Too often, as I look at my feeds, or as I discuss many well intended enablement/training programs, or as I look at the technologies available to “help” our sellers, I’m reminded of the old Three Stooges scene where Curly is struggling, saying, “I’m trying to think but nothing happens!”
While we genuinely seek to help our sellers improve their performance, there seem to be unintended consequences to what we are doing. And the data shows this, declining results across virtually every metric we see. The way we make up for the gaps is with a volume/velocity approach. “If what we are doing now isn’t working, as well, all we need to do is more….”
But, increasingly, we seem to be failing to prepare our sellers to engage in high impact ways.
One of the capabilities I see in the highest performing sellers is the “ability to figure things out.” It’s a combination of curiosity, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. This capability stands in sharp contrast to how we develop the majority of our sellers. We give them the scripts, the talking points, the checklists; all to help them in engaging customers.
We provide endless engagement data about our customers. We provide insights on the business performance of their customers, identifying ways we can help improve performance. We provide rich training on prospecting, qualifying, discovery, questioning, objection handling, closing skills; but too often, even though the right words are coming out of our sellers mouths, nothing is happening.
They know the questions they should ask, but they don’t know how to deal with the answers. As a result, customer interrogations, I mean conversations, begin to look like ping pong matches: Question, Answer; Question, Answer; Question, Answer….. They ask the questions, they get the expected answers, but they are unable to engage the customer in a conversation. They are unable to drill down into the issues, understanding why, what it means, why it’s important, how the customers feel about these things.
A customer conversation, indeed a coaching conversation with our people, is not just about getting answers, but it’s about meaning. It’s about drilling down into how the answers are developed, what they mean, ………
One of the things that provoked this post was an article in LinkedIn. Leveraging the fashionable way of presenting things, the author provided a series of 37 questions to improve discovery calls. What was different from most of what I see, was that at least 70% of the questions were pretty good. But what the author failed to point out was that to leverage these questions with great impact, there needed to be deep understanding of the business, how it works, what the key issues might be and why these might be key issues. Implicit, in the questions was a deep understanding of each of the roles we might pose these questions to, and an ability to connect the dots from person to person. What was missing was, where do these questions lead and how do we engage the customer in a collaborative conversation about their business?
The issue wasn’t so much the questions themselves, I could see how very knowledgeable sellers would “get” the questions, the issue is, they are unlikely to need the questions. They are already masters of these conversations. The remaining potential population is probably confused. These aren’t ping-pong questions. Too many won’t understand why they are important.
We see the same issue across too many aspects of selling. For example, we have dashboards giving us every kind of metric on our people and customers. I can imagine insights like, “Dave is spending 35 minutes a days sipping coffee. You should coach him on how bad caffeine is and how to leverage those 35 minutes more purposefully. Over a 250 day business year, that’s a whole week and a half of lost productivity….. And think of the lost productivity do to ‘peeing time’ caused by the coffee!” Despite the caustic humor, many of the insights we get are very powerful–if we understand what they mean and how to drill beneath them to understand what’s creating driving these numbers and how we might address those root causes.
If you are a leader (or sales enablement professional) what are you doing to develop your people’s skills in “figuring things out?”
If you are a leader, what are you doing to develop the same capabilities for yourself?
If you are an individual contributor, how are you developing your business and customer acumen? How comfortable are you in having collaborative conversations with your customers, helping them figure things out?
Too often, I see too many unconsciously emulating Curly, “I’m trying to think but nothing happens!”
Afterword: And if the Three Stooges isn’t sufficient, this is actually an outstanding AI generated discussion of this post. It’s quite good, enjoy!
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