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By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
In the heat of a sale, it is sometimes easy to confuse a condition to the sale with an objection. The key is to understand what you are really dealing with, and respond accordingly. Done right, it could solidify the sale and the resulting relationship with the buyer.
Take a look, then download the Objection Handling Handbook, and let me know your thought.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
Ask a group of sales people what are the most important attribute or abilities a good sales person needs to master, and “Listening Skills” will usually be near the top of the list. No argument here, the ability and as importantly the patience to listen are crucial. Beyond the common aspects of listening, there is the issue of what you are listening to. Based on the question, you could find yourself doing a lot of great listening, with little progress, or return for the effort.
So while listening is a good discipline, the skill still comes down to the quality of the question. Great questions make for worthwhile listening; crappy questions lead to… well you know.
Buyers have become immune to the most often asked common questions, some may have been fresh the first time they were asked, but by the third time they were asked “if you could change one thing….?” Or any other question of this sort, they develop a standard canned answer, which if not deflected by the seller, will lead to the same predictable outcome, no sale or discounted sale, I guess that’s the penalty for bad questions.
If you want something good to listen to, you need to ask good questions, the better the question, the better listening, the better the engagement. Where there is a range of opinions is around what is a good question. From where I sit, you need ask questions that penetrate the protective shield buyers have developed to protect themselves from the usual lot of overtly self-serving questions sellers ask, of course delivered in a consultative mode.
The questions need to be provocative, spark the buyer to think, at times shock them into thinking. Think of even though a buyer has granted you an hour, they still have a 16 hour work day they are trying get in to a ten hour day, with all the challenges that go along with that. Just like we as sellers are thinking (and listening) ahead of where we are, so are they. Your question need to stop them in their track, get off the tread mill, and actually think about their answers, not just illicit a response, responses don’t make for good listening.
Unfortunately, people don’t like to provoke, they fear making client uncomfortable, so instead they ask Namby-pamby questions, soft and cuddly, almost asking the buyer to be their friend rather than an agent of change, or a person of value. These kind of soft light questions ultimately lead to light listening, like Muzak at the supermarket.
You can build more provocative questions that help you get below the surface of the issues, getting to the root of what the buyer’s objective are and how you can help eliminate hurdle, identify gaps, and mine those gaps to close them in helping the achieve those objective. The goal is to get past the here and now, to where they need/want to be, where you can add value. To do that you need something good to listen to.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
Sales people are constantly working at communicating value to their buyers, especially in the early stages of the cycle, lead gen to prospecting and engaging the buyer to where they could complete an effective Discovery process. After sellers have done all the work involved in getting to the point where they can engage with a buyer, I am always surprised at how easily they are willing to undermine it, and risk their opportunity by saying something completely unnecessary, and serves only to sooth their nerves.
The expression that does this most is “I just need 15 minutes of your time” or “A quick 15 minutes”. Both are stupid and useless, the second is one I never did get, how is a “quick 15 minutes” different than 15 minutes, don’t all minutes have 60 seconds, it is just the quality of the content that seems to make some minutes last a lifetime.
I know why it is used, generally comes down to two things, both can be dealt with more intelligently and effectively. First is the popular notion that if you can get 15 minutes, and do well, they’ll give you an encore and you can stretch it out; I guess we all think we can do a good job. On the other hand I used to work for a VP of Sales who managed his calendar down to the minute, busy guy. He would ask you how long you needed, and would book you in for that time, if you said 15 minutes, he would end the meeting right at 15 minutes. He wasn’t rude, he had to get to his next scheduled meeting, if you couldn’t live up to the expectation I set, it was your issue, not his, you had to deal with it, not him.
Which brings us to the first contradiction, most decision makers have more than what to do in a day, how realistic is that they don’t have other meetings behind your, or other things that require their time and attention. Yes, no doubt we have all had instances where we were able to extend 15 minutes in to 45 or even 60 minutes, but an occasional anomaly does not make for a sound strategy.
The other issue with this approach is that you are in fact misleading the prospect before you have even met them. Think about it, do you really want to start things off by lying to the prospective buyer? Any way you rationalize it, that is exactly what you are doing, not a good foundation for a trust based relationship.
The second reason sales people do this is linked to the first, and just as weak. Specifically they are trying to minimize the apparent impact on the buyer, trying to make it “easy” on them, “Your time will not be wasted”, is the implication. But unless you are selling a coffee service or window cleaning, how much real or tangible value can you effectively communicate. More so, when you are selling what you would call a “solution”, where information has to be exchanged, 15 minutes is not going to get you there, you can pretend all you want, you are going to pitch, worse, you are going to ‘speed pitch’.
Some will tell me, “I can at least get things started”, sure then comeback and continue, with a bit of recapping, you are costing you and the buyer more time. By asking for 15 minutes you are undermining your so called “value proposition”. What the prospect hears is that this is so basic and unimportant, what they are asking themselves is as follows: “we’re going to make real progress in 15, can’t be that important or unique, maybe it can wait, or I can delegate it to someone who deals with unimportant things.”
Think about it, assuming things get started, small talk, while you assume they checked out your web site, you have to validate; if they did, you still need to create context, if they didn’t you have to do a bit more than that. From here, you need to at least go through the motions of gather information or executing a Discovery of facts and objective. Ah, look at that time is up! I remember someone trying to sell me an ad in local board of trade directory, they said they just need 15 minutes, I pointed out to him that he will need to ask me some questions, I will certainly have some for him, so let’s get real, how much time will we really need, he was honest enough to come across with a real time frame.
What’s worse, it is usually the seller who brings time in to the equation, not the prospect, again communicating a lack of confidence in their offering, or their ability to sell, or both. Just stop this juvenile practice, and sell.
Now I know that there times when you will be asked by a prospect how much time you need; in my case I gear my first meetings to about an hour, I am the one that gets antsy after 50 minutes. But rather than saying “one hour”, I pause, and ask, “how long can you give me?” They usually come back and say “is an hour enough?” Touch down!
But assuming they ask again, I just say “I usually need about 30 minutes for Discovery, I assume you’ll have some questions, so 40 minutes is safe.” If I feel they have a sense of humor, I add “any longer than that I take as interest on your part.”
I do have people who say “I can give you 30 minutes.” Great I can work with that; if they offer 15 minutes, I say no, I know what is going to happen, it is not a good use of my time, my most important resource. Either we can find a mutually better time, or on to the next one. If you have lots of prospects, this is not an issue, if you only have one or two, you may have to settle for the scraps that a quick 15 minutes represent.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
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By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” ~ Steve Jobs, Business Week, May 12, 1998 (thanks to Karri Flatla)
Some myths in sales need to be retired, at or near the top of the list is the commonly accepted notion that the customer is always right. If they were, we as sales professionals would have no value beyond that of an order taker. I know there are a lot of order takers out there pretending to be sales people, but that does not make it right. I am not joking, about the order takers, or the fact all to often, customers are not right, especially when it comes to specific solutions or means to achieving their objectives; and the only thing that is worse is the fact that some sales professionals do not push back against this myth.
Yes it is true that it is their decision, and they can buy what they like, but in the end most buyers do want to buy the right thing for their company, at times they just don’t know any better. I have always maintained that one of the core values a good (great) sales person bring to a deal is their vast knowledge of a specific areas of practice. We are if nothing else, conduits to the best practices out there. I regularly meet sales leaders in companies both big and small, from Fortune 100 companies to the most innovative start ups. I see more things that work, and more that don’t than any single one of my customers. That is not a value judgment, but the reality of what I do, a key component of my value. Just as you see all kinds of companies using your service or product, some using it in the most brilliant ways, ways you never conceived, getting more out of it than you may have imagined before; while others use with less spark than it take to light a match.
As a sales professional it is your job to point out where the buyer’s thinking is wrong, and will likely lead to a bad or inefficient outcome. Sometimes this easy, buyers genuinely open to suggestions, but just as often they may not appear to be at first, especially when the buyer has done minimal research and comes with preconceptions. This is potential trap for sellers have in a “be found” environment, where sellers are told that the buyer is some 60% through the cycle, and are informed, before they engage with a seller. Well who is to say that the information they gathered is accurate, complete or really applicable. A successful sales professional has first hand knowledge of what works, what doesn’t and more importantly why. It is still true, even in our peer sourcing social selling age that information is not knowledge.
Now how you counter the buyer’s view is key, there is no need to be heavy handed, pompous or impatient; you can have, and should, demonstrate conviction, especially when you do bring real knowledge to play. Some talk a lot and worry about trust and relationship, I would argue challenging the buyer’s view for legitimate reasons you can back with experience, and will deliver better results based on their objectives, will in fact build trust and enhance a relationship when the client comes out ahead as a result of your challenge and input.
Executed with skill, the buyer will feel and be right with the proper purchase, even if they were wrong at the outset.
What’s in Your Pipeline
Tibor Shanto
By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca
Back in the 80′s or maybe even earlier, the purveyors of Consultative Selling, put a lot of emphasis on Open Ended Questions, for all the right reasons. It took some effort and focus to get sales people to adopt this style of interaction, especially after years of pitching and doing things the traditional (old) way.
Many sales people had difficulty being comfortable and effective in the vast openness provided by this style of questions. It was difficult to fight the urge to regress to their previous comfort zones, many sellers had to be continuously managed to adopt the new more effective question based selling.
One practice was to paint closed ended questions as being inferior, substandard, in those days, even communist in nature; may sound extreme, but in reality, closed ended question were uniformly vilified. In fact the pendulum swung so far that closed ended question were just plain bad. Today, in many workshops, you still hear people demonizing closed ended questions.
Well I am here to tell you that there are no such things as bad questions. There are very few if any absolutes in sales. It’s more accurate to look at how appropriate a question is for a given circumstance. If you look at questions as tools of the trade, there is no such thing as one tool fits all; there may be tools that are appropriate to various tasks, others may be useful less often
Which is why I am here to say that the much maligned closed ended question does have a place in B2B selling in 2013; hell I’ll go further to say it has a place in Sales 2.0 and/or Social Selling. It is about the situation, what is the desired outcome, and what the next step needs to be from both parties perspectives.
Given the above there are regular occurrences in sales where closed ended question makes perfect sense. So I am on a mission to reintroduce this tool to your sales tool kit. A few years ago Timberlake made it his goal to being Sexy Back, so I am advocating the same for closed ended questions (although I am certain they will never be sexy, but the positive results delivered may be).
I am calling the updated version Impact Questions, a marketing friend told me that one needs to rebrand for re-launch; change the name and you change focus from potential negative connotations.
Let’s face it, there are times when you do want to focus things, narrow down the possibilities. Often you want close things off so you can move the process forward, or to realize that there is no forward to move to with a prospect and it may be time to move to the next opportunity.
During a cold call, oops, prospecting call, (need to be politically correct), open ended questions can take you off track; a question that works well in a sales call can be negative during a prospecting call. There are other times when you do want a clear one or the other, a yes or a no. It comes down to how the response serves the purpose. What is the impact of the answer, and how that answer impacts the outcome. For example, when I ask someone I called the first time if they “have ever worked with a third party trainer like Renbor?”, either answer serves to move the process forward, and could prove to be a benefit for both. Rather than using a series of open ended questions to arrive at the same point, a simple impact question focuses bith the prospect and I on the same critical turning point.
So know where you are trying to go, know how you can help a prospect or a customer, then ask the Impact Question, and deal with the impact, not whether it is open ended, closed ended, or some other ended, work to achieve positive impact for the buyer and yourself.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
Don’t look around in your office for the answer, look at your prospects.
Who is a better closer, you or the buyer you are facing? In most cases the argument can easily be made that the buyer is a better closer. In more cases than not, they end up achieving their objective more than you do.
In the case of active buyers, those in the market, reaching out directly to sellers, or actively seeking input from their peer network; or passive buyers – those buyers who are not actively looking but are no longer happy with their current situation, making entrees into the market, searching the web for “what’s out there”. The buyers are usually the better closers, simply by closing you on the fact that they have other options, and unless things are done entirely on their terms, you’ll lose the deal. The more one capitulates here, the clearer it becomes that the buyer is closing the seller on the deal they want. Discounting is an issue in most verticals, either you close the buyer on the value you deliver, or they close you on what you have to surrender to win the deal.
In circumstances where there is no deal, either because the buyer bought from someone else, or decided not to make a decision, again the buyer was the better closer because they closed themselves on not buying, where the seller was not able to close them on buying. Assuming you were truly convinced that they had a need, and you qualified them, and they didn’t buy, they were the better closer.
Where sellers seems to be much better closers are with those buyers commonly called as status quo. Where the seller was able to engage in a proper manner, meaning not waiting around to be found by someone with preconceived ideas and price points, but engaged as two peers around a common opportunity. This involves a proactive approach by the seller, doing the research as to who is in a position to benefit from their offering and engaging with them as a potential means of achieving objectives, not as a latter part of a buying process that started long before the seller was aware. Where the seller takes the initiative rather than the buyer, the odds are much more even.
The reason for this is obvious but often overlooked. In the end, it is not about the close but everything that precedes it. All the elements of the EDGE Process; beyond the research, it is the prospecting Engage long before the buyer goes to market; the Discovery to help confirm the buyer’s objectives, and build value through a collaborative process that encourages the buyer to be part of the process – and part of the outcome. Leading to the point where you Gain commitment based on the mutual definition of value, and then of course Execute together with the buyer.
The ability to change the focus from close to outcome allows you to help more clients close on you.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
Want to make more money, sell to the Status Quo. Here are three ways you can start:
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
Many people involved in sales seem to be fixated with budget; they want to qualify for it way to early in the process. I know it is important, but you maybe disqualifying perfectly good buyers for the wrong reason.
Your job in sales is to well, sell, which means identifying requirements or gaps in the prospect’s current situation. But most, about 75% of potential buyers, don’t know, realize or admit they have requirements or gaps, remember – status quo is your biggest hurdle. So if they don’t perceive a need, they don’t see a need to allocate budget. This does not mean that they don’t in fact could benefit from your product, but they have lived with the pain long enough, or on the positive side they didn’t realize they could achieve their goals by taking advantage of your offering. Ask this type of person about budget too early, and you will end up disqualifying a perfectly good buyer.
If you are talking to the right people in the right way, budget is very much an issue that can be (at times easily) overcome. Consider these examples, have you ever walked into an electronics store looking to buy a flat screen, you know what you had in mind, you encountered a clerk who “qualified you”? They asked a bunch of questions, including budget, and then showed you two or three products that fit what you described. Contrast that with the time I walked into an electronics store, with a specific flat screen in mind, shopped it on line in advance so I had a budget in mind, but I encountered a different sales person. She asked me why I was buying the TV, had I had a flat screen before? What type of things would I be watching? She then continued to ask if I what kind of DVD player I had, telling me about Blue Ray, asked if stream from the web, and of course since I told her I watch music DVD’s, what was I using to maximize the sonic experience. When all was said and done, I had exceeded my flat screen budget by $250, or 20%; in addition I became the proud owner of an unbudgeted Blue ray player, decided to give my inadequate home theater system to the kids, how else was I going to make room for the new one.
You can say I was an impulse buyer, I would argue that I was maximizing my investment in my enhanced flat screen. Either way there is no arguing that rather than qualifying me for budget, she qualified me for what I was trying to achieve and how to best maximize that over the life of my new Smart TV.
Corporate buyers are no different, the higher you go in the organization, the truer this is. Executives are able to create budget, able to shift funds around, and make a buy based on a host of factors beyond budget. I have many clients who did not have budget for training when I cold called them, but after we engaged, and I demonstrated how their investment in what I do will deliver results and returns that will exceed their investment, and justify an unbudgeted expenditure.
Executives want, no need, to make a difference, show them how you can do that and you will find a person motivated to make things happen. Show them that you primary interest is their ability to spend, and even those with budget will self-disqualify. It’s about engagement and investment – not budget. Go ahead, qualify someone for a better competitor.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
Sales people are aware that their biggest competitor in the market is complacency, the lack of the buyer willingness to change, the status quo. Change is hard; it involves time, effort, and the need to overcome the fear of the unknown. This is why even when things are not perfect, visibly not meeting expectations, buyers will stick with less than they deserve, fear is a strong emotion.
Add to this the fact that sellers are already predisposed to the view that people buy based on emotions, which they then rationalize. As stated above fear is an emotion, and as a result sellers are up against the dynamic that buyer feel a strong reaction to a strong emotion, one that keeps buyers spending a lot of time rationalizing why they do not need to change, why they can “make due” rather than risk change.
This triggers two common approaches in sales and marketing types. The first, probably the most common, and well disguised when presented by the guru community, never quiet expressed as this, but essentially: “wait till something changes, then pounce”. To which I say, there is no sales metric for waiting, do you know why, because it is not your job to wait, it is your job to sales happen.
The second, a bit more logical, is to try to minimize the fear and risk associated with changing (to your product), by putting a lot of effort into proving why your offering is better, safer, and economically more sound that the buyer’s current circumstance. Unfortunately in the process we are pushing up against the buyer’s safety zone, heightening their fear of the unknown. Every feature and benefit we recite causes them to cling more firmly to the safety of the status quo. We unintentionally work against ourselves.
Given all this, why not turn you efforts to undermining where they are now? Rather than trying to entice them to go where you want them to go, introduce some doubt and uncertainty into where they are now, and where their current path will lead them. The one emotion that is worse than the fear of the unknown is the fear of the known. If I can focus the discussion on why the current situation is untenable, why if they left it unaddressed it will bring exposure, the discussion turns to how to avoid that, rather than avoiding the risk of change, the unknown.
If you know how to articulate why your product is truly better for the buyer, what the benefits are, financial, productivity, time advantage, etc., then you have the speaking points you’ll need to turn the table. Use that knowledge to develop the type of questions that drive the discussion to WHY NOT for the status quo, rather than WHY change. Your why is the safe alternative to the why not.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
“Leveraging Value from Engaging the Buyer to Closing the Sale” – A Sales Association Webinar
Tuesday, October 30 – 2 p.m. EST / 1 p.m. CST / Noon MST / 11 a.m. PST (1 hour in length)
On Tuesday October 30, I have the privilege to deliver a webinar for The Sales Association – I will be talking to specific steps sellers can take to delivering and leveraging value throughout the sale.
Almost every conversation about selling starts or ends with the concept of value. At the same time, there are as many different understandings and definitions of value as there are sellers and buyers. Without a clear and actionable definition of value, many conversations between buyers and sellers are less than effective, and do not help create a buy.
Starting with a clear definition of value, participants will learn the five-step process to leveraging value throughout the sale, from the initial engagement to winning the client.
Steps include:
Participants will learn how to use this process to create alignment with the buyer, their objectives and buying process.
What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto
