All posts tagged Consultative Selling

Has This Ever Happened to Your Salespeople?

I don’t often use examples from my sales coaching experiences when posting but the following story is too good not to share as it illustrates a shortcoming of too many salespeople using mediocre or outdated selling strategies and skills that result in sabotaging their sales calls instead of relying on their selling strengths to be more effective and close more business. 

Several years ago I worked with a sales team selling capital equipment to large manufacturers across the US. One of the salespeople on the team was a young guy–let’s call him Joe. Joe was in his late 20’s at the time, a former college football player intense, competitive and committed to being successful in sales. 

Joe had a sales call with a company president (we’ll call him Bob) involving purchasing a piece of equipment for his business. Joe’s discovery process for qualifying and determining the company’s needs was going well until he made an unforced error. 

Joe’s company had a special financing program in place as an alternative for customers to use in place of financing purchases through their own bank. It so happened that the program was ending the following day. Thinking he could create buying urgency and close the deal, Joe mentioned the financing program, which appealed to Bob. Here comes the unforced error. “When does the financing program end?” asked Bob. “Tomorrow,” replied Joe. Bob was silent for a few moments and said to Joe, “We’re done…get out. Do you think you can come in here and pull that kind of stuff on me? I’m not going to be pressured into making a decision like this that quickly. Get out.” Joe knew he had messed up and was speechless as Bob escorted him out his office and down the hallway to the front door. Bob’s last words were “If I’m interested further I’ll call you.” Joe was pretty certain that he’d never hear from Bob again.

Standing next to his vehicle in the parking lot, Joe engaged in some serious self-talk with himself. He felt embarrassed. He knew he had made a mistake in how he had introduced the  financing program and made Bob feel pressured to make a buying decision. “I’m better than this,” he told himself. Here’s where Joe’s competitive nature and commitment to success kicked in. 

Knowing he probably wouldn’t be able to go back in the front door and get past the receptionist, he walked around to the side of the building and entered through the employee’s entrance. As he headed down the hallway to Bob’s office, he looked up and there was Bob walking toward him!

Before Bob could say a word, Joe apologized profusely for what happened in the meeting and told Bob that he understood that he was upset and took total responsibility for causing it. Bob accepted Joe’s apology and told him to call him in two weeks. And yes, there is a happy ending–Joe got together with Bob two weeks later and sold two pieces of equipment!

How does this story relate to selling? Joe’s misadventure and eventual success illustrates several principles. 

First, outdated selling strategies like the ‘impending event close’ (“This special program ends tomorrow so act fast!”)  are just that–outdated–and should never be used. Rather the ‘urgency’ to buy should come from a prospect’s compelling reason for fixing their problem. When the prospect has compelling reasons to buy, they often close themselves. 

Second, having the right selling strengths is more crucial to a salesperson’s success than having great selling skills. For example, take Joe. I coached him on how to help prospects like Bob ‘discover’ that they should take action by selling more consultatively (selling skill) but it’s a much tougher and longer process to coach a salesperson to have the right amount of drive and commitment for sales success (selling strengths) that Joe displayed in going back into the building and re-engaging with Bob.  Joe has plenty of that drive and commitment before we ever met. 

Ideally, we’d like current salespeople or sales hiring candidates to have both great selling strengths and sales skills. But as a company president or CEO you should focus on developing your sales team’s selling strengths first then work on building their selling skills. Or if a company is recruiting sales talent, they should make sure their hiring process is designed to uncover a sales candidate’s strengths before a hiring offer is made. 

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Underdog Selling

On October 3, 1964 a cartoon series debuted on NBC called Underdog, a show  about a humble dog, who when trouble threatened, transformed into a superhero and save the damsel in distress. The well-known character actor, Wally Cox supplied the voices for both characters.

Why am I describing a television show that ran over 40 years ago? For this reason—many companies are competing in the marketplace today and living at the “corner of ignorance and bliss”. They don’t realize that they are ‘underdogs’ in their industry and need to be selling their products or services in a totally different manner.

If only they could leap tall buildings in a single bound and save the day by defeating the ‘villain’ (the competition) and save the damsel (the sale). But they can’t.

Why not? Because they’re not following a predictable, optimized, systematic sales process when they go to market.  As a result, their sales pipelines are inaccurate, contain poorly qualified ‘hot deals’ and they’re not making their sales numbers. A well-designed sales process would take into account their underdog status and allow them to leverage it to make the sale.

How do you know if your company is the underdog?

If you are selling really expensive products or services, you might be an underdog.

If you’re not the market leader, you might be an underdog.

If you have higher priced products or services than the competition, you might be an underdog.

If you have a story to tell to the attention of your market, you might be an underdog.

If you have a new product or technology, you might be an underdog.

If you are a new company or brand, you might be an underdog.

If any of the above conditions are true for your selling organization, it’s time to put on your superhero cape and invest the time in fine tuning your team’s sales process.  Where to start? My previous posts here, here and here would be great places to begin.

Good luck!

 

 

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Curses! Foiled Again!

How many of you are familiar with "Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" (New York: Random House, 2007) written by Chip and Dan Heath? If you've read the book you may remember the concept of the 'curse of knowledge'. This concept comes from an experiment conducted by a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. The experiment involved a "tapper" and a "listener". The tapper's role was to pick a well known song –"Happy Birthday", "Star-Spangled Banner" etc.– and tap out the rythm (on a table) to the listener. The listener's job was to listen to the rythm being tapped and guess the song.

Prior to the experiment being conducted, the tappers were asked to predict how often the listeners would correctly guess the song. Their prediction? 50%. However, listeners only guessed correctly 1 time in 40. Why? Chip and Dan Heath explain:

"It's hard to a be tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. When they're tapping, they can't imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind."

How does this relate to sales and salespeople?

How often do salespeople get in front of prospects and make a presentation of their company and it's products and/or services and recite their features and benefits and then afterward write in their call report what a successful meeting they had with the prospect! They talked and the prospect listened. The salesperson asked the prospect if they had any questions and the prospect said 'no'. A successful meeting right? Wrong! The curse of knowledge strikes again!

The curse of knowledge hits salespeople because they can't imagine what it's like for the prospect not to know about the salesperson's products or services. Because they don't know what the prospect's mindset is like (the prospect's world) they wind up talking only about what they do know–their own 'world', which is made up of their product or services.

And here is where the sales call runs off the tracks. The salesperson fails to get the prospect to talk…so they can listen to the answers…and ask good, tough, timely questions…to identify the problems that must be solved. This is the key to consultative selling.

The curse of knowledge will impact a salesperson at all points of the sales process but never more so than at the front end of a sales call. It's at this point that the salesperson should be positioning their company, themselves and describing the types of problems they help their customers solve. Ideally, all of this sales messaging should be designed, structured and delivered to focus on the prospect's world, their problems, their issues, their concerns to avoid the curse.

If this part of the call is done correctly, the prospect will engage, the meeting then becomes a conversation with questions being asked and answered and information being shared. Compelling reasons to buy begin to be uncovered and an agreement to move to a solid next step is agreed upon. Now what do we have? A great meeting! The curse has been undone!

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