Insight Selling: A Q&A with Author Mike Schultz

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Insight SellingIt’s no secret that I’ve been a contributing author at RainToday for many years. In that time, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate and connect with many thought-provoking professionals.

Last year, I had the privilege to sit down with Mike Schultz, the founder and publisher of Rain Group, and talk about their 2013 report, “What Sales Winners Do Differently.”

Recently, Mike and I sat down again and discussed his new book, Insight Selling: What Sales Winners Do Differently, that delves into this same topic in further depth. After reading the book cover to cover in a matter of hours, I was thrilled to get further insight and chat about his findings.

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CG: The sales world has changed dramatically over the past several years. There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there on what works and what doesn’t. In doing research for Insight Selling, what strategies or tactics did you uncover that work today?

MS: Since articles like “The End of Solution Sales” and “Selling is Not About Relationships” were published in by the Harvard Business Review, there’s been a lot of disagreement in the sales world about what’s working and what’s not. We decided to study what was actually happening.

We wanted to find out what the winners of sales opportunities do differently than sellers who came close but ultimately came in second place. So we studied over 700 B2B purchases made by buyers who represent $3.1 billion in annual purchasing power. We found that winners sell radically differently than second-place finishers and that winners exhibit a specific combination of behaviors to achieve better outcomes than second-place finishers. We found that sales winners:

1. Connect with buyers personally and connect buyer needs with their solutions.
2. Convince buyers they are the best choice, that the risks are worth taking, and that they can achieve strong ROI.
3. Collaborate with buyers by bringing new ideas to the table, delivering new insights, and working with buyers as a team.

And we found that solution sales is not dead and that relationships are still important. Sorry, HBR. Solution sales and relationships need to evolve and they are just a piece of the whole, but they’re far from dead and sellers who dismiss these concepts outright put their sales results in grave danger.

CG: What surprised you most about your research findings?

MS: We studied 42 factors that were common pieces of advice given to sellers in order to determine what sales winners do differently.

In our training programs, we poll our audiences asking them to guess what they think sales winners do most differently than second-place finishers. They usually pick things like, ‘was trustworthy,’ or ‘listened to me,’ or ‘understood my needs,’ and so on.

They rarely pick ‘educated me with new ideas or perspectives,’ which, according to buyers, was the number one factor separating winners from the rest. And they rarely pick ‘collaborated with me,’ which was the number two factor most separating winners from second-place finishers.

With this last point, there’s been a lot of buzz that the new trend in selling is to challenge buyers. Our training participants often say to us, “Isn’t the word ‘collaborate’ more of an antonym than a synonym of the word ‘challenging’?” Perhaps. So it’s not only surprising to our training participants but also to us, because these two factors are not what we would have guessed to be what most separates the winners from the rest.

Now, this doesn’t mean sellers who win don’t say what they need to say in order to help the buyer. But they don’t do it standoffishly. So, what sellers think buyers want and what buyers actually want are two surprisingly different things.

CG: In the book, you introduce a three level model that I love – Connect, Convince, Collaborate. How does this change the way people need to sell?

MS: With connect, even though prevailing thinking in sales has been focused on uncovering needs and crafting compelling solutions to solve those needs, sellers still fall into the pattern of not listening, not investigating, and not tailoring what they sell to the needs of the buyer.

With convince, it’s been drilled into the minds of so many sellers not to pitch or sell anything too strongly that they are unwilling to take a point-of-view or advocate for a particular idea or strategy.

With collaborate, too many sellers have been trained to think of sales as me-versus-them. Or to just try to find ways of selling what they offer. Or simply don’t engage deeply enough. What’s important is that these are the things that buyers value, so they’re the things sellers need to do.

CG: You break down insight selling into two applications – interaction insight and opportunity insight. Can you explain the differences between the two?

MS: When sellers introduce buyers to ideas they need to know about we call it opportunity insight. This is when the seller knows a buyer should be doing something and the buyer has little or no idea about it until the seller brings it up.

Now, I’m not saying go straight to the pitch—there’s a rhythm to getting there—but fundamentally, sellers need to get the passionate beliefs they have in their heads about certain ideas into the buyers’ heads.

The second application is interaction insight. This is when sellers ask disruptive questions, push buyers out of their comfort zones and encourage them to think differently. In this case, buyers often come to new insights by working collaboratively with the seller guiding them.

Sellers bring ideas (opportunity insight), and spark ideas through how they lead their conversations (interaction insight).

CG: But the buyer has to trust you if they’re going to accept your insight. Don’t you agree? They can get information anywhere, but when they trust the person it’s coming from it makes a big difference.

MS: Absolutely. You can’t succeed with insight selling without trust. When buyers trust sellers they:

1. Depend on them
2. Listen to them
3. Give them access
4. Spend time with them

The more a buyer trusts you the more willing they are to listen to your ideas and to implement them. Without trust, insight selling is very difficult to do.

CG: Increasingly we hear how buyers don’t trust information from corporations and sellers – that they trust information from third parties, their peers, or even strangers. How can a salesperson get around this?

MS: Well, Charlie, I’d say they should all listen to you.

There’s not much an individual seller can do to restore someone’s faith in corporations, but they can certainly build faith in them as people and can influence strongly whether a buyer perceives their company to be trustworthy.

When a buyer meets a seller, on the one hand they bring with them a modicum of skepticism about the seller’s competence and motives. On the other hand, when a buyer meets a seller for the first time, that seller has a blank trust slate.

It’s up to the seller to bring their “A” game and demonstrate competence and behave overall in ways that the buyer forms the impression that the seller is trustworthy. Every seller is essentially playing on the same playing field of trust. It’s what they do on that playing field that matters.

CG: What’s the biggest misconception sellers have about trust and where do sellers often fall short when it comes to establishing and maintaining trust with buyers?

MS: Everyone thinks they, themselves, are competent. Amazing, even. But they’re not. The concept is called, in academic circles, “Illusory Superiority.”

What does it mean for trust? Sellers overestimate their competence and buyers don’t. Proving they are competent and have integrity – that they are worthy of trust – is a steeper hill than many sellers think.

Insight selling plays in here. You need to get people to trust your ideas, your advice, and your ability to get things done for and with them. Until they have experience with you, the well of trust you build won’t be very deep. This is why collaboration is so powerful, because it creates shared experience where buyers can be exposed deeply to your competence while spending time with you. At the same time, spending time builds intimacy. All of it leads to trust.

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If you want to learn how to sell like winners do, pick up your copy of Insight Selling today. If you order by May 10, RAIN Group has some great bonuses for you. You’ll receive the exclusive expert interview series What it Takes to Succeed in Sales Today with myself, John Jantsch, Jill Konrath, Andrew Sobel, and more along with 5 lessons from Insight Selling and RAIN Selling Online training programs. You’ll also be invited to join Insight Selling author, John Doerr for an exclusive webinar, What It Takes to Become an Insight Seller. Plus, RAIN Group is donating their portion of book sales during the launch to the American Heart Association to support congenital heart defect research (learn why here). So go order your copy today. Mike and John are the real deal.

Relationship Inflation

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photo“Now our global sales team can create customer relationships instantly from anywhere.”

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of YELP, in an ad for the Salesforce1 Mobile App in the Economist.

“Run your business from your phone,” the ad goes on to say. Including the instant creation of customer relationships, with just a click.

Of course, we get what it means. Salesforce is a powerful tool; I use it. We’ve even got our own app on Salesforce for Trust-based Selling (and are proud of it).

But let’s just pause a moment and note the grade inflation that has come about with the use of the word “relationship.”

Relationship Inflation

Never mind the dictionary. Just use your own built-in definitions. What does the word “relationship” mean, and what does it suggest when we use it as synonymous with something clickable?

This is not a Luddite rant – I love my CRM-flavored apps as much as anyone. And I’m not going to bemoan the demise of deep connection at the hands of social media.

But I am going to protest the casual use of a rich word in ways that flatten and cheapen its meaning.

Dimensions of Relationships

When we think of relationships, we naturally think in two dimensions – depth and breadth. There is the sense of connection, empathy, shared knowledge, and the promise of more to come. That’s the deep part, and the deep part adds value.

The breadth part is equally important – because it shares value. The plural of relationship is network. Relationships times depth equals shared value.

The problem comes when we over-emphasize one dimension to the exclusion of another. The digital explosion has enabled both.  The ability to quickly scan and dive deep into data, or to quickly access past experiences (think your email history, think LinkedIn) can greatly help on depth.

But the emphasis in many ways has been far more on the breadth side of things. When zero marginal cost meets an ethos that says more followers/clicks/eyeballs are always better, that’s where the qualitative gets run out of town by the quantitative.  Deep gets beat by broad.

The Cost of Breadth at all Costs

When the intersection of Deep Street and Broad Street gets paved over by an expansion into Broad Boulevard, we lose something. The value of what we’re sharing diminishes. That means less value, less insight, less impact, less connection, less meaning.

In the world of sales, it’s no accident that we’re hearing about the power of insight – we’re starved for insight in a world that has been bingeing on breadth.  In the world of content, it’s no accident that we’re seeing an explosion of (often fairly good) TV programming enabled by online broadcast capabilities; we’ve been starved for it.

We need both dimensions for balance. Lately we’re out of balance, and it’s the deep content side that needs redressing.

Rediscovering Selling in Today’s Post-Recession World

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I spoke recently with Brian Sommer, President of Vital Analysis, a technology resource firm. He had some insights about what’s happened to sales since the recession. Almost all of it applies to Trust Matters readers, so I asked him to write it up as a guest post. So, here’s Brian.

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The recession of 2008/2009 was a bad one.  Organizations made a number of adjustments just to survive in the times that followed. Sales departments made deep personnel cuts as they had too little business for too many salespeople to chase.

Worse, the quality of the deals the remaining sales people pursued was often terrible. Every deal was brutally competitive; deal sizes were small; profit margins were non-existent; and, prospective customers couldn’t do some deals as commercial credit was almost non-existent. It was definitely a buyers’ market (for the paltry number of buyers that were actually out there).

Sales organizations and their personnel were adaptive in those times but many of those adaptations need to be halted now as those changes were a response to a market that doesn’t exist anymore.  A couple of years ago, your firm, if typical, pursued almost any lead that came in the door.  No matter that the deal wasn’t in your firm’s wheelhouse, wasn’t strategic and came from a flighty prospect, it represented the potential for revenue.  Your firm chased a lot of cats and dogs then. This needs to stop.

Selling Post Recession

Chasing Deals, and Other Sins.  Chasing bad deals isn’t the way to build a growing sustainable book of business. You need focus and you need a core set of strategic customers who work with you collaboratively. This is how you reduce sales costs, improve margins and grow your book of business with each customer. Chasing all that one-off stuff is a waste of energy and robs a firm of its future.  It’s also hard work. Building great relationships is easier and more rewarding.

Your firm may have committed other sins, too. During the recession, you probably oversaturated your existing customers with too many sales pitches, offers or entreaties just to drum up any business. No matter how many times they told you that they had no budget for anything, your sales team pursued them like a pack of wolves targeting the weakest member of a herd. It was brutal.

Unfortunately, your overzealous sales efforts have left these customers bruised and second-guessing why they ever thought of your firm as a strategic partner. They no longer like your firm like they did before the recession. Your sales efforts showed them that you valued their money and your sales more than you did their relationship. Simply put, you put your short-term financial needs ahead of their business needs and the partnership between your firms. You probably killed or severely wounded a number of these relationships.

Only now do firms realize the long-term costs that these short-sighted sales maneuvers created.  Now, firms must rediscover how to sell and sell in these new, recovering times.  Let’s hope it’s not too late for your firm. The pursuit of recession-era deals has clouded one sales organization after another and the pendulum must return to a more reasoned balance.

What must be done?

Rediscover that Customers are “Assets” not “Targets.”  Sometimes, in the heat of a sales promotion, you need to remember that there are finite limits as to what any one customer wants or needs. If you see them as assets, then you alter your behaviors and pitches to them.  If they are but a means to you hitting a sales quota this month, they’re just targets.  If a company treats me (or my firm) like a target, I see that company as a commodity supplier. I will not invest one ounce of extra effort, loyalty, etc. with that firm as they won’t reciprocate the gesture. I will invest in my partners – the businesses that value me and treat me like an asset.

Rediscover How Businesses Buy Today.  Buying has changed of late, with B2B buyers having done huge amounts of research, shortlisting, etc. via Internet resources long before your firm even knew a deal was in process. While this customer self-service activity doesn’t mean the end to relationship selling, it does mean that the way you spend the time you spend cultivating and growing your relationships is changing. Now, you have to grow relationships fast and learn how to make these last in spite of your competition putting all kinds of goodies out on the Internet that might tempt your customers away.

Rediscover that Trust Is Earned Over Time and Can’t be Rebuilt Overnight.  My commercial relationship with some firms (i.e., air carriers) has changed markedly over the last few years.  My trust in those companies was broken badly and I doubt it can ever be recovered. These firms would need a culture transfusion and/or new leadership to get my business back. At a minimum, some firms would need to replace the long-standing representative assigned to our firm as the mere sight of him/her stirs up so much animus.

You might benefit from rotating customer assignments as fatigued, weary customers might want a new face – someone who might treat them better and is genuinely interested in created a new kind of relationship.

The basics of great selling never really went away in the great recession of late. But, they, too often, got submerged beneath the dire and crushing short-term needs of that timeframe. It’s time to re-discover these basics again, while adapting them to a newer era of how selling works in an Internet fueled, omni-channel, global marketplace.

Readers’ Choice: Top 10 Posts from TrustMatters for 2013

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The votes are in! Your votes, that is – the votes you made with your ‘feet.’

From Sales and Leadership to Neuroscience and Shakespeare, we covered a wide range this year. But your interest is what ultimately determines what’s of most importance.

So, that’s why we’re taking a moment to share with you the top 10 most-popular TrustMatters blogposts from this year – as decided by you. If you can discern the (an?) underlying pattern in this list, we’d love to hear it.

Without further ado, here are the Readers’ Choices for 2013:

1. The New Leadership is Horizontal, Not Vertical

2. 8 Ways to Make People Believe What You Tell Them

3. Hitting a 7-Iron From The Tee Box

4. Know Yourself. Wait, What Does That Even Mean?

5. When You Can’t Get No Respect

6. Brutal Honesty Isn’t

7. What Sales Winners Do Differently: Q&A with Mike Schultz

8. Why Experts Are Bad at Sales

9. Why We Don’t Trust Companies Part I

10. How Neuroscience Over-reaches in Business

Discomfort with Selling: Interview with Author Jeff Shore

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Jeff Shore talks about being bold in the face of discomfort – a subject that quicklyBe Bold and Win got my attention.

Jeff is a sales expert, speaker, author and executive coach. He focuses far more than the usual person in this field on mindset issues, perhaps due to his combination of sales and cognitive behavioral therapy approach. Maybe that’s why I was so intrigued. His first book, Deal With It, was for salespeople coping with rejection.  His latest book, Be Bold and Win the Sale: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone and Boost Your Performance, is forthcoming from McGraw-Hill in January 2014.

Here’s our conversation:

Charles Green. The title of your new book, Be Bold and Win the Sale, sounds very upbeat and motivational. Yet the book is built very much around the idea of embracing discomfort. That sounds like a very negative approach. How do you get from discomfort to being positive in relation to sales?

Jeff Shore. Discomfort is an inevitable part of the sales process. The most successful sales people have learned to embrace discomfort as an opportunity for growth, vs. avoiding it. From the perspective of potential change and growth, discomfort is inherently positive.

We all know people who have found a way of enjoying discomfort in order to achieve a goal or to maintain their daily life. We may not think about it in those exact terms, but when we do, it isn’t hard to come up with a list of people who experience joy in the discomfort of their pursuits. (Professional athletes, humanitarian aid workers, the list can go on and on).

We tend to think that people who enjoy discomfort are simply made of different stuff than the rest of us. That’s a handy explanation, but completely untrue. People who enjoy discomfort have trained themselves to do so. They have learned, on a deeper level, how and why the gain is worth the pain and they have reprogrammed their knee-jerk reaction to discomfort in order to recognize it for what it is: the means to a greater good.

CG: You also write and speak extensively about being bold. What does being bold mean to you and how is it related to discomfort in sales?

JS: It’s different from what we sometimes think of as “bold,” in that it’s not about aggressive selling or plowing over people to reach our individual goals. It is a humble, servant-oriented mindset. But it’s also the strategy we use to dismantle what I call “comfort addictions.” Being bold is about focusing on strengthening oneself in order to be equipped to better focus on and serve one’s clients.

Every time we have a moment of discomfort we also have a moment of decision. It takes boldness and a willingness to embrace discomfort to peel back the layers of our habitual actions that are based on decisions we make so quickly that we don’t even realize we are making them.

CG: This is very similar to what I mean by lowering our self-orientation. If we can stop feeling personally attacked, or fearful, in high-stress situations, then we can be free to pay attention to and be of service to our clients.

JS: Yes, and when we take the time to be honest and examine what we are thinking (fearing) and then analyze how those thoughts are defining our actions, we can gain a new understanding for ways in which we can improve in not only sales, but all of life. It’s not at all comfortable to face one’s own well-worn rationalizations or to choose to take action that is not our norm.

CG: Interesting. This reminds me a bit of Julien Smith’s excellent eBook, Flinch: he suggests we need to face our “flinch” moments and drive through them. So, how does ‘trust’ come into play in your message of being bold?

JS: First, trust always has to do with complete honesty and that is what I encourage people to embrace as a starting point: total honesty with themselves. Sales professionals are busy people with demanding quotas and deadlines. Over time, out of a sense of survival and/or efficiency, sales people inevitably develop habits that are not based on self-honesty.

By that I mean, there are so many potentially awkward moments in the sales process that sales people learn how to largely avoid these moments by basing their actions on possible outcomes vs. what actually is. The fear of losing a sale or of experiencing an intensely uncomfortable situation is what largely motivates most sales people. I believe that if a person can change their level of honesty with themselves, they will be freed up to change their actions and then, as I always say, they will be able to change someone’s world.

CG: Fear is a great motivator, but ultimately a limiting one. We need to get over it to get to a higher, more client-focused level.

JS: Trust also comes into play in my message of being bold in that it is crucial for people to understand and believe (trust) that boldness is not an inherent personality trait that is possessed by only the “heroes” amongst us. Boldness is a choice and an action. It can be learned. I have learned, and continue to, that this is true for everyone, including myself. If I hadn’t seen evidence of this in countless aspects of my own life, including my work in sales, I wouldn’t be so convinced of it. But, I have…over and over!

CG: I would echo that. Personally, I’ve never learned as well from positive examples or even positive experiences as from negative ones.

JS: I am utterly convinced that there is no growth without discomfort. Period. If you want to accomplish big things you must first accept and then appreciate discomfort. Every time you find yourself in an uncomfortable position you can be assured that an opportunity for success is around the corner. My mantra is: a moment of discomfort ALWAYS leads to a moment of decision.

CG: And what about that “moment of decision?” Say a bit more about how people can best respond to a moment of decision?

JS: In the book, I explore, analyze and dissect all of the how’s and why’s behind the sequence of feeling discomfort and then making a decision. I talk at length about retraining one’s mind and making “pre-decisions.” Again, being bold has everything to do with being bold with oneself: taking the time to recognize those moments in the sales process that are uncomfortable and coming to grips with one’s fears in relation to them.

When we honestly recognize how our actions are based on our perceived fears, it is then that we can make a plan for change and improvement. I encourage people to be very practical and pro-active in this process. In the book, there are spaces for readers to record what their usual responses (actions) to discomforts are and write down exact plans for different actions. This is part of the pre-decision process. When someone takes the time to foresee discomfort and plans for it by pre-deciding a positive response vs. their usual response, life changes for that person!

CG: You mentioned your work in sales. Can you give us a brief description of your career in sales and how you came to be an author?

JS: My sales career spans almost 30 years and in that time I’ve done it all – sales, sales leadership, executive leadership, consulting, training, speaking and writing. I wrote my first book, Deal With It!, to help salespeople overcome objections (a specialty of mine).

Be Bold and Win the Sale is my legacy book, my vocational ambition for many years. So much of a salesperson’s success is mental. I want to help high achievers to break through barriers and find the real prize.

CG: Jeff, thanks so much for taking the time to share with me today; I love your approach.

For more about Jeff Shore:

Learn more at JeffShore.com
follow Jeff on Twitter
pre-order Jeff’s book Be Bold and Win the Sale: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone and Boost Your Performance

Introducing the Trust-based Selling Salesforce App

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skitch

Today is the opening of Dreamforce – this year’s grandest ever annual event bySalesforce.com. 

Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Benioff, Vivek Kundra, Wayne Dyer, and many more will appear at the Moscone Center and some of San Francisco’s largest hotels as the event takes over the town.

And now you can add one more item to the agenda – the release of the Salesforce.com App for Trust-based Selling.

As the author of Trust-based Selling, I couldn’t be more proud to see it join the company of major sales books like Miller Heiman, SPIN Selling and others with their own Salesforce apps.

All thanks go to my developer partners, Soliant Consulting. I’ve worked with them for years, and they’re top-notch; as part of their database applications work, they build complex custom applications built on Salesforce.

Trust-based Selling is based on the simple idea that buyers greatly prefer to do business with those they trust. Trust can be broken down and taught through the Trust Equation and trust principles, as described both in the book and in the app. But it only works for those who grasp its basic premise – that you actually have to care about your customer.

The Trust-based Selling Salesforce App brings those concepts to life on the tried and true Salesforce platform.

If you’re at Dreamforce this week, look up the team from Soliant to ask them more about the Trust-based Selling App, starting with MD Craig Stabler. And enjoy the event.

Riding the Shark: Vanquishing Fear in Selling, Part 4 of 4: Shark-proof Your Selling

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Shark ProofingThis is the final post in a four-part series on Fear in Selling.  In the first part, I talked about the importance of dealing with fear in sales. In the second part, I wrote about the four types of fear.  In the third part I talked about fending off the sharks of fear. In this last part I talk about Shark-proofing your market – how to banish fear permanently.

The Sharks of Fear: Beyond Shark Repellent

There are Four Sharks of Fear:

1. Execution Fear. “I might mess up in doing this sale; I might not do it right.”
2. Competence Fear. “I might not know how to do this sale right; I may not even know I don’t know.”
3. Outcome Fear. “I might not get the deal at all – everything I wanted to happen won’t happen.”
4. Shame-based Fear. “They’re not going to like me or respect me anymore; and they’re probably right.”

While each can be dealt with tactically (see part 3), fear is a classic case where an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.  So – how do you conduct your selling life in ways that keep the Sharks of Fear permanently at bay?

It can be done.

Five Keys to Vanquishing the Sharks of Fear in Selling

First, let’s be clear where the solution does not lie. It is not in your sales process. You won’t find the key in sales management, and you won’t get there by tweaking your value proposition.

Instead, it consists of constantly applying five principles, or values, to every aspect of your selling life.  And here they are.

1. Always Sit on the Same Side of the Table. You are on the same team as your customer. Your interests are allied. There is no such thing as win-lose or lose-win, there is only win-win or part on friendly terms. You are not playing a zero-sum game, you are looking for a mutually beneficial relationship.

Don’t speak, write or think anything that posits you vs. your customer – your proper seat is on the same side of the table as your customer.

2. The Customer Gets Theirs First. The way to a successful partnership is not by insisting on 50-50 from the outset and at every step of the way. It comes from being gracious, putting the customer’s needs first, offering up some value, taking some risks, and listening before talking. The single best behavioral tool you can employ for this principle is – listen empathetically, long, and well. The result is that, when it’s your turn, you will be listened to in the same way.

Yes, a trust-based partnership has to work for both of you; but you get there by being willing to first focus on the customer’s needs, not your own.

3. Play the Long Game. The most powerful force in selling is the natural human tendency to return good for good, and bad for bad. Again – the most powerful force. Time, though of this way, is your friend, because time lets you develop relationships, not transactions. The more you develop relationships, the more your transactions will have context; and it’s a context of mutual courtesy, obligation and goodwill.

Don’t think of the sales process as a transaction, to be repeated. Think of it as a relationship, with ongoing interactions, but with a permanence all its own. And remember – the way you behave is the way you will be treated in turn. You empower what you fear; and you get back what you put out.

4. Keep No Secrets.  Transparency is to fear as a cross is to vampires. If you have no secrets, then there can be no surprises. If you don’t know something, say so. If you have information, share it. If you’re the best for the job, say so and say why. And if you’re not, say so as well – and that will be a lot more believable. Be the same person at all times to all people.

There are three exceptions, of course. Don’t give away trade secrets; don’t do anything illegal; and don’t hurt someone. Other than that, deal strictly in the Truth in all your affairs, and no one can or will fault you.  (And if you think giving away all your information will empower your competitors, think again – they can never replicate your relationships).

5. Lead With Your Chin. The thing that triggers trust, allows you to play the long game, and encourages collaborative reciprocal behavior is to be the one to take the first risk. Never mind what Ronald Reagan said – there is no trust without risk. If you want to create trust, you must lead with risk-taking.

Talk price early, not late. Admit your shortcomings up front. Give away samples – especially if you’re in an intangible services business. Have a point of view. Go out on a limb. Invest a little time, rather than checking your sales efficiency watch every minute. Dare to empathize.

 

That’s it. If you conduct your sales life by those principles, about 90% of customers will return your behavior in kind. The other 10%? Leave them to your competitors. Life is too short. And be assured, they won’t do as well as you and the 90% anyway.

Riding the Shark: Vanquishing Fear in Selling, Part 3 of 4

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How to Keep the Shark At Bay (photo by: Hermanus Backpackers) This is the third article in a four-part series on Fear in Selling.  In the first part, I talked about the importance of dealing with fear in sales. In the second part, I wrote  about the four types of fear.  In this part I’ll talk about solutions, and in Part 4 I’ll talk about Shark-proofing your market – how to replace fear permanently. 

Four-Step Shark Repellent

I’ve suggested there are Four Sharks of Fear:

1. Execution Fear. “I might mess up in doing this sale; I might not do it right.”
2. Competence Fear. “I might not know how to do this sale right; I may not even know I don’t know.”
3. Outcome Fear. “I might not get the deal at all – everything I wanted to happen won’t happen.”
4. Shame-based Fear. “They’re not going to like me or respect me anymore; and they’re probably right.”

Conveniently there are four forms of “shark repellent,” i.e. tools to vanquish those fears, at least for the time being.  Inconveniently, they don’t coincide one for one with the Four Sharks.  Conveniently, they generally come in a sequence: all you have to do is follow the four-step sequence.

Of course, all these steps depend on your recognizing your state of fear in the first place. If you can’t get outside of your fears long enough to notice that you’re afraid, then you need to start elsewhere. But assuming you can identify your fears, follow these steps.

Step 1. Write It, Read It, Talk It. Write down your fears in plain, simple language. With a pencil (not a keyboard). On paper (you remember paper, right?). Then read it out loud.  Sure, go ahead and close the door first.  Now the hard part: read it aloud to someone else. A friend, a co-worker, a relative.

Don’t kid yourself that reading that paragraph and “understanding” it does anything for you. It doesn’t. If we could “understand” our way out of fears, shrinks would be out of business. You actually need to do those steps. Write it down. Say it out loud. Say it to another person.

The reason is simple. Many fears dissolve in the light of day. And even if they don’t, it’s important to be able to state them clearly.

Again – don’t skip this step or think it’s enough to “understand” it.

Step 2. State the 95% Worse Case Scenario. Identify the worst thing that realistically could happen.  (Leave out the 5% doomsday scenarios). Write it down; write down the downside of that bad thing happening; and write down the probability of it happening.

For example: “I don’t know enough about this industry, and that might come out in the sales call, and then the client will see through me, I’ll be embarrassed and I won’t get the sale.”

What’s the 95% worst case? Probably losing the sale and being embarrassed. Now – seriously – how bad is that? How bad is it that you’re embarrassed and lose a sale? You can get over embarrassment easily enough, it doesn’t have to scar you. And sure you’d like the sale, but is your job at stake? Your house? Your mortgage?

It’s a good idea to write this down too. Our fears are almost always exaggerated versions of what is likely to happen. I’m not suggesting you ignore your fears – but you must right-size them. Get real. Your fears will most likely subside.

Step 3. Identify the Customer’s Fears.  Put aside your fears for a minute, and ask yourself – what is my customer afraid of? Being fooled? Being made a fool of? Making a bad decision? Appearing indecisive? Giving away competitive information?  Forgetting to ask critical questions? Wasting 20 minutes of their life on an unproductive sales call?

List your guess of the top three fears your customer has. Think about how these fears might show up in your customer? What words or questions or mannerisms might suggest those fears?

The purpose of this exercise is partly to get yourself out of your own skull, where all the fear-talk is happening. But it’s also substantive. If you can surmise what fears your customer has, you can then come up with ideas and solutions and perspectives to help your customer address those fears. And that would be excellent selling, by anyone’s book.

Step 4. Define Your Limits of Control
If your fears have made it through steps 1 through 3 and are still not vanquished, you’re ready for Step 4: get clear about what you can and cannot do in the situation, do what you can, and let the rest go.

For example: You may fear losing the sale to a competitor with a degree in chemical engineering (and you’re a philosophy major). There are some things you can do between now and the sales call, but getting a graduate degree in chemical engineering is probably not one of them. So let it go.

Instead, do what you have some control over. Identify the business dynamics, the value proposition, and possible sources of chemical expertise outside yourself should you need it for the job. (And don’t even think about leading the customer on to think that maybe you have a Chem degree when you don’t).

The hard part for most people is “letting the rest go.” But think about it. If you’re 46 years old and 5’9″, odds are good that you’ll go your grave without ever having played in the NBA. Get over it.

It’s easy when it comes to playing in the NBA – but it’s no different. If the job really does require someone with a degree in chemical engineering, then you deserve to lose the deal to someone who does. You only deserve to get what is within your power to deliver on. Save your emotional energy for the next customer, and leave a good impression with this one.

There’s no shame in losing a deal for which you were unqualified, or for which you couldn’t possibly get qualified in time.  In fact, in those rare cases where you do succeed in selling a deal without being qualified, you’ll cause yourself far more fears when you actually have to deliver on your false promise. Fix what you can, and let go the rest.

This four-step process should help in dealing with any particular fear that arises.  But how do you deal with fear itself? Can you reduce the incidence of fear itself?

Yes you can, and that’ll be the subject of the next and last blogpost.

Riding the Shark: Vanquishing Fear in Selling, part 2 of 4

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4 Sharks Of Fear (photo via Iggy.)There are many ways to think about sales and selling. You can focus on value propositions, sales processes, sales management, motivation, techniques, and models. In this blogpost series,  I focus on something else that’s common in sales – fear.

In Part 1 I talked about the importance of dealing with fear in sales. Here I’d like to talk about how to recognize and categorize fear. In Part 3 I’ll talk about solutions, and in Part 4 I’ll talk about Shark-proofing your market – how to replace fear permanently.

The Four Sharks of Fear

There are many ways to categorize fears, just as there are ways to categorize sharks. I like to lump them in progressively more fearful categories, from relatively tame to terrifyingly fearful.

  1. Execution Fear. “I might mess up in doing this sale; I might not do it right.”
  2. Competence Fear. “I might not know how to do this sale right; I may not even know what I don’t know.”
  3. Outcome Fear. “I might not get the deal at all – everything I wanted to happen won’t happen.”
  4. Shame-based Fear. “They’re not going to like me or respect me anymore; and they’re probably right.”

The first thing you’ll notice about that list is that it gets “worse” as you go down the list – it starts off with incomplete education and ends up with self-loathing. All of us find it a lot easier to deal with the former than the latter.

But they all can drive equally negative impact on sales.

How Fear Affects Selling

Whether your fear is tactical, existential, or in between, it will keep you from doing something right.

  1. If you have execution fear, you are likely to not make the call, schedule the appointment, or send the email. You will be physically not present. You will miss opportunities and appear undependable.
  2. If you have competence fear, you are likely to appear ragged, unconfident, changeable and second-guessing.
  3. If you have outcome fear, you are likely to annoy everyone around you, because you try to over-control, micro-manage, obsess, and frequently blame others; you are in a bad mood because the world doesn’t obey your commands.
  4. If you have shame-based fear, you are mentally not present; you are probably chronically sick, or often busy elsewhere; you are probably inconsistent, moody, and often a poor listener. And in sales, the inability to listen is a major handicap.

Have you been mentally jotting notes?  Write them down. Which type of fears do you seem particularly prone to?

Negative Feedback Loops

One of the most pernicious aspects of fear is its self-fulfilling nature. If you don’t make the appointment for fear of making an error, you have made an error. If you’re afraid of appearing competent, almost anyone will perceive that fear and interpret it as – incompetence.

If you’re afraid of a bad outcome, some kind of karmic rule of life intervenes – you nurture what you fear. And if you are ashamed of yourself, nobody will be comfortable  being around you; which of course is more fish-food for the shark of shame.

This feeds-on-itself aspect of fear is powerful – picture a feeding frenzy when sharks congregate around some little piece of distress, compounding the terror.

The Wrong Shark Repellent 

Unfortunately, people are almost hard-wired to respond badly to the Sharks of Sales. In the real world, if we see a shark in the water – we run.  Good call; avoiding the shark is the right thing to do.

But with Sales Sharks, that’s exactly wrong. In almost all cases, fear of doing something wrong drives us to not do something that is right. Think sins of commission and sins of omission.

We are so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we say nothing. We may not lose what we have (dignity), but we create a much bigger failure to get something we wanted (the sale).

Imagine a lifeguard who sees someone drowning. If the guard dives in to save the person, and it turns out the person was just playing, the lifeguard may be slightly embarrassed, and feel put out.

But what if the person really was drowning and the lifeguard thought, “Well, I’d look stupid if I dove in after them and it was a false alarm, let me wait a bit longer and see.” Wrong answer!  Yet that is the mistake that fear drives us to make in sales.

The pattern is clear: fear drives us to avoidance, which ensures failure. You can probably envision some of the solutions to fear in sales, but in any case, that’s the next post. Stay tuned.

Selling to Mr. Spock

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Nowhere am I so desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical humans. –Spock in ‘I, Mudd’

Star Trek’s  iconic Mr. Spock was half-Vulcan, half-human. It’s the former we first notice in Spock – Vulcans are governed entirely by logic and rationality, unencumbered by emotions.

But it’s the latter that takes Spock from caricature to character. Spock mirrors our own schizophrenic, rational / emotional natures. He is the sock puppet for humanity, allowing us to look at ourselves afresh.

Of course, you wouldn’t know that from looking at economists, strategy consultants – and much of the B2B sales literature. They suggest that people, particularly smart business people, are mostly rational decision makers, persuaded by well-established rules of scientific evidence, logic, and the inexorable rules of mathematics.

In other words – they treat buyers like Vulcans.

But as with Spock, the truth for buyers is far more complex.

My Brain’s Bigger than Yours

In recent weeks I’ve spent a lot of time with B2B sales organizations. I’m reminded of how much businesspeople have bought – hook, line and sinker – the idea that customers buy through rational decision-making. The economists’ models are live and well in sales training programs.

Feeding the ratiocinating Vulcan side of buyers is necessary. But it is almost never sufficient. The true role of the intellect in B2B buying is as follows: Buyers scan options rationally, but they make their final selection with their emotions – then rationalize that decision with their brains.

The cognitive role in buying is vastly over-stated. Brains don’t rule. Spock is not 100% Vulcan. Neither is your customer.

Your Customer is Not a Vulcan

Question: What do the following things have in common? Value propositions; challenger selling; strategic fit; problem definition; pricing; negotiation; objection-handling.

Answer: In B2B sales, they usually center around analytical economic value, assuming that the rational resolution of each issue is the key to helping a buyer achieve a decision. Look for these buzz-phrases; clients buy results, you’ve gotta show the bottom line, the key is to demonstrate value, and so forth.

Nothing wrong with that list; but what’s missing are the things that actually trigger a buyer’s decision – not just justify it. Those include, for starters:

  • confidence that the seller can deliver what (s)he promises, and
  • the resulting ability to sleep through the night
  • integrity
  • character
  • commitment to principle
  • a long-term relationship focus
  • a sense that the seller has the buyer’s interest at heart
  • the seller’s ability and willingness to defer gratification
  • vulnerability of the seller
  • a set of values beyond economic value
  • a sense that the seller is a safe haven for conversation.

In short – trust in the seller.

Your customer is not a Vulcan. Your customer is Spock – partly human.

The Cognitive/Emotive Disconnect

I spend my time with smart, complex-business, B2B professionals. Every single one of them will acknowledge the importance of the above list. Yet every one of them lives in an organization where 90% of attention is focused on the buyer’s Vulcan side, doing slide decks, spreadsheets, valuations and scenarios.

In the real B2B world, all those rational items are the (necessary) justifications for customers looking to rationalize their (emotional) decisions. But they aren’t the decision-driver.

Buyers often (rationally) screen sellers. But they quickly form favorites, unconsciously, and usually before the sellers have even had a chance to address the issue. All the Vulcan-targeted approaches are aimed either at forming a buyer’s opinion (too late, already done), or changing a buyer’s preformed opinion (already set in concrete).  It rarely works.

Proof? Ask yourself how many times your customers failed to see the brilliant case you had made, because they were somehow biased against you. You tried to sell to the Vulcan in your Spock-customer; but that human side kept rearing its ugly head.

How Complex B2B Buying Really Works

Very few buyers will tell their boss, “Gee, I guess I bought from those guys because, you know, I really trust them.” That’s career suicide. Buyers need the air-cover (and, to be fair, the reality check) of a rationality-based argument. It’s our job as sellers to deliver that rationale to them, bullet-proof and logic-tight as it can be.

Because in business, we all need to pretend we’re Vulcans.

But deep down, we all know what’s really going on. People buy with the heart, and rationalize with the mind. Brains are a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Being right, by itself, is a vastly over-rated proposition. Being right too soon just pisses people off. All else equal, a trust-based sell will always beat a rationality-based sell.

The truth is, our emotional instincts are extremely powerful (not to mention frequently accurate). We make our decisions first based on those emotions, and then struggle to justify them according to the rules of the game.  Unlike Spock, we lead with the human, and bring in our Vulcan sides as a check.

Many, many of my clients say: “That may be true for lots of people, but not for my [boss] [client] [customer]. They’re completely Vulcan, data-based, just-give-me-the-facts people. You’ve got to treat them like Vulcans, because they demand it.”  But the fact that they demand to be treated like Vulcans is 95% about ego – and that’s their human side.

Ironically, all this is especially true for those who believe the world works on brains. They are prone to buy even more emotionally, because their self-worth is tied up in thinking that emotions don’t matter – which renders them oblivious to their own human decision-making process.

Even if your customer thinks they’re a Vulcan – treat them like Spock. Address the human side – then give them Vulcan-food to justify their feelings.

It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.  – Mr. Spock in ‘Errand of Mercy’