Salespeople are constantly talking to clients, but if you think about it, clients don’t have that many conversations in a year with salespeople, so there is a massive power imbalance in play. That imbalance is in favour of the salesperson, if they know what they are doing. Humans have survived on the basis of many factors, physical and mental and certainly pattern recognition is one of those crucial skills we have accumulated. When we encounter any situation we search our memory for our experiences of a similar situation, as a guide to what are some of the possibilities available to us. This applies to sales as well.
When the client says a certain thing, we have a huge database of other sales conversations and outcomes to draw upon, to filter what we are hearing and to also prompt us to do what we did last time, which worked out well and we got the deal done. We are searching for patterns to recognise to assist us with marshalling our response.
The problem though is a lot of this is just left to memory and as we know, the faintest ink is more reliable and superior to the best memory. In other words, we need to capture this information, so that we can remind ourselves of the patterns we have encountered. We work in teams and across the sales team, there is a tremendous resource base of patterns and experiences, but it is rare that sales teams will capture these gems. Every salesperson is an island and this is especially the case if there is an individual sales commission remuneration system in place.
The better approach would be to get everyone together and share their experiences and patterns. For example, Japanese buyers think they are GOD and they don’t brook insolent salespeople asking them questions. All they want is to hear the pitch, so that they can tear it limb from limb. How can we sell anything if we don’t ask questions to find out if what we have is what they need? So we need to seek permission to ask questions first. There will be certain patterns around asking for this permission which have proven more successful than others. We should all work on using the more successful approaches, rather than trial and error or just trying to work it out ourselves. And we should capture the best practice patterns.
When we get to presenting the solution we go through a five phase structure. We talk about the details of the solution – weight, cost, size, colour, delivery timings, etc. Next we draw out the general benefits of our solution. This is a great topic to gather the total possibilities available and we should make a record of these for future reference when we speak with clients about the widget they need. In phase three, we go deeper and we talk about the specifics benefits for this particular firm if they use our solution. Most salespeople never get to this phase, so what a great opportunity for the professionals to burn off their competitors by using this technique.
This is also where the pattern prediction comes in. Across the sales team there will be people who have dealt with this same industry sector and with similar clients. We ourselves may be encountering this type of business for the first time, so we have few reference points to talk about the successes of our widget with this prospective client. Where have others in the team seen this particular application of the general benefit in this type of business with this type of firm? We need to capture this and store away the information for when we need it. By pulling on the total power of the team we can best position ourselves with the client. When we meet the client we have no idea what they need and we spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand their business, their situation and trying to fix upon the best solution for them. In Japan, this solution provision usually comes at the second meeting and so there is time to work on plumbing the database of similar cases before the next meeting. We are looking for predictive success patterns to help us assure the client that what we have will deliver what they want.
Assuring the client that this solution works is vital, but they may not be inclined to take our word for it, so we need to present some evidence – this is phase four. The best evidence is a similar firm’s experiences especially one coming from a similar industry sector. This is where we need to be capturing this type of information across the firm, from all of the salespeople. One salesperson may not be able to build up a big enough pool of similar cases, but collectively, the chances are high that the firm has covered off a lot of possibilities which can be used as evidence. Over time, we can build up a strong library of patterns where our solution has worked well and we can convince the client it will work for them too. In phase five we test for resistance and use a trial close asking “how does that sound so far?”.
The secret is to tap the entire salesforce for their predictive patterns, capture them and get them into a format which is searchable and easy to find. The search modes might be by industry sector, problems or solutions. These are all predictive patterns and we can make the most of them to be successful in sales.
