I do a lot of coaching for salespeople and there is a common theme which continuously arises, which reveals why they are not getting sales with their clients. They get very deep into the weeds of the solution for the buyer. The features of their widget monopolise their own minds and that is what they try to use to envelop the client with. It doesn't work for a simple reason. Clients buy the application of the benefits of the solution, not the features. You would think, “Greg, this is highly obvious buddy”, yet salespeople keep leaping to the features and forget about extolling the virtues of the benefits. Take a long, cold, hard look at your own sales materials. Are they a compilation of features, describing in detail how the widget works and substantially light on the benefits of employing the widget?
Salespeople are often engrossed with the execution piece of the sale. They want to explain how the widget will function for the buyer, going into depth on the intricacies of the how it works. This is important because the buyer needs to know they can integrate this solution into their existing business. But this not why they will buy.
I was accosted by a salesperson who battered me with the gritty detail for twenty five minutes. It was a slide driven sales presentation and it was very comprehensive and detailed in explaining how the widget worked. Now this was a totally non-customised presentation, so it had to cover off all manner of buyers, with their different situations, needs and motivations. In other words, it was shotgun spray hoping to hit a buyer or two. I noticed in that slide deck, that there were two cases where there were other companies, a little similar to my own firm.
A big opportunity was missed however, because the salesman didn’t bait the hook to catch me as a buyer. He launched straight into his pitch, which doubtless was something he had been doing for the last twenty years or so, judging by his age. So he has been failing now for over two decades and still hasn’t worked it out. If talking about the benefits was so obvious, such a default position, then how could this be happening in this day and age? By failing to ask me any questions, he didn’t know where to zoom in, where to focus his remarks.
By asking me where we are now and where we want to be, he could have pulled back the velvet curtain and revealed the scale of the gap between those two points. He could have hit gold, by asking me, if I know where we are now and where we want to be, then what is stopping us from getting there? That is such a wonderful, elegant question and absolutely has to be in the tacklebox of everyone in sales. If the gap is too close, then the buyer will reveal they don’t see any need for outside help, because they believe they can bridge the gap using their own internal resources. Or they may reveal they already have a supplier and they are entirely, even deliriously, happy with that provider.
If we know this information, then we can move to baiting our hook to lure them to not do it themselves or keep using that existing company. If we keep bleating on about our features, we will never know why they have no interest in buying from us. Knowing they don’t believe they need us, we can start asking intelligent questions which challenge their entrenched ideas. If they want to do it themselves we can bait the hook with the opportunity cost of that route.
We can ask, “Doing it yourself is a possibility and do you think that you can do it fast enough to steal a march on your competitors, who by the way, seem to be getting a lot more active recently?”. Japanese companies in particular, are usually quite paranoid about what their competitors are doing and they also know that getting things done internally is rarely ever achieved at speed. The key here is to not make this statement, such as “Doing it yourself will take too long and your rivals we eat your lunch while you are trying to DIY the process”. When we frame it as a question and they say “yes”, then the statement is true. If we as the salesperson say it, then as a statement it is just so much salesperson hot air and they can dismiss it as such.
Regarding the incumbent supplier we could say, “Well we are much better than them and you should use us instead”. This won’t fly because they are happy with their current arrangements and nobody in business in Japan likes change all that much. We need to bait the hook. We should say, “I understand you have been using this current firm for a number of years. Can I guess that you made a change at some point from the much earlier suppliers to this one, because you saw a benefit of doing so and wouldn’t you want to enjoy that benefit again today, given business has changed so much over the years?”. We are asking a question which is easy to say “yes” to and difficult to disagree with. We are also trying to get them to make that idea relevant and plausible, by their saying “yes” rather than us proffering the idea.
Asking questions to get more information allows us to work out the angle of approach to the clients and to find our where there may be some resistance. When we encounter that resistance, we bait our hook with questions to which the only answer can be a “yes” and in so doing, build the momentum to continue to the idea of using us as their trusted partner.
