Selling from Inside Your Client’s Shoes

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You know the phrase, “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” It’s short for empathy, understanding them so well you can intuit what it feels like to take a long walk—wearing their footwear, no less.

Let’s adapt that idea to selling. What if you could understand your client so well that you could intuit how it feels to be sitting in their seat in a sales meeting, sensing every nuance along the way?

Shall we give it a try?

Sales Meeting Time T-minus-10

It’s 10 minutes before meeting time. You arrive early, and the receptionist ushers you into the conference room and offers you coffee. You nervously drum your fingers on the laptop you brought to introduce yourself and your firm to Claudio and Taciana. They are CEO and COO, respectively, of the relatively new marketing automation firm C3PX. You spoke by phone with Taciana to set up this meeting. You’re optimistic, marshaling your nervous energy as you mentally rehearse your key points for the nth time.

Claudio. Meanwhile, Claudio wonders if he has time to call his 19-year-old daughter at college. Actually, whether to call her at all. Things are not well between the two of them—they haven’t been since he and his wife divorced last year. Teenage girls can be so—difficult. And it seemed like she so often took sides with her mother.

Meanwhile, C3PX is doing well—sometimes too well. Claudio just signed another line of credit extension. The good news was the firm’s credit was good. The bad news is he wants to pay down some debt, but there was always a need to invest in some new software or process. The meeting in 10 minutes may be another example—a necessary expense, but not welcome in terms of cash flow.

Claudio hopes Taciana can take the lead on this. He’s been leaning a lot on her lately. Is he holding up his end of the bargain? Or is it welcome to her—a chance to grow into the business? But what if she’s growing too fast and taking over some of Claudio’s roles as CEO?

Taciana. Taciana is running late. She’s just finished a meeting with HR, and she is concerned the experienced hire recruiting program is short of target. She wonders if she’ll need to postpone the ops team call this afternoon until tomorrow, though she did that last week as well. Is she getting a little overloaded? Does it show?

Taciana has mixed feelings about this meeting. On one hand, she genuinely liked the phone call she had with you. She felt you sounded sharp, competent, and confident. But she can’t help worrying about your service offering.

Does C3PX really need your kind of service at this point in its growth? You offer some great services, but with them comes another level of complexity. Are the benefits worth it? Should they get along for another 12 to 18 months? What if some new technology comes along and leap-frogs your offering?

Also, is this going to be yet another Taciana-solo project? “Sure, I’m the COO,” she thinks, “but that doesn’t mean I have to do everything. Am I leveraged enough? Will Claudio think I’m empire-building if I try to delegate? But if I don’t, how am I going to get time to spend with my husband? We’ve been trying to get more time together; he has a demanding job, too. I hope Claudio takes the lead in this meeting.”

Sales Meeting Time T = 0

It’s time. You take a last look at your phone just as the door opens. In walk Claudio and Taciana.

You all smile and shake hands, then pass out business cards. You each reject offers of more coffee and strategically settle into your chairs, all the while smiling and uttering meaningless phrases in non-committal tones.

The meeting commences.

Like all meetings, it commences on multiple levels. There is the overt agenda to be discussed. There are first impressions, flooding each of you as you quickly take into account the others’ appearance, sound, bearing, and manner. Are you who they expected? What’s different? What does that mean?

And are they who you expected? What did you misjudge? What did you get right? Can you afford to focus on that and pay attention to what’s being said? Do they seem a little rushed? What does that mean? Are they going to sit through your deck, or should you skip it? When should you bring up price?

You can ask them to tell you a bit about their situation, but you can’t do too much of that. These days no one has time for someone who hasn’t done their homework. Yet neither can you waste time proving you’ve done your homework. What does it mean that they placed their iPhone next to them? And so on.

Behind the Scenes

The internal dialogue is endless—and that’s just yours! What about the dialogue inside Taciana’s and Claudio’s heads? How important is this inner cacophony? And what should you do about it? Ignore it? Address it? If you choose to address it, how do you do it?

The truth is those internal dialogues are not trivial. They are important. You need to address them. Most of all this is a great opportunity cleverly disguised as an awkward social moment. You can dramatically affect the whole sale, and the whole relationship, by how you conduct yourself in the first few minutes regarding these internal dialogues.

Small Talk Isn’t Small

The idle chit-chat we engage in is a potent social ritual. The point is not to find out that you both went to Ohio State or love basketball or have kids. Those are proxies.

The real issue at stake is whether they can trust you—in a very specific sense of that word. It’s what we call “intimacy” in the trust equation. Do they feel safe being who they are in your presence? Do you laugh at the right moments—with the right kind of laugh? Do you wince at the right statements—like when Taciana mentions meeting overload? When they say, “Tell us about yourself,” do you remember that mostly they’re just being nice and then turn the conversation to them?

Do you have the emotional courage to raise your eyebrows when Claudio says, “Teenagers—am I right?” and invite further comment should he choose to go there? When one of them raises price concerns, do you respond with curiosity and say, “Tell me what’s behind that concern?” Or do you reply with a canned defense of your value-for-price? Do you have the nerve to say, “I’m sensing a little bit of stress from each of you. Is this decision a source of concern to you?”

This isn’t about your value proposition. It isn’t about proposing challenging questions or asserting your qualifications. But it’s critical. The buyer/seller interaction is many things, but it’s first and foremost human. First impressions matter, and not just about clothes and looks.

What buyers want is to feel at ease, trusting, and confident they can be authentically themselves with you and not have to look over their shoulders when dealing with you.

Buyers make up their mind about this subconsciously, and they do it very quickly. Trust in this sense doesn’t take time; it takes courage, connection, and empathy. Don’t be afraid to let your guard down. Doing so shows others that can do the same with you from the get-go.

This post first appeared on RainToday.com

Trust-Based Selling Between Cultures

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The hardest thing about describing Trust-based Selling to Americans is the idea that the first step in selling has nothing to do with selling. They just don’t get it. Maybe this will help.

Jim Peterson—lawyer, accountant, former newspaper columnist, blogger—told me this delightful story about himself.

I’m an American, and had moved to Paris as an expat, to be senior in-house counsel in Europe for my global firm. The dossier included oversight of our litigation, disputes and risk management.

I inherited a very large piece of pending litigation: we were one of the several defendants — the lead plaintiff was a large French bank. The case had been going on in the course of Germany for several years — but it was then dormant.

I got from the files the name of my in-house counterpart at the bank — whose office was near mine in Paris — and invited him to meet over lunch. The ground rule was–no discussion of the case or its details or merits, since I had no background on the matter and there was no activity then or on the horizon. We did in fact meet up — had a fine and proper French meal including a good bottle of wine — and parted company.

The case ran on in Germany for a year and a half or so. Eventually the local lawyers for both sides called to say that it was time for a settlement, but that they were at an impasse and there was no prospect for fruitful discussions.

I went back to my phonebook. I called the bank’s lawyer in Paris, got caught up on the current status, and asked for a meeting. In a Paris conference room, in about an hour, a successful resolution was reached.

To the French, relationships are vitally important in the conduct of business of all kinds. This could not have happened if we had been coming together for the first time. (The American mis-apprehension about the rudeness of French shop-keepers, waiters and taxi drivers is misplaced — they simply don’t know or have any relationship with a new arrival. By taking the time to be courteous and conversational, ahead of the desire to transact business, the entire atmosphere can be changed. And even more so when you become a repeat customer.)

We Americans, with characteristic brevity and impatience, have an urge to “get on with it.” We consider this a virtue, despite the fact that this approach will often leave us frustrated and will yield sub-optimal results. Neither does this alter our belief that we are results-driven.  But the truth is: slowing down rather than rushing to finish in time to catch the afternoon plane will often yield a better outcome.

By extension, I have used variations on this approach even in the American context — where the investment of a small amount of time and effort is often seen to bear fruit.

Jim is not alone. One Japanese bargaining technique (as per Riding the Waves of Culture, a great book) is to wait until the Americans have confirmed their return flights before demanding an additional item or making a small concession in their position. The urge to hold to a preset plan is so strong that the Americans will jump at the offer rather than reschedule.

The point is not just that Americans are prisoners to our own US-centric views of culture, but that we are mistaken even about our own culture. The simple powerful truth, anywhere in the world, is that people prefer to do business with those with whom they have some kind of relationship. The mechanics of that differ; the principle does not. Tons of sales are left on the table in the US because of an inability to deal with relationships.

Want to sell? Then first Stop Trying to Sell.

This truth is no less truthful for being a truism: People don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.

The best sales begin with relationship. Deal with it.

This post first appeared on TrustMatters.

The Dirty Little Secret about Subject Matter Expertise in Sales

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It may be the dirtiest little secret in professional sales. The lie we all love to tell ourselves. The truth we just hate to face up to. What secret/lie/truth is that?

The myth of the subject matter expert as key to sales success.

Sources of Mythology about Subject Matter Experts

There is no shortage of prognosticators about the increasing importance of subject matter expertise. You’ve probably seen a lot of it:

  • You may have heard from The Challenger Sale folks that if you’re not coming up with new insights about your customers’ business, then you’re a relationship wimp.
  • You may have seen the article Top Ten Trends in Sales and Business Development, which lists the rise of the subject matter expert as number one on the list.
  • You may have read the Canadian Professional Sales Association article The Rise of the Subject Matter Expert, which says B2B organizations are increasingly turning to subject matter experts.

What all of those pieces have in common is an underlying view of the buying decision as rational, calculating, value-based, and economically driven. And that’s Just. Not. True. That’s the dirty little secret.

To be precise, it’s not that buyers are irrational. Nor are economics or rational thought irrelevant. But the role we ascribe to such thinking is profoundly mislabeled by an awful lot of sales “experts.”

So, let’s get it right.

There are two types of thinking, there are two stages in B2B buying (which largely correspond to those types), and there are two logical roles in the buying process (necessity and sufficiency). When we get it right, those all drop into place, including the role of subject matter expertise.

Two Types of Thinking

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, outlines two types of cognition. The first, System 1, is fast, is intuitive, and jumps to instinctive reactions or conclusions. System 2 is the slower, logically deduced, careful check. His book (and his life’s work) consists of showing over and over how much our lives are controlled by System 1, contrary to popular belief.

A similar point is made by Jonathan Haidt in his brilliant book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics. He uses the metaphor of the elephant and the elephant driver. The latter thinks he is in charge, but in fact the elephant pretty much does what the elephant wants.

If you prefer the same idea in a far more accessible and practical manner, read Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning, in which he explains how he became a junior globally ranked chess champion and then a world champion in the martial art Tai Chi Chuan.

How’d he do it? He learned the link between thinking fast and slow thinking; he learned when and how to use the elephant and when to use the elephant driver. He drilled over and over the most minute movements, strategies, and counters until they became subconscious and he could trust them with “fast thinking”—thereby reserving his “slow thinking” to focus on that one, single differentiating move.

The point is not that one is right and the other wrong. They are both necessary to human functioning, but they play different roles.

Two Stages in B2B Buying

David Maister originally observed that most B2B buying processes proceed in two stages: screening and selection. In the screening process, staff people typically “round up the usual suspects,” putting criteria on spreadsheets and evaluating who should be in the “final four.” That is a prototypical rational process—think spreadsheets, analysis, and quantitative tools—which is why it’s delegated to junior staff.

Then there’s selection. Selection is heavily instinctive, intuitive, and non-rational. Selection is done by senior people who are experienced, have confidence in their judgment, and have the track record to back it up. But of course they don’t claim clairvoyance or rely on gut feeling. No, they rationalize their instincts. To put it prosaically, people decide with their hearts, then rationalize the decision with their brains.

Two Logical Roles: Necessity and Sufficiency

Some things you must have in order to get other things. On the other hand, some things are all you need. Writing a term paper may be necessary to get an A in the course, but writing a paper alone isn’t sufficient to get that A. We often mistake necessity for sufficiency. And subject matter mastery is a classic example.

In B2B sales, it is pretty much necessary to have and demonstrate subject matter expertise. In fact, such expertise is specifically looked for in the screening process assigned to junior staff. The absence of subject matter expertise is often justification for being removed from the final list of firms invited to present.

But subject matter expertise is far from sufficient (the same is true of low price). You’ve seen plenty of cases where neither the lowest price nor the highest technical ability got the job. Instead, the job frequently goes to the seller who is “good enough” on technical (and price) terms, but who clearly has a better trusting relationship with the client.

Interestingly, often this is not stated. In fact, it’s even denied. Selection decisions, which are made with the intuitive, “fast thinking” mind are often rationalized by referring back to the “slow thinking” rational criteria that were employed during the screening phase.

Putting It Together: Revealing the Dirty Little Secret

The dirty little secret is that subject matter expertise plays two important, but precise and limited roles. The first is to screen out uncompetitive offerings up front, so that time is not wasted on providers that are least likely to win. This role is finished once the finalists are selected.

The second role is to rationalize the decisions that are made by the “fast thinking” mind, the “elephant” mind, the subconsciously competent mind that has absorbed experience and can trust its own intuition. Here the rational mind is the handmaiden of instinct and experience.

The buyer may tell you and everyone else that you won the job because of your expertise and credentials and that competitor B lost it because they weren’t as brilliant as you. But don’t you believe it.

You won because you were good enough on the expertise side of things and the client loved you. That means they felt you had integrity, they could get along with you, they could be honest with you, you’d be straight with them, and that if there were problems, they could work them out with you—and not with those other folks.

The dirty little secret is the same thing that popular girl told you in high school when you invited her out and she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m busy Friday night.” She wasn’t busy; she just didn’t want to go out with you. “Busy” was the socially acceptable excuse of high school dating. “Expertise” is the socially acceptable excuse of B2B buyers.

You gotta have it, but don’t kid yourself that it’s enough.

 

This post first appeared on RainToday.com 

How Effective Was that Sales Training?

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If you’ve ever received a personal performance evaluation at work, there’s a decent chance you left the meeting thinking, “Well, it would’ve been good to know that about four months ago!” In other words, advice—even if valuable—has to be timely to add value. And, of course, an evaluation that doesn’t offer any recommendations at all feels even less valuable.

In the realm of personal evaluations, we all “get” the need to add value, and to do so on a timely basis. But what about when it comes to evaluating training programs, particularly sales training programs? How does your firm go about evaluating its training offerings? Would you say it adds value? And if so, how fast does that value accrue?

I also want to suggest a simple, but basic, change in how we evaluate such programs: by shifting from metrics to communications. But first, let’s explore how evaluation usually works.

Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Does this sound familiar? Your firm hires an outside vendor to develop an addition to your portfolio of sales training programs. Your Learning and Development team works hard with the vendor to ensure the program is customized. You do a pilot, you redesign, and you finally release it.

Your firm rolls out several deliveries before the fiscal year-end. A detailed online eight-page evaluation form has been developed, and it is filled out by over half of the participants within a week after each delivery.

Thus at year’s end, the training organization can submit a lengthy data-based analysis of the extent to which each of program’s objectives were met. In consultation with the vendor, changes are made to the program, and the cycle of delivery and evaluation begins anew.

Only one question remains: how much did sales increase because of the program? And isn’t that the only question that really matters?

Of course, there are myriad reasons why it’s a hard question to answer: GDP growth declined in the same quarter, a competitor made an acquisition, you raised prices, the leadership team changed, etc. Those are perfectly valid reasons, yet the only relevant questions remain: Did the training increase sales or not? By how much? And how did it do so?

If those questions can’t be answered, then all your complicated evaluation did was to evaluate. It didn’t add any value. And, just as with your unsatisfying personal evaluation, it leaves a hollow feeling.

The Problem with Evaluations

To over-simplify, the problem with programmatic evaluations is metrics. Not the wrong metrics, but simply the metrics. Business in general overrates metrics, but this is a particularly egregious case. We are easily seduced into thinking that if some data is better than no data, then more data is always better than less.

And that’s not the only mistake. There is also the cognitive trap: believing that if we can “understand” something, we have done the hard work of change. Not when it comes to selling, we haven’t.

Finally, there’s a subtle trap unique to training: the mistaken belief that tweaking the program will directly and causally result in the desired sales behavior changes. In fact, this is largely a leap of faith.

To sum up, the metrics don’t measure what matters (sales). The metrics give a false sense of accuracy, and there’s a leap of faith between the recommended changes and the hoped-for actual results.

The Answer

Many of these problems can be solved through one relatively simple change: replacing metrics-based evaluation with a post-training program of communication between participants. Here’s how it works.

A simple platform and protocol is developed for participants to share stories with one another about their successes in applying the lessons of the training program. Some serious social engineering is required to make it very simple. We have found an online document-sharing approach with an occasional conference call works best, with some admin support to encourage and tease out stories to be effective.

This simple approach does three things:

  • It provides timely feedback—no more waiting until period-end.
  • It provides specific Example: “I ran into a prospect at the airport, and I remembered to talk about her family first rather than diving into business. It resulted in a meeting the following week.”
  • It gives very specific guidance to future training designs about what does, and doesn’t, work.

Also—and maybe the most important thing—it directly addresses the top line. Sales can be identified through the story lines and augmented by a request to participants to periodically identify particular sales and the proportion attributable to the training.

Insist that your evaluation process doesn’t just evaluate. Make sure it adds value. Do so by substituting human-to-human direct communication about what works in place of quantitative and abstract metrics. It’s a human solution to a still-human profession—sales.

This post first appeared on RainToday.com 

Discounting, Price, Value and Psychology

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Back in 2008, RainToday.com published Fees and Pricing Benchmark Report: Consulting Industry in which they analyzed a ton of data from 645 consultants. There were six price-related topics. One in particular has stuck with me over the years: the analysis on discounting.

As the authors point out, discounting is Ground Zero for hypocrisy in pricing. Everyone decries it – yet everyone (actually, 65%) does it. It reminds me of dieting – “I know I shouldn’t, but this one little brownie won’t hurt. And I’ll get back on the wagon again tomorrow.”

Couched this way, the problem of discounting is one of willpower – we all know we should stick to standards and principles, yet we are morally weak at the moment of truth.

I don’t think that discounting is a moral problem, however. Instead, it is one of bad thinking. And it centers around two false beliefs:

  1. the belief that certain customers are inherently “price buyers”
  2. the belief that feeding the price beast will make it go away.

The truth is that price is a proxy for several different fundamental buyer concerns. It has no meaning inherently. Price per se is a clearing factor, the point at which money exchanged balances with the various benefits received. And this balancing point is not just “value” as most firms mean that term; it is very much tied up with the psychology of the buyer.

What Clients Mean By Price Objections

It seems obvious.  A client expresses an objection to a price. They say they want a lower price. Clearly – they are concerned about money, value and price. Right? So the only question is, shall we discount, and by how much. Right?

No, and no. Here are four distinct things that buyers are saying when they say they want a lower price. And not one is really about price.

  • Mismatch with competitors. Frequently clients faced with competitive bid situations will say, “Company X is cheaper than you by 25%—you need to discount to stay in the game.” Let’s assume the claim is true on the face of it.  There are two reasons for one firm pricing 20% below another; one is intentionally buying the business, with the intent to raise price later.  The other—and most common—is that the client is comparing apples to oranges.
    • The solution to the first is easy: explain to the client why your competitor’s cost structure is virtually identical to yours, and why a 25% discount is inherently unsustainable—therefore the client is facing a relationship vs. transaction issue.  If they choose transaction, then be glad your competitor just trashed their bottom line to buy a price-shopping client.  They’ll eventually be back.
    • The solution to the second is to have the client carefully compare features of your bid with features of competitor’s bid. You know where costs get built up and where they don’t; have the courage to give your client the data to do the comparison.Competitive mismatches aren’t really price objections; they are fundamentally rooted in a misunderstanding of either industry economics or project design economics. The answer is not discounting, but education.
  • Mismatch with budget. Sometimes buyers just have a limited budget. They feel trapped, and often a little embarrassed that they have asked you to quote into a situation in which they under-budgeted—or over which they have no real control. Their natural reaction is to push back, in hopes that you can solve their problem without their having to confess their embarrassing ignorance, or go back to their boss for more money.This too is best not seen as an “objection;” it is a simple constraint of the world—budget vs. cost. Again, discounting just confuses the matter, and reinforces the idea that the client can afford to not be open and transparent with you.
  • Mismatch with expectations. Only experienced buyers do a good job of guesstimating price quotes from professional services firms. They tend to focus on a basic mental model of time vs. rate, and naturally under-estimate each.  (Recall your own shock at first finding out your billing rate as a newcomer; and the shock of industry hires when they first see time estimates for what they thought was just a request for a data-dump from an expert).This “objection” isn’t an objection at all—it’s just the natural human expression of surprise and dismay when we find out our expectations didn’t match reality.  Discounting just confuses them more, and rewards their delusions for the future.
  • Mismatch with motivation. Professional services firms suffer disproportionately from the delusion that clients make decisions on purely rational, monetary, statistical criteria. Clients, like everyone (including ourselves) make our decisions with the heart, and justify (rationalize) them with the brain.A basic human need is to make sure we didn’t get a “bad deal.”  You can give all the “value” data you want, but unless a client feels you are being straight with them and/or they’re getting the best possible “deal,” they will remain suspicious.
    • When suspicious, our innate tendency is to bargain, to determine some subtle psychological resistance point, just as we would at a bazaar or yard sale.This behavior has nothing to do with price per se, and everything to do with transparency of your economics and the prices others have gotten from you.Not paying attention to motivations leads to discounting, which has the perverse effect of convincing buyers that—aha!—you really were holding out on them! Which leads them not only to haggle again the next time, but to fundamentally mistrust you because you quoted them a price that was an attempt to “get by.”

What to Do About Price Objections

So what’s to be done? We all know the answer – don’t discount – but we think it’s a moral weakness, a failure of principles. It’s not– it’s a failure of understanding the reason for price objections.

Armed with the truth—that it’s not about price, and it never is about price – we can do the right thing; be curious, probe and sensitively get one level deeper when presented with price objections.

Back to RainToday’s survey. Why do 65% of consulting firms discount, even when, as the authors point out, the average 11% reductions could go straight to the bottom line?

It is simple fear – fear of losing the deal, particularly—which drives us inward rather than outward.  Rather than asking curiously, “Please, help me know what’s behind that?” we fearfully back off in the face of the aggression in the client’s tone – and start discounting.

The only two good reasons to discount are:

a. to reflect real cost differences due to volume purchases (which is great – you pass on some lower cost of sales, everyone’s happy), or

b. to buy your way into a strategically new piece of business. But be careful when you do so, because only certain clients buy that way.

The most tragic result of inappropriate discounting is not even the lost profit; it is that we confirm the client’s suspicion that we are untrustworthy.  It leaves the client thinking, like Sir Winston Churchill’s apocryphal line, “we have now established what you are, we are merely haggling about the price.”

Giving Prospects the Confidence to Hire You

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When it comes to selling – many of us focus on our fears.

“Will they buy?”

“Are my services priced right?”

“What are they looking for?”

“Will they go with me?”

These questions inevitably lead to a dance that involves both buyer and seller, a delicate tip-toeing around the heart of the matter. We try to talk about needs, solutions, benefits, values.

But a buyer is not looking for those things alone. Above all else, a buyer is looking to feel confident that they made the right decision; that their business or needs are in the right hands.

Are you giving your prospects the CONFIDENCE to hire you?

——–

A western journalist visiting the old Soviet Union, so the story goes, asked a worker if he was being paid well. The worker said, “It’s all pretend. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

Do you sell consulting? IT services? Accounting? Financial planning? Legal services? Then you too play a game of pretend – with your would-be clients. They pretend to care about your qualifications. You pretend to listen to their questions. You pretend to write a unique proposal. They pretend to read it. You pretend to sell. They pretend to buy.

All the while, behind the game of pretending, an unspoken and important vetting process is taking place.

For example, a company about to spend big on a CRM system, or make an investment in leadership training, or change its sales approach, will ask about the benefits of what’s being sold. The prospect will want to know the answer and they will pretend it matters most.

But what they really want to know is – will we have the confidence to sleep well at night given the choice we make?

And yet, this search for confidence – the thing that matters most – isn’t what’s actually discussed during the sales process.

Instead, prospective clients have been seduced by the trappings of “hard business.” They think “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” and they try to reduce decisions to metrics. That’s how we end up with clients wanting to know all about our qualifications – despite the fact that our qualifications were what already got us in the room in the first place.

And so, we all pretend that buying and selling is about talking. About words and numbers. About qualifications.

But it’s not. The fact is, clients make huge, complex, intangible decisions very much on the basis of gut, emotion, feeling, opinion, Kentucky windage, call it what you will.

As sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer says, people buy with the heart, and justify with the brain. It’s not about rational decisions, but about decisions rationalized.

The truth is this: people vastly prefer to buy what they need from people they feel good about. People they trust. People who they believe have their clients’ interests at heart, not just their own. People who make an effort to honestly listen to their clients. People who actually seem to care.

This goes beyond “people buy from people they like,” or “people buy from people similar to themselves.” It’s way more than schmoozing and finding out common interests.

It gets to the guts of the matter:

  • Do you actually seem to give a damn about me?
  • Do you act like you care about me?
  • Are you working your own agenda, or will you actually listen to mine?

Sales process designs won’t get you there. Metrics and CRM systems won’t get you there. Motivational speeches won’t get you there.

But two things will.

1. Genuine, Honest-to-Goodness Listening

That’s listening for real. Listening not to find out data, but to find out about the client. Listening not to make or confirm a hypothesis, but to understand another human being. Listening not to find out client needs, but to find out what makes a business and a person tick. Listening not so you get answers, but listening so that at the end of it, the other fellow feels heard. Listening not to provide great answers, but listening to earn the right to offer those answers later.

I’ve heard this called yellow-pad listening; no proposal or talking points in front of you, just a blank pad ready to take notes if necessary as issues come up. Whatever you call it, remember another old truism that is still true: People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

2. Sample Selling

People don’t buy ice cream from verbal descriptions; they buy it from taste. Referrals may get people in the door, but samples sell them. We don’t use samples selling nearly enough when it comes to selling the intangible.

Give people a taste of what you do. Assume you’ve got the job, and start working it in the early stages. Don’t say how good you are at tax planning, grab hold of some business issues and show them how you do it — on their data.

If a voice in the back of your mind (or your boss in the front) says, “don’t give it away,” recognize that they are wrong. There is an inexhaustible supply of problems in this world. Giving away a few solutions doesn’t diminish your value — it earns you the right to solve more of those problems.

If a client shows a pattern of stealing ideas from you, quietly drop them. After all, that’s the kind of client you’d prefer your competitors to have. Place your focus instead on those clients who want relationships of mutual benefit.

* * *

Listening and sample selling. These are actions, not thoughts. Deeds, not qualifications. Results, not process designs. Most of all, they demonstrate your devotion to your client.

After all, would you rather buy from someone who says, “Trust me”? Or, from someone who shows you why you should?

This post first appeared on RainToday.com

The Purpose Of Sales

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Do you hate selling? Do you distrust salespeople? Do you find the whole concept, premise and purpose of sales to be somehow distasteful?

You are far from alone. Even the dictionary is loaded with secondary and tertiary meanings of “sales” that suggest selling is considered manipulative, conniving, even morally offensive.

This revulsion toward sales isn’t limited to our lives as retail consumers. In business, many buyers of goods and services are deeply suspicious of those whose job it is to sell. But the issue can be even more acute for the sellers than it is for the buyers.

Consider the case of complex professional and intangible services. The people who sell such services are highly intelligent, and even more highly educated. They have invested enormously in their technical education, and are justifiably proud of their proficiency and expertise. But they are even more proud of their objectivity, devotion to quality, and service to their clients.

The last thing they want is to be seen as “salespeople.”

And so they struggle. They strike the word “sales” from their vocabulary, talking instead about “business development” (note: even the grammar is instructive – the use of the passive voice, rather than the direct verb ‘to develop business’).

They abhor talking about price, and are apologetic about it when it can’t be avoided. They are proud of their qualifications, and believe (hope?) that their resumes will suffice to do the job of selling for them.

And yet it never seems enough for the feckless professionals. They are stuck with the undeniable proposition that they are being held accountable for getting their clients to fork over filthy lucre in return for the timesheet they hand in. They are confounded by the inability to distinguish themselves from the used car salesman, both in the minds of their clients, and – perhaps worst of all – in their own innermost thoughts.

What’s a poor professional to do?

The answer – amazingly – is at once simple, profound, and easily accessed. It lies in fundamentally redefining the purpose of sales – beginning in our own minds.  Let’s start by trying to understand the purpose of sales.

The Purpose of Sales

You may think the purpose or goal of sales is obvious – to get the buyer to buy, to get the sale, to get the buyer to hand over the money. Indeed, that’s what most people believe – and it’s precisely the source of the problem. It all starts there, and heads downhill fast.  Here’s why.

If you believe the purpose of selling is to get the sale, then you have made three key assumptions. First, that the ‘purpose’ of selling is one-sided – all about the seller. Second, that value to the buyer is per se irrelevant, as long as it’s enough to result in a sale. And third, that selling is essentially competitive – that you fail if you don’t get the sale, whether the loss is to a competitor or to the ubiquitous DND (Did Not Decide).

Those assumptions just fuel buyers’ paranoia. They enforce the notion that sellers do not have their buyers’ best interests at heart, that ‘the deal’ is all that matters, and that you can’t trust anything sellers say. It’s the kind of attitude that fuels sales ‘wisdom’ like “buyers are liars,” and “there are no be-backs.”

And those are just the key assumptions. There is a host of secondary implications which also follow from believing the purpose of selling is to get the sale. For example, it suggests that sales efficiency is key – that salespeople should work to qualify their leads so they don’t waste unproductive time. For example, it suggests that you should be very careful about giving away ‘free samples.’ And especially it suggests that you should never, ever refer a competitor to a client.

All of these are equally pernicious beliefs. It’s easy to characterize them as just traits of used car salesmen, but those beliefs are equally held by serious B2B salespeople, and taught in many ways by well respected sales training programs. Of course, that doesn’t make them better. They are still the source of all the negativity held by so many, including by salespeople themselves.

So – what is the alternative?

The Striking Alternative

Instead, try this simple statement on for size.

     The purpose of selling is to improve the buyer’s business. 

If that doesn’t sound radical, consider the implications. It means, for example, that if the product doesn’t improve things for the buyer – if the buyer is kidding themselves, in other words – then you shouldn’t sell it to them. That’s a little bit radical.

Much more radically, it means that if a competitor truly has a superior solution for a given client, you as the salesperson should actually recommend the competitor.  (Rest assured that the willingness to do so endears you so strongly to the buyer that you’ll virtually guarantee future sales).

But the radical implications aren’t the point. It is the day to day matters, the little things, that truly make the difference.  If your purpose is to improve the buyer’s business, then you’ll forsake that absurd acronym, Always Be Closing. Instead, you will Always Be Exploring, to make sure you help your client find a solution. This means the end of artificially-driven period-ending sales contests and forced attempts to close deals; instead, you focus on good decisions, in the appropriate timeframe – the client’s timeframe, not yours.

If your purpose is to improve the buyer’s business, then you won’t shut down the minute it appears your lead is not going to buy. Instead, you’ll spend another five minutes to help them look elsewhere for solutions from other businesses or different providers (and you’ll be amazed by the marketing payoff of that so-called inefficiently-spent sales time).

If your purpose is to improve the buyer’s business, then you won’t have problems with cross-selling. Instead, you’ll pursue it with a good conscience because you know what you’re seeking is in the client’s best interest.

You won’t have problems with pricing, because you’re not trying to put something over on someone – your goal is pure, and your firm needs a fair price to continue doing that truly good-for-client work.

You won’t have a problem with transparency regarding pricing, contracting or service policies, because those policies will likewise be truly aimed the betterment of the client’s business. And if they’re not aimed that way, then you’ve got a strong argument to make internally that sales shouldn’t bear the brunt of customer resentment – the problem lies elsewhere, and sales can be a force for client-focus good.

The Bottom Line of the Alternative

When you see the purpose of selling is to improve the client’s business, things change fundamentally. Your goals are no longer in conflict with the client – they are precisely and profoundly aligned. Your clients have every reason to trust you – and no longer to distrust you.

Selling is no longer about competition – with your clients, competitors, or your partners. It is about collaboration, in ways that can unify your sales organization. The sale itself becomes not the goal, but a byproduct.

And here’s the ultimate paradox. If you re-conceive the purpose of selling in this way, your clients will recognize it very quickly – even instantly, in some cases. Think about it from your own perspective as a buyer. How would you react if you ran into a seller who behaved in ways such that:

  • you can believe what they tell you
  • you can depend on their promises
  • you can confidently share confidences with them, and
  • you can be sure they have your best interests at heart?

The answer is clear: this is someone you would buy from.  And so, this approach to selling is paradoxical. By your very willingness to forego the sale (by making it no longer the object of your sales activity), you actually increase the likelihood of buyers buying from you.

But there is a catch. You can’t work the paradox against itself. You actually have to be willing to forego “getting the sale” as your objective in order for it to come true. After all, you can’t fake trust. But then – why should you even try?

The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Trust & Selling

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What is it about selling?

It can sometimes leave a bitter aftertaste the mouth – whether you’re the seller or the buyer. Why is that? I think it comes down to a few things – but mainly how we approach the sale and what we bring to the relationship between buyer and seller.

You may know “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” In game theory, it’s a classic conundrum. As Wikipedia states, it “demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so.”

It turns out that the solution to The Prisoner’s Dilemma is also the solution to a great many sales problems—those in which your customer doesn’t trust you. Are you living in the Dilemma? Or are you living in the solution?

The Dilemma of the Prisoner

Here is a classic version of The Prisoner’s Dilemma:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction and, having separated the prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal:

  • If one testifies for the prosecution against the other (defects) and the other remains silent (cooperates), the defector goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence.
  • If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge.
  • If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence.

Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

What’s a poor prisoner to do?

If you analyze the situation rationally (the way a game theorist or economist defines that term), your odds are a lot worse if you remain silent—either you get 10 years or six months. But if you rat on your partner, you either get out free or—at worst—five years.

So, reasons the economist, Option A’s average “value” is five years and three months in prison. Option B’s average is two and a half years. “Ah ha,” says the economist’s rational player, “I’ll go for Option B.”

Of course, the other player does the same math and comes to the same conclusion. As a result, each gets five years in prison—a total of 10 prison-years between them.

If only the prisoners had cooperated with each other; they could have each gotten out with just six months in prison—a total of one prison-year between them.

The question is: why don’t they cooperate?

At least, that’s the economists’ question. In the real world, cooperation is quite common.

So the real question is: why do so many people listen to economists?

The Dilemma of the Salesperson

Before answering the Prisoner’s Dilemma, let’s note the similarity with The Salesperson’s Dilemma.

The salesperson has a similar series of trade-offs. For example:

“I could take some extra time to study up on tomorrow’s sales call, getting to know more about the prospect. That would improve the odds of my getting a sale tomorrow.”

“On the other hand, I could make another cold call with the time saved if I don’t spend it studying up for tomorrow’s call.”

Or, another example:

“I could tell them we have very little experience in this area, which would increase their sense of my honesty, which would help me in the long run.”

“On the other hand, experience might be the key in getting this job, and I’d better make the best case I can and fudge the rest.”

Still another:

“I could share a lot of my knowledge with them, which would really impress them and make them grateful to me.”

“On the other hand, if I give it all away in the sales call, they’ll just steal my knowledge and not pay me for it—I’d better wait until after we have a signed contract.”

And one more:

“I could go out on a limb and make some really far-sighted observations that would help them—it would go way beyond what they asked for.”

“On the other hand, we don’t have much trust built up yet. They might see that as presumptuous or unprofessional; I’ll just answer the questions they asked.”

Just like with The Prisoner’s Dilemma, if the salespersons continually choose Option B, they will sub-optimize. They will do cold calls, leading with no relationship, taking no risks, treating the customer like a competitive enemy, and offering no great help.

In other words, they’ll lose. Just like the prisoners.

In theory, the prisoners are identical, whereas the salesperson and the customer are distinct. But that’s theory. In the real world, sellers somehow tend to find buyers who are similar to them. Sellers who are fear-driven and guarded somehow often find buyers who justify their worst fears.

Both seller and buyer often operate from the Prisoner’s script. And the result is just as sub-optimal.

The Prisoner’s Solution

As postulated by economists and game theorists, The Prisoner’s Dilemma is usually presented with two key assumptions:

  1. The game is played only once
  2. The players do not know each other

The solution lies in changing each of those assumptions. If you tell the players the game will be played 10 times, cooperative patterns begin to emerge. If it’s played 100 times, cooperative strategies take over.

If the players are given information about each other, they become less abstract to each other. If the information is personal, then the relationship changes tone as well.

These two dimensions—time and relationship—are critical. Without a sense of continuity over time, and without a sense of personal relationship, those playing the game will opt to “rat out” each other—even knowing that the result, system-wide, is negative for them on average. But given time and relationships—the optimal solution emerges. Everyone is better off.

In other words, the solution to behaving stupidly is to develop personal relationships over time. Now let’s see how that insight applies to selling.

The Sales Solution

The sales solution should look pretty obvious now. Suboptimal behavior is the result of short timeframes and shallow relationships. In a Prisoner’s Dilemma world, both buyer and seller fear each other, suspect the worst, don’t have relationships beyond the transaction, and are interested primarily in their own self-aggrandizement, without regard to cost to the other party.

If that sounds familiar, just look at this quick list of sales topics that are hot these days: sales automation, lead screening, CRM, social media lead generation, multi-channel messaging. Think about the last step in nearly every sales process model you’ve seen—closing. Think about some of the trends in procurement: online, blind auctions, and RFPs.

What all these subjects have in common is a view of selling that is a) transactional and b) impersonal. In other words, they have short timeframes and weak relationships—two things sure to hurt sales.

Selling benefits from longer timeframes and better personal relationships. If you can stop thinking like an economist and work to eliminate the fear you and your buyers have, you’ll benefit from the long-lasting trustworthy relationships that develop as a result.

This post first appeared on RainToday.com

New Year, New Perspective: The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking

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To kick off the new year, we thought we’d look back at one of our more popular eBooks: The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking.

It’s the fifth in the our Trusted Advisor Fieldbook series by Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe.

Each eBook provides a snapshot of content from The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, which is jam-packed with practical, hands-on strategies to dramatically improve your results in sales, relationship management, and organizational performance.

The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking reveals:

  • How trust-based networking is different from every-day business networking
  • Ten best practices for trust-based networking
  • Specific dos and don’ts for online networking

P.S. Did you miss out on Volumes 1 through 4 of The Fieldbook eBook series? Get them while they’re still available:

  1. 15 Ways to Build Trust…Fast!
  2. How to Sell to the C-Suite
  3. Six Risks You Should Take to Build Trust
  4. How YOU Can Raise Trust in Your Organization

Please let us know your take on this eBook below.

 

Fear and Loathing in Sales

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Why is it that, when it comes to sales within a service-based industry, the very thought of selling seems to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth? Below, we dive into why the fear of sales creeps up on those of us “rewarded” with the extra task of “business development.”

Let’s dig a little deeper into the root cause of the fear and loathing that so often seems to accompany sales.

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Some people seem born to sell. They enjoy the challenge, the meritocracy of the numbers, the feeling of controlling their destiny, and the social interaction that comes with sales. They like selling, and they are good at it.

But that isn’t true if you’re a professional who sells services. If you’re a management consultant, accountant, lawyer, human resources professional, financial planner, or technology consultant, let me ask you a question: did you set out early in your career with the goal of being a salesperson? No? That’s what I thought.

Fear and Loathing in the Professional Services Sales Business

The biggest difference between professional services salespeople and other salespeople is the former’s general distaste for selling. Fear and loathing is often not too strong a phrase. A professional is generally hired, trained, rewarded, and promoted for subject matter mastery.

Up to a point, that is. At some point, like a cruel joke, they are “rewarded” with the additional responsibility of selling. Little wonder, then, that the word “sell” is a four-letter word in the professions; most firms prefer the euphemism “business development,” conveniently phrased in the passive voice. After all, they reason, clients buy from us because of the quality of our work. Our sales strategy is to aggressively wait for the phone to ring.

Fear of sales runs deep, yet few professionals can really succeed without confronting and overcoming their apprehension. And so people who thought they had chosen cold hard data and logic as their career end up having to self-psychologize to remain effective—yet another distasteful venture for a content lover.

The Source of Our Fears

Most professionals were attracted by the intellectual aspects of their career. They were bright, with good minds, and the professions worship intellectual achievement. Since clients are often from the same profession, both buyers and sellers share the same delusion—people buy solely through a process of rational decision making. No self-respecting in-house counsel or vice president of strategy would admit to hiring an external advisor based on vague criteria like trust or chemistry.

And so both parties contribute to the myth that services them both: clients buy value propositions, packages that deliver positive net present value, and providers who make the best business case. If one firm loses, they can feel secure that it was probably not their fault—it was just price. And price is the easiest reason for the client to give to the also-rans. The delusion continues.

To contemplate that things don’t work this way is a threatening idea to professionals. It suggests clients aren’t buying their expertise, but their personalities—which feels unfair and rather scary. Since the seller is often the deliverer, it suggests that rejection is far more personal than it is for the seller of a widget. Finally, to lose is the ultimate failure. It means your expertise, the thing you have prized all your life, just wasn’t good enough. And by extension, neither were you.

No wonder professionals loathe the need to sell.

Overcoming Fear and Loathing

Unfortunately, the sales world is all too full of salespeople willing to teach professionals how to sell. They and their professional clients buy into yet another myth: the idea that sales is sales and best practices cut across all industries. And so sales programs that teach closing techniques to manufacturer reps and clothing suppliers founder when they try to close chief financial officers.

What’s true of closing is also true of sales cycles, CRM systems, pipeline analyses, and sales efficiency programs. What works in “regular” businesses falls flat in professional services, and it accentuates the already bad taste in the mouth for selling.

This deep psychological aversion to selling cannot be overcome by behaviors, tips, techniques, processes, and tools alone. It must be addressed at the mindset level. While you can partly act your way into right thinking, in the fog-sculpting world of professional services, you must also think your way into right acting. It starts with re-conceiving the very purpose of selling.

The Purpose of Selling Is…

In most businesses, that is a simple sentence to finish. The purpose of selling is to get buyers to buy the seller’s products. Both buyer and seller know this, and they easily accept the rules of the “game.”

In the professions, we need a very different purpose—that of client service. By this view, the purpose of selling is to make the client better. The sale is not the goal; the sale is a byproduct of successfully helping the client improve. The sale is an indicator, not an objective.

Taking this definition seriously has serious implications. It means transactional selling is all wrong—transactions are just points along the way of a relationship. It means we don’t compete with our clients—we collaborate with them. It means our timeframe must be long, not short.

Most of all, it means we don’t sell by selling. We sell by successfully helping the client to see new possibilities and trusting that the clients we help will, with predictable regularity, prefer to do business with us. It means detaching from the outcome of the transaction and trusting in a broader pattern of human behavior.

If that sounds like selling based on trust, that’s exactly right. It’s the same powerful dynamic recognized in concepts such as customer loyalty. The economics of trust are compelling.

Perhaps best of all, though, is the message this viewpoint offers the professional. Rightly conceived, the only difference between selling and delivering is getting paid. When we think of sales that way, the fear and loathing can slip away—we are all comfortable with client service as a model for delivery. Selling is the same: the right way to sell professional services is to aggressively do good, and then, at the right time, ask to be (well) paid for doing so.

That view of selling isn’t to be feared. It’s a view we can feel good about, while generating a powerful business model at the same time.