The Sales Cycle: How to Close Deals That Take Years to Make
By Walter Koellner | June 23, 2010

To say that Walter Koellner sells big-ticket items is anunderstatement. As part of Siemens's Industry Solutions division, Koellner'sjob is to convince large mining companies to spend up to $15 million on largeexcavation machines that contain Siemens's electric drive technology — everything from gear units to motors and engineering software. Koellner, anAustrian native who has been at Siemens for 30 years, calculates his salescycles in years, not months.

Despite these innate challenges and the fact that miningcompanies halted much of their capital spending when the U.S. economy soured,Koellner has excelled. His team generates the second highest sales volume for his division.
Name: Walter Koellner
Location: Alpharetta, GA
What I sell: The drive systems for massive machines that areused at mining sites
Biggest win: Selling the world's first gearless draglinemachine to a mining company in China
Most common objection I hear: "This can't be done."


Walter Koellner of Siemens's Industry Solutions division

Sales is all about patience and persistence, especially in my job. I sell these huge machines that work for 30 years and nobody buys one of these things overnight. I recently came back from South Africa for a sales pitch to Anglo-American on a drag line, a 5-story excavator used in open-pit mining that costs between $150 million and $200 million. For something like that, you have teams of people evaluating and making reports to the company's board. They do all sorts of calculations and look at what the lifecycle cost is, and then there are third parties that have to look at it. And since Siemens has only been in the business of supplying the drive systems for these dragline excavators since 2006, the customer is even more concerned and wants to get all kinds of technical and support details. All this will take more than a year, so we won't know whether we landed this deal until 2011. There's still a long road and I'll probably have to go back to South Africa several more times.
Put in the time

My customers need to know the benefits of Siemens's solution, but they also need to really trust me and the sales team, especially in terms of my ability to provide support for a machine after the deal is closed. This is what takes the most time, especially in the Asian countries like China. You can't build trust over a three-hour meeting. You have to go there again and again. You go with them to dinner and talk about your families. It's a long process of relationship development.

There are few things that can kill a deal faster than not being prepared and not knowing as much about what the customer wants as you possibly can. Sometimes you rush into a meeting without all the proper homework and it shows. This happened many years ago when I met with a manufacturer of trucks that haul mining waste. Our product was too big and it did not meet their shock and vibration requirements. We weren't going to be able to deliver what they needed at the right price as soon as they wanted it. I should have known more about their needs — and our limitations — beforehand. But here's where persistence comes into play — I kept in constant touch and updated them every time there were developments bringing us closer to their ideal machine. Then, 11 years after that first sales call, I received an order.
Read between the lines

Even if you are prepared, it's sometimes necessary to switch gears quickly during a meeting when a certain preference or concern emerges. It's important to stay flexible and listen to what the customer wants. This is where you find the real insights, and you often have to read between the lines to know what it really is a customer wants.

When I tried to sell the world's first gearless dragline together with the manufacturer Bucyrus to a customer in Inner Mongolia, China, they asked, "How will you provide technical support for the machine since we're all the way out here in Inner Mongolia?" I talked about warranties and the reliability of our system, but that wasn't enough. So we told them we had a machine working on a mining site in Canada that was hooked up to a remote diagnostic system. We were able to call it up in real time and show the customer that it's possible to see how the machine is operating half a world away. This helped them overcome their fear of having to deal with difficult issues all by themselves and it was a big part of closing the deal.

-As told to Melanie Warner

http://www.bnet.com/article/the-sales-cycle-how-to-close-deals-that-take-years-to-make/437926