Archives for October 2018

The answer to the question “what do you need?” gives you intellectual information. Typical answers might be “a chip that can store 2 terabytes of data”, or a “car that has a good safety rating”, or “a service company that is more reliable”. You need to know those things but that is not enough to get to the prospects pain. None of those answers is pain. However, if you follow up the what question with a why question you get a whole lot richer information including pain. I need a reliable service company because “my current service company did not show up and it put me in a terrible bind with a client. I was totally embarrassed and it almost cost me a client.” I need a chip that handles that much data “because the competition only can handle half of that and it is important to me to be able to beat them to the market.” That one may need another “why” question to get to the real pain. This is a simple concept but one that will pay huge dividends.

Jargon is insider language. Every market or niche has some. Many salespeople mistakenly think that if they just master the jargon they can sound smart and that will mark them as someone in the know. However, that is not necessarily true. There are certain pieces of information it is important to know. And not to know the basics would be a mistake. But knowing the basics is far different from intentionally littering your speech with buzz words and acronyms which the prospect may or may not understand. Overuse of buzz words marks you as someone who is trying too hard and more importantly it can make the prospect feel not ok if they do not understand what you are talking about. You lose them as they try to decipher what you meant by that last statement you made. Once they feel not ok, the easiest remedy is to disengage from the conversation or to end the meeting prematurely. At the very least it detracts from your ability to develop a deeper relationship. So the lesson here is to speak simply and use terms common to most people in the industry. Don’t add acronyms and buzz words whose only purpose is to make you appear smarter than you are. Prospects can see through that anyway and it does more harm than good.

Confidence is important. But confidence that you know the prospect’s problem can kill a sale. If you have been in the same industry for a while, pretty soon you feel like you have seen everything. You listen as the prospect starts to explain his or her problem. At some point you feel like you have heard this before and you pounce in with the solution. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that you start to sound like “know it all” or the smartest person in the room. This has the potential of making the prospect feel “one down” or “not Ok”. Since people don’t like the ‘not ok” feeling, they push back and can eventually shut down the meeting if they are dominant types. Or, people who are not strong willed just humor you until the meeting ends and give you some lame excuses when you try to close or to follow up. The second reason confidence that you know the prospect’s problem can kill a sale is that even though the problem might be the same the consequences of the problem may be different or how the prospect reacts to the problem may be different in every case. These two elements define the prospects pain. So even though the problem is the same the pain could be different. If your solution is geared to the wrong pain, you probably will lose the sale. My neighbor and I might both have tires on our car that don’t pass inspection (same problem). My neighbor’s spouse and kids ride in that car every day to school. The neighbor’s pain might revolve around the safety of the family and durability of the tire. In that case price would be no obstacle. My car may be a third vehicle in a two driver family and will be traded in or sold in the next 6 months. In that case I will want to spend as little as possible and safety might not be an issue and long term durability certainly is not. It’s good to be confident. But in the pain step, humility to admit you don’t know everything will get you closer to the sale.

Baseball players know their batting average. Coaches in every sport track activity versus results on a game by game basis. This allows them to better predict future results and to allow them to make better game plans an in game decisions. Salespeople … not so much. It is rare that I find a salesperson or a company that knows how many calls are made on a daily or weekly basis. And what is worse, since they don’t know the history of calls versus results, they don’t know how many calls they will have to make in the next month, quarter or year to hit their numbers. Top salespeople like top players and coaches have these numbers at their fingertips. How can you make a plan for hitting your numbers if you have no idea what your “hit rate” is? If that rhetorical question is not enough to get you to begin tracking your sales activity, then there is nothing else I can say.

People with perfect pitch in music are rare. But it is relatively easy to achieve a perfect pitch in sales if you know how to do it. The mistake most salespeople make is to make the pitch before they know what pain will compel the prospect to buy. They might have learned or deduce a need the prospect has. Or they might have uncovered a problem. But a true compelling reason to buy is much deeper than that and requires that the salesperson to understand the consequences of the problem and the prospect’s reaction to those consequences to truly know what to say to the prospect to get him or her to commit to spend some money to fix the problem. The reason traditional salespeople fail to have a perfect pitch is that they use a me-centered sales process. They are more concerned with what they can offer than they are with what the true motivation of the prospect is. In a prospect centered selling process you will first seek to understand whether the prospect has a compelling reason to buy. Once you understand what will compel the prospect to buy it is a very simple matter to make the perfect pitch.