's “must-have” features and capabilities in tabular form. For each feature you had to indicate if you complied with the requirement and, if not, describe how you were non-compliant.

In this case, the compliance matrix listed 20 items per page across 17 pages.

In other words, the buyer claimed they had 340 “must have” features. Not likely.

My seller was way ahead of the game.

Through his persistent discovery and ongoing qualification he learned from the buyer’s CEO that the reliability and availability of communications from all of his shipboard casinos to HQ was critical to their operations.

Real-time insights into the cash take from his casinos was his One Thing.

As a result, we turned our proposal into a detailed technical paper on how our system would ensure the quality, reliability and availability of his ship to shore communications link. And quantified what those outcomes would mean to the CEO in hard dollars.

And, the 339 other “must have” items? It turns out they just didn’t matter. And we barely addressed them in our response.

Want to dramatically increase your chances of winning a deal?

Use the Rule of 95 to discover and qualify your buyer’s One Thing.

- Andy Paul