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Pain, Brain, or Reframe? How do Buyers Really Buy?

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If you’re interested in selling, you might plausibly start with trying to understand how buyers buy. It’s a simple enough question. But then why are there so many answers?

Three of the most common answers to that question are:

  • People buy when they strongly feel a desire to alleviate a negative situation.
  • People buy as a response to a clear value proposition.
  • People buy most from those who offer differentiated, out-of-the box, creative solutions.

For short, let’s call those Pain, Brain, and Reframe, and examine them in turn.

The Pain Model

Many sales writers say things like these two quotes:

“The customers that are most likely to convert have a pain that they need to alleviate. Now.”

or

“Solid, smart sales are focused on our clients’ pain points, not on the tech demo.”

Within the Pain category, there is an internal debate about whether the prospect of a better situation can be as motivating as alleviating a painful situation. (One solution: reframe the gain as alleviating a potential pain.)

The Brain Model

Many other salespeople consider “value propositions” to be the key driver. Consider, for example, Investopedia’s definition of value proposition:

“A business or marketing statement that summarizes why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement should convince a potential consumer that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings.”

Or consider this one from a sales training firm:

“Customer contact professionals must be engaged and expected to adapt a financially oriented value proposition to the customer or prospect.”

Many fans of value propositions suggest they are best used as conceptual maps for marketing and not as sales collateral. But this distinction is lost or ignored by a great number of salespeople.

Note that nearly the entire economics profession is built around the idea of rational economic choices. In my experience, greater exposure of salespeople to economics or MBA programs translates to greater reliance on the Brain model of selling.

The Reframe Model

One constant need among buyers is to de-commoditize their business. “What have you got that’s new?” is a powerful and relevant question for them, and sellers who have an answer will generally get a hearing.

The Challenger sales approach is a good example of this model:

They have “a deep understanding of the customer’s business and use that understanding to push the customer’s thinking and teach them something new about how their company can compete more effectively.”

This approach has some justification in business strategy, where the attempt to gain differentiation is an alternative to the low-cost producer strategy.

So, what is the truth? Are buyers motivated by the desire to remove pain? By a rational statement of value? By a compelling new way of articulating issues?

What’s best? To soothe the pain, appeal to the brain, or reframe the game?

Making the Buying Decision

If clients make buying decisions because of rational calculations, then the Brain model would appear to be the best. If buyers are looking for access to new, differentiated ideas—and the people who bring them—then the Game-reframe model looks best. And if buying is mainly motivated by emotional issues, then the Pain model is best. The question, therefore, becomes: which underlying psychological model best explains the process buyers undergo.

Of course, simple choices like A, B, or C often end up being solved only by rephrasing the question. This is no exception. For example, consider the buying decision as a multiple-step decision, or a multiple-psychology decision, rather than a single-step decision.

Different Buying Stages: In The Trusted Advisor (written by David Maister, Charles Green, and Rob Galford), we note that complex services buying decisions are typically two-step decisions. The first step is screening to identify plausible sellers. The second step is selection. Bill Leigh of the Leigh Speakers Bureau tells the story of one client’s decision process to hire a speaker for a major corporate event:

“They quickly narrowed it down to two—either Michael Porter, a major business strategist, or Lester Thurow, a prominent economist. They went back and forth until finally they agreed on a solution—ex-Chicago Bears football coach Mike Ditka.”

The first step is a relatively rational process of data-gathering. That process sounds very much like the Brain model.

But the selection step is taken much more emotionally, involving a complex set of cross-currents. That sounds more like the Pain model. (Or if you consider Ditka a redefinition of the problem, it’s more like the Frame model.)

Different Buying Psychologies: Another approach to splitting the A/B/C dichotomy comes from a large study by Bill Brooks and Tom Travesano, reported in You’re Working Too Hard to Make the Sale. Looking over thousands of sales across several B2B buyer types, their conclusion was summarized in one powerful sentence:

People buy what they need from those who understand what they want.

In other words, the identification of needs (systems, audits, legal advice) is fairly straightforward—the Brain model. But the actual choice is made on the basis of which seller most deeply taps into buyer wants—fears, hopes, aspirations, wishes, desires. It is not necessary that those wants be satisfied; it is enough that they are recognized, understood, and acknowledged. Doing that drives the decision to buy what, after all, has to be bought anyway.

Integrating Buying Psychologies: Neil Rackham, via his classic SPIN Selling, offers yet another insight, one that integrates the various models. SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implications, Needs-Payoff) operates at one level on a buyer’s emotional needs by forcing sellers to listen to the customer before they start offering solutions. At another level, it is a very rational model, methodically identifying both pain points and alternative, potentially breakthrough conclusions.

What’s the Answer?

Perhaps the last word may come from science fiction author Robert Heinlein, who is credited with saying, “Man is not a rational animal: man is an animal who rationalizes.” Putting it into sales terms, “People buy with their heart and rationalize it with their brains.”

That is not to minimize or discount the role of rational decision making. We all acknowledge rational analyses as important checks against the mistakes we might make if we rely solely on the emotions. At the same time, it recognizes the powerful role that emotions play in human decision making, of which the buying decision is just one.

The most useful answer is, “Develop a rich, insightful, trusting relationship with your client, and be prepared to offer them all the legitimate backup they’ll need to defend their decision to buy from you.”

This article was first published in RainToday.com

Riding the Shark: Vanquishing Fear in Selling. Part 1 of 4

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photo by: Steve GarnerThis is the first of a four-part blogpost series. In Part 2, we’ll discuss the 4 types of fear. In Part 3, I’ll go over how to fend off the sharks of fear. And in Part 4, you’ll learn how to shark-proof your market and vanquish fear altogether.

There are many ways to think about sales and selling. You can focus on value propositions, sales processes, sales management, motivation, techniques, and models. I’d like to focus on something else that’s common in sales – fear.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Market 

Remember the first time you saw the movie Jaws? The tale of a giant shark tapped into a primal human fear. The follow-on, Jaws 2, raised the ante with one of the most famous taglines in movie history – “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

Who could look at the beach again without some kind of shiver? Selling has some of that same flavor. We’ve all had some negative experience in selling – and like Jaws, it keeps some sort of control over us ever after. “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the market…” is all too real.

All kinds of selling involve some fear. Some forms of selling involve more fear than others.  Fear comes in many flavors; the form it takes varies by industry, by products being sold, and of course by the individual salesperson. There are multiple ways to deal with fears. None is always better than the others; and often more than one approach is necessary to overcome fear.

Fear is the Enemy

But with all this diversity around fear, one thing is unambiguously clear: fear is the enemy. Fear destroys sales. It separates you from your customers, makes you behave in narrow ways, lowers the value you can add, and in a thousand ways cuts your sales effectiveness.

Some may disagree.

  • Some say, “Fear helps keep me on edge, sharp, focused.” But if you require fear to keep you sharp and focused, then you lack any positive customer-based motivation. That means you’re sub optimizing – for your customers, and for yourself.
  • Some say, “Fear keeps me on my toes, always looking around for new trends and issues.” But if you seek new trends and issues only to assuage your own fears, then simply feeling comfortable will make you oblivious to trends and issues.
  • Some say, “Fear gives me adrenaline, energy, passion, things that my customers pick up on and love.” Note that drug addicts and alcoholics also believe that they are flat, boring and uninteresting unless hopped up. Are you different?

No. Fear, in all cases, is the enemy. If you’re fearful, you’re not selling as well as you can. And if you’re not selling as well as you can, someone else will. And you should be afraid of that. (And if you are, you increase the odds of precisely the thing you fear, because fear of fear is just as destructive as any other kind).

Unless you can ride the shark – vanquish your fears – you will always be sub-optimal and at risk – always afraid to go back in the water. It’s a lousy way to live.

It also doesn’t have to be that way. That’s what this four-blogpost series is about.

In the second post, The Four Sharks, I’ll tell you where to look for fear in sales. The first rule in shark-fighting (unlike Fight Club) is – we talk about Sharks. I’ll go through the Four Fears – the Big Sharks that account for about 95% of our fears. That should give you an acute sense of pain for just “where it hurts most” in terms of your fears, and help you zero in the issues unique to you, in your business, in your industry.

In the third post, Riding the Shark, I’ll go through solutions.  There are four of them, but they don’t match up one-on-one with the Four Sharks. Instead, they are comprehensive, and offer differing ways to fend off “shark attacks,” making you less vulnerable and more able to sell correctly.

In the last post, Shark-Proofing Your Market, I’ll write about what you need to replace fear – to stop being vulnerable to shark attacks altogether. Because you can’t just fight defensive battles all your career – you need to come from a place of security and confidence.

Stay tuned for the next three parts: and I welcome your comments about the subject in the meantime.

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

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For many years now I have been a contributing editor at RainToday.com, the premier online resource for professional services sales and marketing. Besides a ton of articles, books, special programs, and online learning forums, they occasionally do some seriously good sales research. They have just yesterday come out with their latest, a report called What Sales Winners Do Differently.

What Sellers Winners Do Differently

I sat down with friend Mike Schultz, founder and publisher of the Rain Group, and asked him to headline for Trust Matters readers just what they found out. Have a look, then download the full report, compliments of Rain Group.

——————–

Charlie Green: First, tell us – big picture – what did you research, why, and what did you find?

Mike Schultz: It was pretty quiet in the world of sales approaches for the past 30 years or so. In the last few, however, especially with the popularity of books like The Challenger Sale, there’s been a new vigorous debate about one question:  How should people approach selling these days?

The answers have been all over the place, with wildly divergent ideas and opinions.

To add to the conversation, we asked ourselves, “What are the winners of complex sales doing to win, and what are they doing differently than the sellers that came in second place?”

Charlie: A sensible and forthright question: of whom did you ask it?

Mike: We talked to buyers. We studied more than 700 B-to-B sales (from buyers responsible for $3.1 billion in annual purchases) to find out what the providers they selected did to win their business, and why the providers they didn’t select lost.

What we found is that sellers that win:

  • Connect with buyers as people, and connect the dots between needs and solutions
  • Convince buyers that the ROI is achievable, the risk is worth taking, and that they are the best choice among the available options
  • Collaborate with buyers both in how they behave, and in the sense that they, as sellers, bring ideas and value to the table.

We cover these concepts in depth in the report.

Charlie: OK, let’s unpack this now.  In the report you say, “Winners don’t just sell differently, they sell radically differently, than the sellers who came in second place.” When people make a statement like this, I often find it to be more puff than substance. But when I looked at your data, I thought your statement was quite appropriate.

Rain Survey

Mike: I think you’re referring to this chart. On the left, in dark, are the top 10 factors that most separate the sales winners from second-place finishers. In other words, the buyers reported that these factors represented the greatest gaps between what the winners did versus the second-place finishers.

On the right you see how often the second-place finishers demonstrated the factors on the left in relation to all 42 factors we studied.

Charlie: This chart’s hard to read in the blogpost, but one thing jumps out at you – the top ten reasons the winner won – in dark, on the left-hand chart – ended up really low for those who lost. For example, #2 on the reasons winners won was “collaborated with me.” But the ability to collaborate was way down at #26 for the losers.  And most of the top ten results were more extreme than that!

So, what are some big take-aways?

Mike: Lots, but here are three to start:

First, as you noted, the difference between winners and second-place finishers is stark.

Second, the top two factors demonstrated by the winners are “educated me with new ideas or perspectives” and “collaborated with me.” We looked at 42 factors. Who would have guessed these two would be right at the top? Not us. As you might imagine, we keyed in on them quite a bit to analyze what this told us.

At first blush, they might not seem to go together, actually, but they do. What this tells us is that the seller, themselves, brought value to the table over and above the products and services they had to sell, and over and above the reputation of the company.

Especially in industries where sellers complain about the commoditization of what they sell, the difference between winning and losing lies in large part in how the sellers lead their interactions with buyers.

Third, “understood my needs” and “crafted a compelling solution” appear on this list and also showed up as important factors in a number of other places in the research. As much as some people want to declare solution selling dead, it’s not. Not even close.

Sellers and companies that ignore fundamental solution sales concepts do so at their own peril.

Charlie: Now, I’ve got to ask you; one factor you studied was whether the buyer thought the seller “was trustworthy.” It’s not in this chart. How did the concept of trust show up in the report?

Mike: It’s not in that chart because, for the most part, buyers reported both winners and second-place finishers were trustworthy. It’s not a massive difference between the two groups, but the winner group was, indeed, perceived to be more trustworthy.

Notably, when the second-place finisher wasn’t seen as trustworthy, the buyers reported it as the 8th most important factor for the seller to change in order for the seller to win their business.

We also analyzed the statistical key drivers of buyer satisfaction with the buying process, buyer loyalty, and buyer willingness to refer.

“Was trustworthy” was a key driver of buyer loyalty, and was the #1 key driver of willingness to refer new business to the seller.

Last point, we found that buyers were very tuned in to the concept of minimizing risk. Other factors we studied, aside from the trustworthiness of the seller, related to experience in their industry, experience in the area they had need, whether the seller inspired confidence in the company, how respected the provider was at their organization, and so on.

The factor “was trustworthy” was important on its own, but themes of trust also showed up as important throughout.

Charlie: Can you share with us what some people might believe is important for sales success, but that you found wasn’t as important as the other factors?

Mike: Yes; here are three:

  • People often say to sellers, “Don’t talk too much.” But buyers didn’t really care about this. As long as the seller felt listened to, the airtime taken by the seller was immaterial. How much the seller advocates (talks/educates) and how much they inquire (ask questions) are wholly situational.
  • We tested the importance for the seller of introducing “valuable” ideas versus “new” ideas. You might wonder “splitting hairs?” It’s not; the distinction is amazingly important. If the buyer perceived an idea to be valuable but not new, it wasn’t important for sales success. Buyers don’t need to be validated about something they already knew was a good idea. It’s the newness of the idea or perspective they found important.
  • “Deepened my understanding of my needs” was not typically important. Thus, the ubiquitous advice to diagnose needs shouldn’t be applied everywhere. Situationally it may be warranted, but sellers shouldn’t diagnose as a rule. However, sellers shouldn’t throw out the “needs understanding” baby with the “diagnosis” bathwater. It’s important for sellers to demonstrate they understand the needs, but sellers don’t always need to dig, dig, dig to produce some kind of “ah hah” moment in the needs discovery process.

Charlie: You mentioned the plan is to turn this research into a book. Is there something you can share with us from the research that’s not in the report, but that we might see in the book itself?

Mike: We looked at how opportunities originally arrived on buyers’ radar screens. When the buyer reported they were likely to be loyal to the provider, 22.9% of the time, “a seller brought this opportunity to my attention.”

When the buyer was likely to be a switcher (not loyal), they found out about the opportunity from the seller only 7.8% of the time.

In other words, loyal buyers were about three times more likely to start a buying process because the seller brought something to their attention.

And you’ll like this; the key drivers of buyer likelihood to buy again were all factors related to trust, including confidence in the company, seller professionalism, experience, and, of course, the trustworthiness of the seller as a person.

Charlie: Tell me if I’m hearing this right: greater trust leads to greater openness and receptivity to new ideas; is that what you’re hearing? It surely makes sense from a trust perspective. And it means brilliant ideas alone don’t carry the day – first you’ve got to be listened to.

Mike: That’s right. The data say that the more the buyer trusts, the more likely they’ll be open to a seller’s ideas – both accepting meetings with you to discuss new ideas and opportunities, and eventually moving forward with them. Trust is a huge factor in what is perhaps the greatest opportunity to increase revenue at most companies: the ability of the seller to create their own opportunities and drive their own demand.

That’s pretty powerful.

Charlie: Mike, this is great stuff.  You’ve done a real service here; I can’t wait to dig into the survey itself.

Again, people can get their complimentary download of What Sales Winners Do Differently. Mike, I hope you get a boatload of people reading it.

Mike: Thanks Charlie, I appreciate the opportunity to share it with the Trust Matters readership.