It was a provocative outreach. The seller identified an issue he thought was impacting our company. He opened with, “We see this challenge…… impacting organizations like yours. We think you can be doing better……”
Intrigued, it was an important issue (it always is for small businesses), I responded, “What causes you to say we face that issue and can do better?”
Quickly, he responded, “I’d like to schedule a meeting where we can demo our solutions….”
I stopped him, “No you raise a fascinating issue and seem to think we can do better. I’d love to learn more about what causes you to say this? What have you seen that tells you we need to improve?”
“Well, we’ll show you the capabilities of our product and how companies like Microsoft and Google are leveraging it to great advantage….,” he responded.
Interrupting him, “Well Microsoft and Google are very different from us. Why do you think we have this problem? If we do, why should I do anything about it?”
The call wasn’t going the way it had been scripted, I could tell how frustrated he was getting. He gave it one last try, “We have to show you our product and it’s capabilities. Can I schedule a demo?”
We stopped the conversation.
The majority of prospecting conversations I see are similar. The conversation is either an outright pitch for the product, or it starts with a provocative assumption of a problem, then focuses on the product that solves that problem. When the victims, I mean recipients, of these outreaches start to ask about the problem or the business issues underlying the problem, the seller cannot continue the conversation.
But those are the conversations our prospects and customers value the most! They want to talk about their problems. They want to discuss. They want to talk about the issues they face, they want to better understand the problem and what it means to them. They want to understand who else has the problem, what they should do to better understand it.
Prospects and customers have no interest in discussing solutions, until they thoroughly understand the problem, how it it impact them, whether it is something they should address now, and what happens if they don’t address it. Once they understand it, once they’ve decided it’s a high priority to address, then they are interested in potential solutions.
Unfortunately, we don’t train sellers to have those business focused conversations, we only train them on presenting the solution to the problem. We don’t train them to help the customer better understand the problem, what it means, why they should be concerned about solving it now. We don’t train them to talk about what the customer cares about, what captures their attention and drives them to change.
Yet we expect them to get into conversations which they have no capability of holding up their end of the conversation.
What would happen if we started training our people in the problems and all the issues around discovering, understanding, quantifying, and thinking about the problem? What if we focused on customer understanding of these things before we jumped to solutions? What if we trained them to talk about what the customer cares about, rather than what we care about?
Might we be more successful? Might more prospects be interested in learning more?
We miss so much opportunity because we focus on what we want to talk about and not what the customer cares about.
David, I like your posts, and they do get people talking about what and how to approach potential clients. But I disagree that the first thing you should ask potential clients the issues they face. Finding out issues is important, but I have found that finding out why they have those issues is more important, and that asking this will distinguish you from all other salespeople. I learned this back when I was with IBM in the 70’s, and it will always hold true. You must ask them what their goals are first, because people don’t have issues, if they don’t have goals. And everyone has goals, and that’s what they want to accomplish.
Ian, perhaps I miscommunicated. Clearly, we have to focus on the issues and challenges the customer faces, drilling down to understand them, their impact, and what they mean to the customers. Sometimes, we can do this through a research based presumption: “Do you face this….” then drilling deeply into the issue. Alternatively, we can do an insight driven approach, “We are seeing this happening, how are you dealing with it….”
For some years, we have been promoting an approach called Business Focused Selling. It focuses on the customer business issues, helping them better understand, help them determine the impact, who should be involved, etc. We train people not to talk about solutions or the product until the customer thoroughly understands, defines, and organizes themselves to address the issues. At that point, they always ask, “How can you help?”
The results from this are profoundly increased trust, win rates. Reduced no decision made. And buying cycles reduced by 30-40%.
Thanks for adding to the discussion and helping me realize I hadn’t been a clear as I might have been.
David, you often talk/write about business acumen or the lack thereof. You column today is another example of this and, unfortunately, it’s a common occurence. Assigning new sellers to cold (or even lukewarm) outreach with limited experience to the challenges and/or aspirations of prospects makes little sense. Those that argue it’s a “numbers game” and you just have to keep slogging miss the point entirely.
You’re preaching to the choir, Barry! I do wonder why people are so entrenched in strategies that produce increasingly failing results. But you did inspire a new post, written with my tongue planted deeply in my cheek. Thank you 😉