I have a confession. For some reason, I take perverse pleasure in taking sales people off script. Yes, I do it purposefully, but not maliciously. I suppose I should be ashamed with playing with these hapless souls, but I’m not.
But before you start thinking poorly of me, the questions or responses I provide aren’t unreasonable. These sales people are just ill prepared to engage in a conversation.
For example, a few months ago, a sales person calls me (yes, I had just downloaded a white paper). After the introduction, he said, “I can help grow your business by 200% in the next year!” I responded, “Wow, that’s incredible, what is it that we are doing wrong in managing the business, I’d really like to learn?” He launched into his pitch about tools. I interrupt him saying, “No, you’ve made a very provocative statement about my business, I’d really like to understand what we are doing wrong, or how we are missing opportunities. Apparently you have some insight into our business that we are blind to.” He stumbled a moment, tried to get back to his pitch.
I interrupt him again, “You’ve made a claim about our business, so clearly you have some knowledge about us, so what should we be doing that we aren’t?”
He was clearly uncomfortable, I know he just wanted to get out of the call.
“Perhaps, some of our competitors are doing some things that we have missed. What are those?”
He knew he couldn’t hang up, but didn’t say anything.
“Do you know what our business is? Do you know anything about our customers, our positioning, or performance?”
Meekly he replies, “No I don’t, perhaps you could tell me.”
That was the only good question he asked.
I explained very quickly, describe our services, our target customers, our differentiation, our strategies, and our growth rate–which has been high double digits, but not triple. I asked, “What should we be doing to grow at 200%?”
He responds, “Well we sell products and services that do this……” To which I respond, “But our priorities are to do these things with these people in these target customers. What can your product do to help us with this?”
Trying to get out of the situation, he responds, “I don’t know, but I’d be glad to set up a meeting with someone who can answer those questions….”
I interrupt, “I’m confused. You open this call with the claim that you know how we can grow our business by 200%. You don’t know anything about our business, but I’ve taken the time to tell you a few things. But I still don’t understand why you believe we aren’t doing enough, or that we are doing some things wrong. How do I grow at 200%?”
Again, he said, “I can set up a meeting with someone who can tell you this.”
Now most of you are wondering, why I’m wasting my time. So far it’s taken 5 minutes (the guy has probably nailed his “call time” goal for this call). I was taking some perverse pleasure in seeing how he could handle perfectly reasonable questions.
They are reasonable aren’t they? After all, if someone makes a statement they can improve my business, they ought to be able to support that statement with specific observations about my business–based on research and analysis, or in the very least what those who I might consider competitors are doing that I’m not.
Is that an unfair expectation?
To be honest, I use the same approach quite often myself. Recently, a client asked me for help with a very large deal. We made a call on the CFO of one of the top 5 retailers in North America. I started the meeting saying, “We’ve done some research, we see an opportunity for you to increase your reported net income by almost 10% over the next couple of years.”
As you might guess, the CFO’s response was exactly the same as mine to the sales person, “That’s amazing, what makes you think we can do this?” I quickly followed with, “Here’s the research we’ve done, here are some assumptions we’ve made about your business…..”
It turns out some of the assumptions were wrong. But the CFO was engaged. As we talked about the business, the assumptions that led us to our conclusions, we adjusted them. We quickly re-ran our analysis, using the CFO’s assumptions. To all our surprise, we had underestimated the impact of the challenge he faced. Together, we discovered the opportunity to increase reported net income by more than 10%. We had identified some critical challenges, if addressed, could substantively improve the business.
The other interesting thing about this discussion was that so far in the conversation, we had not talked about my client’s products or solutions. We had just focused on this retailer’s business and some issues we believed impacted their performance.
You can guess how the call went. The CFO is actively engaged, he has a team working with my client. They are looking to buy, they are naturally looking at alternatives, but it’s my client they keep coming back to for advice. We have a way to go, and then we have the implementation and have to produce the results the CFO and we believe can be achieved.
Let’s get back to the poor sales person who had the misfortune to call me. It really isn’t his fault. It’s his company’s–his management’s. The poor sales person is just doing what he’s been told, he’s just being told and taught the wrong things.
Too often, I hesitate to say the majority of the time, we set our SDR’s and sales people up for failure. We give them the wrong script, we don’t prepare them for the reasonable questions that script might generate, we don’t equip them to be able to go off script.
In the case of my poor sales person, he had a script based on a single case study from a very different customer. He was only equipped to say, “Our product helped this customer grow their business by 200%, can I arrange a meeting to tell you more about our product?” He was not equipped to deal with other reasonable questions the provocative opening might generate; “Why do you think we are underperforming, what is it about our business that makes you feel we can do this, what are the assumptions that drive you to that conclusion?” That’s not his failure, that’s the failure of whoever designed the program.
He was also poorly prepared or incapable of thinking on his feet. When given the cues, he couldn’t shift the conversation to, “Dave, tell me a little about your business…”
We miss so much opportunity because we don’t understand how to engage our customers. We don’t equip our people with the knowledge and skills to be able to engage in conversations about business. We drive potentially interested customer away, because our people can’t think on their feet to engage and teach the customer.
It’s not difficult, but somehow, it’s easier not to do the work, not to develop the capabilities of the sales people to think, understand, probe, and engage. It’s easier to do 100’s of calls to get one meeting, than to do a few well researched and prepared calls to have close to 100% hit rate.
I think there is another challenge, are we having the right people make these calls. Is it fair to expect a brand new SDR to engage in a provocative conversation about a customer’s business? Should we rethink who we put into the role of SDR?
Shame on us…I do the same thing. I like to think I’m educating someone, but really it’s just like a lion playing with its meal before devouring it.
Peter, it’s great to see you here. There is a certain sadistic pleasure in doing this. However, it’s not the SDRs fault, they are doing what they have been taught and trained to do. I think many of our strategies for the type of person we put into the SDR role are really misguided. Typically it’s an entry level sales job. Yet we expect these people to engage C level people, get them interested and gain commitment to go the next step. It’s an unfair and unreasonable expectation. It causes companies to lose huge amounts of opportunity because of this mismatch. Sometimes, I think our most experienced people should be put into SDR roles–particularly when they are targeting C level high impact conversations.
I’ve written a few things on this, glad to send them if you want. Regards, Dave