Provoke Your Customer Harvard

www.hbr.org

The companies you serve are
slashing their budgets—but
you can still make the sale.

In a Downturn,
Provoke Your
Customers
by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore

Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:
1 Article Summary
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work
2 In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers10 Further Reading
A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further
exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

Reprint R0903C

In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers

The Idea in Brief

The Idea in Practice

The downturn is making it tougher than ever
to make a sale. The companies you serve
are slashing budgets. Senior executives—
not the managers you’vetraditionally dealt
with—are now the decision makers. But
you can motivate those executives to allocate funds for your offering—by using
provocation-based selling:

Follow these steps to provocation-based
selling:

• Identify a critical problem facing your
customer—one so ominous that, even
in a downturn, it will find the money to
address it.
• Formulate a provocative view of the
problem—afresh perspective that
frames the problem in a jarring new light.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

• Lodge your provocation with an executive who has the power to approve the
solution you’re proposing. To win support,
convey the magnitude and intractability
of the problem—without putting him on
the defensive.

IDENTIFY A CRITICALPROBLEM

LODGE YOUR PROVOCATION

Note what securities analysts are saying
about the target company or its industry.
When analysts flag a problem, the customer’s
investors are likely pressuring management
to resolve it. Critical problems meet these
criteria:

To deliver your provocation to the right person, in the right manner, follow these steps:

• They seriously jeopardize thecompany’s
ability to compete.
• They’ve proved intractable to date.
• You’re a credible source of advice on them.
Example:
A tech company targeting wireless communications carriers identified a critical
problem facing them: plunging averagerevenue-per-user (ARDU), leading to losses
of $100 million to $1 billion annually. Carriers had assumed that adding enhanced
features would help, but theyweren’t
generating meaningful new revenues.
FORMULATE YOUR PROVOCATION
R ather than finding out how your client’s
executives currently view the problem you’ve
identified, determine how they should view it.
Example:
The tech company determined that the
ARPU problem was worsening as carriers
threw bundles of value-added-services into
the marketplace. It postulated that a carrier
mustidentify one service from which it
could make money. The tech company
estimated that if carriers didn’t address
the problem within 9–12 months, they
would risk losing up to three points of
market share.

1. Pave the way: Identify the executive who
has the power to allocate funds for your offering. Find a mutual acquaintance who can
provide you with a personal referral. Sell the
referrer on yourprovocation. Then ask her to
make the introduction and help you arrange
a meeting.
2. Rehearse: Before the meeting, test-drive
your provocation with internal advocates lower
in the customer organization or with third
parties well acquainted with the company.
3. Deliver: During the meeting, present your
provocation in a way that clarifies the challenge
and makes the status quo untenablein the
executive’s mind. Demonstrate your knowledge of the problem and the customer’s
current approach to it.
Example:
One vendor said, “By our estimate, your
current approach may be costing you
$100 million a year in lost business. We
believe if you don’t stem the bleeding, you
c ould lose 4% of market share within
6–12 months.”
4. Get approval for a diagnostic study: The
study...