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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?

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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

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

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’

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.

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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.

 

I’m Selling Hammers, You Look Like a Nail

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iStock_000000212423XSmallYou know the old line, “If you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It means we tend to see the world through our own frames of reference. It’s a good reminder to watch out for unconscious biases.  And in sales, it shows up in a very particular way.

[Trivia tidbit: the hammer/nail line is credited, in Wikipedia, to Abraham Maslow in 1966. But elsewhere, it’s attributed to Bernard Baruch – who died in 1965. Someone’s wrong.]

Hammers and Nails in the Field of Sales

Occasionally you get a salesperson who actually sees a wrench and mistakes it for a nail. But that’s an uninteresting mistake – that’s just incompetence.

A much more frequent occurrence is that once the salesperson sees the wrench, and recognizes it’s not a nail – they leave! They assume that the lack of nails means game over; nothing to see here folks, turn the lights out on your way out the door.

And it seems obvious, right? If you’re selling hammers and you find yourself in a nail salon, you say “whoops” and  ask directions to the hardware store. And you leave.

Because – wrong kind of nails. They’re never going to buy hammers, not from you, not from anyone. Because the only nails here are getting manicured. They…do…not…have…nails.

And in case it’s still not obvious you should leave, sales organizations reinforce it at every step. Don’t waste your precious time. Salesforce efficiency. Ruthlessly prune the lead list and the funnel. Deploy yourself where real nails are to be found. Go where the real nails are. Get out.

A Blinding Flash of the Non-Obvious

In our haste to get out of the nail salon and scramble to a He-Man nail store, we forget one thing. You just passed up a chance to do some high impact marketing.

And it’s easy. You were already there, standing in front of someone who probably buys. There are a hundred things you could have said to the lady at the nail salon:

  • Hey, I noticed your screen doors are getting a little worn – I know someone who fixes that, would you like his number?
  • Well, aren’t I the silly one! Unless, that is, you’re looking for a present for that special man in your life; if you tell me about him, I can tell you what kind of hammer to get him – and believe me, any man loves a new hammer.
  • You know what, as long as I’m here – you got any drawers that are always sticking, maybe an appliance that isn’t working right? I’ve got 10 minutes until my next call, anything I could help you with?
  • Tell me, what kind of ladies come in here, from where? How would I know if my wife would like this salon? What kind of friends should I refer here to you?
  • This is so funny, I was just thinking the other day about nails and nail salons, and they’re actually pretty similar – tell me, what works best for you in finding new customers, and in getting repeat customers?
  • Oh well, that’s my bad sales story of the week. Not so bad, really. How about you? You ever have a bad day in here? What would you say was your worst day in this business?

In other words – engage with and serve the customer in front of you. If you always do that, word will get around. The lady from the nail salon will tell friends, “A funny thing happened today; a guy came in selling hammers, and it turns out he’s really interesting…”

What does it cost you to make an impression? Compare the cost of that impression to a mailing, a phone call, a social media campaign – and then factor in the qualitative impact of that impression.

Sales Goals and Sales Outcomes

So much of what makes sales fail (and give selling a bad name) is thinking that the goal of selling is the sale. And so in single-minded pursuit of your sale, you leave negative impressions or no impressions at all as you bounce around the world – because you leave as soon as your goal is not immediately evident.

The better way to think about it is that the sale is an outcome – a byproduct – a consequence. It’s an outcome of a very different goal – the goal of helping people you run into, including a few who turned out not to be the nails you thought they were.

Don’t pass up a marketing opportunity because of your obsession with the sale. Play the long ball. Make your goal service. And if you do that – the outcomes, the byproducts, the consequences turn out to be at least as much, if not more.

Trust-based Selling

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The goal of most selling is to make the sale. The goal of trust-based selling is to help the customer; the sale is an outcome, not a goal.

In trust-based selling, the right time to mention price is when it is useful to the customer to know it.

In trust-based selling, you don’t “handle objections” – you jointly explore the fit of the solution.

In trust-based selling, hard-sell is not a sin – wrong-sell is.

In trust-based selling, the acid test is whether or not you’d refer the customer to a competitor – if the competitor has the better solution.

In trust-based selling, a sale transaction is just an event along the path of a relationship.

In trust-based selling, the default mode of presentation is transparency.

In trust-based selling, the time-frame is lifetime. Assume that you will meet this customer again, along with his or her customers, cousins, bosses and Facebook friends, and that every interaction is evident to all of them instantly. That’s your reputation.

Trust-based selling relies on the proposition that people return good for good, and bad for bad. If you treat a customer respectfully and with trust, and they happen to need what you are selling, the natural response is to buy it from you.

That proposition is not only an ethical template – it is a business model.

Trust-based Selling: McGraw-Hill, also available in Kindle and CD-ROM format. It’s a good book.

You Can Lead a Horse to Water, but You Can’t Make Him Buy

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The biggest problem in sales? Violating the laws of human nature.

Exhibit A: one of those timeless folk-wisdom sayings, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Not many of us have equine interactions these days, but we still get the metaphor: you can’t make people do what they don’t want to do.

Cue Bonnie Raitt’s achingly beautiful “I Can’t Make You Love Me – If You Don’t,” for a Top-40 version of the same wisdom.

Or, if you prefer, try telling a teenager what to do. The same law will present itself.

Seller vs. Human Nature

When you try to sell a client – or, if you prefer, to “persuade” them (or to get them to take your most excellent advice, it’s all the same) – what’s your attitude?

Probably you’re trying your best to add value, to listen, to come up with great ideas. You’re trying to frame issues sensibly, to identify pain points and to clarify objectives and outcomes. All great stuff, of course.

And all the while, inside, not very deep down, your inner voice is screaming:

     “Drink, you damn horse – drink!”

Detach from the Outcome

The problem is, all those linear sales models lied to you. Not the first part – it’s all good, the leading the horse to water part.  The problem comes in making the horse drink.  Because people don’t do what you want them to do.

No need to get all psychoanalytic here, you can test it on yourself. When someone tells you to do something, what’s your instinct? And if they try to dress it up, pretty please with candy, pretending they don’t actually care if you do the thing they want you to do – what’s your instinct?

Neeeiiiighhh!

The trick is simple, really.  Give it up.  Detach from the outcome. Stop being wedded to the horse drinking. Stop obsessing about the sale.

Seriously – let it go. The client will buy, or the client won’t buy.  If you’ve done everything you can to bring the horse to water, then stop at the water’s edge. Let the horse drink.

The amazing thing is, if you do that, the odds of getting the sale go up. Not down, up. To get results, give up control. If that sounds more like a Buddhist mantra than a Salesforce.com app, ask yourself which model has been around longer.

Try selling instead from the serenity prayer: change what you can, accept what you can’t, and be attuned to the difference.

Why Saying ‘I Understand’ Is an Act of Arrogance

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Empathy symbolIn an episode of Two and a Half Men (a high-ratings US television sitcom), the rakish cad character played by Charlie Sheen discovers that he can easily manipulate others by solemnly saying to them, “I understand.”

When he first says it, other people believe him, and begin to gush their feelings to him. Of course, his empathy is faux, and so the comedy begins.

Empathy is Cognition Plus Connection

The best way to influence (not manipulate) others is for them to feel that you understand them.

Yet the key word in the preceding sentence is not ‘understand,’ but ‘feel.’

It is one thing to understand someone; it is quite another for them to feel understood.

A seller might perfectly understand a buyer’s needs; often, in fact, even better than the buyer. That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the buyer feels understood.

A consultant might perfectly understand what a client is going through, on all levels—including the deeply emotional issues facing the client. But even understanding the emotional issues of the client doesn’t guarantee the client will feel understood.

A common sales truism says, “People don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.”

Just because it’s a truism doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  And it is, profoundly so.  The point of listening is not what you hear–it is the act of helping another feel heard.

Why Saying “I Understand” is Arrogant

On the face of it, the statement “I understand” is the perfect expression of empathy. Unlike Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen’s character in the sitcom), we usually mean it. We are sincere when we say it, so for me to suggest that ‘I understand’ is arrogant may sound insulting.

But think of it this way. The feeling of being truly understood is, by definition, something that must come from the one who is understood—not from the one doing the understanding. To assert that you understand how someone feels about their situation is to usurp their very role as object of the understanding.

It is not our right as advisors or sellers to tell someone we understand them; it is only they who can inform us that they feel understood. For us to make the claim ourselves is arrogant.

A Better Way to Express Empathy

We can never truly know another. All we can do is to guess at how we might feel in similar circumstances—and assume that they might feel likewise. The source of much tragedy—and comedy—comes from mistaken assumptions that others are exactly like us.

So, what is a better way to express empathy? How do we communicate, across the divide of individuality, a sense of connection with another? Here are a few ideas.

  • That must feel…
  • I can only imagine how that must be…
  • I suppose if I were you I’d feel…
  • Is that (difficult, easy, complicated…) for you?
  • I think I might have a glimmer of what that means for you…

The particular words don’t matter as much as a combination of sincerity and a respect for the ineffable separateness of the other person.

Ironically, the way to convey connection is to acknowledge the impossibility of fully achieving it.
 

Buying Lessons from a Master Salesman

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

I spent some time in South Florida this weekend with Sam, a retired former rep for a national clothing manufacturer—that is, he wholesaled clothing lines to retail stores and chains. His territory was New York. Here’s what he taught me about buying.

How Buyers Say They Buy–from Expertise

A few years ago, he got a terrible pain in his left knee. Three doctors in a row said he needed either a knee replacement or arthroscopic surgery. A fourth doctor said he suspected it was actually a hip problem which caused a pinched nerve, which resulted in knee pain.

“I’m not a hip guy,” said doc four, “but my new young colleague is. I’d like you to have a chat with him. “Fine,” said Sam, “anything to get rid of this debilitating pain so I can get back to tennis and golf.”

“The doctor was young,” Sam said. “That was no problem. But he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me it was a hip problem all right, and all those other fancy doctors had it wrong. None of them had even taken an x-ray of my hip, but he did.”

“Problem was, I couldn’t get over him not looking me in the eye. If a buyer or a seller won’t look the other in the eye, I just don’t trust him. Kiss of death and all that. So I says to him, ‘hey, I’m over here—who you talking to?’ He just said he was a distracted kind of guy, nothing to worry about.”

“But that’s exactly what I worry about. So I went back to his boss, Doc 4, and I said no offense at all, I just think I’ll look for someone with a little more experience.”

I asked, “Sam, you told me you didn’t trust the guy; why didn’t you tell his boss?”

“Well,” Sam said, “I don’t want to be ruining some kid’s medical career, so I just made a plausible excuse.”

And there you have it. Sam—a highly experienced and successful salesman, basically says people buy on trust, including him. And yet, when asked by the seller (Doctor #4) why he didn’t buy, he lied—he said it was lack of experience. He didn’t tell the truth–which is that he didn’t trust the young doctor.

How Buyers Really Buy–From Trust

So it always is. Sellers think buyers buy on expertise; they don’t. They buy on trust. And when they ask buyers why they didn’t buy, the buyers claim it was on expertise. And since that’s the answer sellers want to hear, they believe it.

The truth is otherwise. As Jeffrey Gitomer puts it, people buy with the heart, and rationalize it with their brain. We overrate the importance of processes–and underrate the importance of connection.

The irony is that young doc was right. Sam underwent arthroscopic knee surgery with a high-reputation doctor in South Florida, and the result was nothing but more pain.

A year later, Sam visited a hip specialist in NY who diagnosed hip troubles just by watching Sam walk. He got a hip replacement two months later, and shot a 47 on the front nine a few weeks ago–pain free.

The young doc was right. Unfortunately–So What. He treated the patient like a case study, not a human being.

Sam would be the first to tell you: being right is vastly overrated. Earning the right to have people believe you’re right—that’s where the trust comes in.

That’s trust. That’s how people buy. That’s good selling.

Seller’s Remorse in the Marketing Business

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Courtesy of Advertising Age,  a peek into a catfight; a domestic squabble; a business story right out of a Hollywood fanzine.  Famous buyer vs. aggrieved seller.

The Famous One here is Zappo’s, beloved by the online set and poster child du jour for customer service.  The aggrieved party (picture them throwing a pair of stiletto high heels at Zappo’s head) is marketing agency Ignited.

With what crime does Ignited accuse Zappo’s?  Disrespect, it would seem. The disrespect of a seller by a buyer. 

The horror.

When Buyers Disrespect Sellers

Seems that Zappo’s sent out an online RFP to some 100 or so of their closest-friend ad agencies, asking for first-round pitches.

Of course, Ignited didn’t make the first cut. Ah, but they had a trick up their sleeve.  Using Google Analytics allowed them to see how much time the reviewer—Zappo’s—had actually spent reviewing Ignited’s proposal.

Zappo’s had reviewed only 20% of the pages, about 15 seconds per page, before relegating Ignited’s work to the digital circular file.  Whereupon Ignited went public with its “gotcha,” announcing the horrible 15-second truth to the world.

Unfair! said Ignited. They didn’t even look at our brilliant methodology, insights, testimonials.  How dare they! And then–as if it were the clincher in an argument–Ignited’s Wolfsohn says, “they never clicked on the page that outlined our approach to measurement. Which may explain why they didn’t know we’d be monitoring how much time they spent looking at our proposal."  Gracious me.

What’s wrong here?  Where to begin…

The Customer Owes You Nothing

If you click on someone’s personal ad in an online dating service–what do they owe you in return?  Bupkus.  Zip.  Nada.  The same is true of a seller whose sole connection to the buyer is an online response to a 100-company RFP.

(Why Zappo’s would run a 100-company RFP is another question.  Maybe to screen out those who respond to mass RFPs?  Or those who can’t manage to get ‘round them?  Hey, maybe Zappo’s is clueless (though I wouldn’t put big money on that hypothesis)).

But that’s irrelevant to Ignited.  Or should have been. 

I know what I’d do with 100 first-round sections on qualifications, methodologies, and testimonials.  I’d ignore them completely until I’d seen if they had anything interesting, original, provocative, value-adding to say about me–the customer/client. 

If they do have something to say about me, then I’d go back and check the testimonials to see if I knew anyone.  I might or might not look at the qualifications or methodologies at all.

And if there was nothing in it about me in this first-pass attempt to impress me, the customer?  Then it’d take me, oh, I don’t know, maybe 15 seconds to conclude this act was not going on to Hollywood. Simon may get there faster than Paula, but they both end up at the same conclusion.  And purchasing people can make Simon look indecisive.

And from all that I have seen, my response is the rule, not the exception, on this one. 

Buyers Buy from Trust

One of the biggest fallacies sellers make is that buyers buy based on their own stated rational criteria.  The truth is, a dose of trust overwhelms rational data like methodologies—(which are, frankly, more similar than sellers like to think).

What sells best is a sense that the seller cares about the buyer—cares enough to actually distinguish this buyer from another, to take a risk and make a client-specific suggestion, to focus on the client rather than on oneself–to say something that is of value and that makes the buyer feel heard, seen, recognized, understood.  A sample of your wares, please, customized to me.

Earth to Ignited, a little multiple choice: every client’s favorite subject is:

a.    Ignited
b.    themselves

Think carefully now…

You can recognize sellers who don’t get this.  They confuse sample selling with theft of intellectual property.  Says Ignited’s Wolfsohn: “When I go to my mechanic, he won’t do work on spec. We’re a very rare industry that is willing to give stuff away for free, and it escalates to a point where it’s self-defeating to the industry that we’re all in." 

Maybe that’s true–if you’re a mechanic. (Though I’d love to hear from insulted mechanics who disagree with Wolfsohn).  It’s not true, however, in services businesses like marketing. You’re selling air, for heaven’s sake; give a little away to let them feel you.

Zappo’s response, incidentally—to publicly engage in a dialogue about the event—strikes me as incredibly gracious. 

Yet I suspect it’ll be a long time before Ignited does marketing work for Zappo’s.