Power Prospecting
Page 7
People don’t buy Disneyland tickets, they buy fun.
—Anonymous
In 1487, Christopher Columbus managed to arrange a meeting with the monarchs of Spain—King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Columbus had spent years searching for financiers for his proposed voyage to discover a shorter route to Asia. He originally approached the Italian and Portuguese aristocracy for support, but to no avail. Eventually he finagled a meeting with the king of Portugal, John II. In his meeting with King John, he detailed his plans for the voyage and the necessary funding and equipment needed to accomplish his expedition. In return for financing the voyage, Columbus made serious demands on the king, including the title of Grand Admiral of the Oceanic Seas, the office of viceroy over the lands he discovered, and 10 percent of the future commerce with such lands.
After King John II declined his offer, Columbus decided to change his approach. Rather than talk about the details of the proposed voyage, he would focus exclusively on the financial benefits to the financiers, and the public glory associated with navigational discoveries. He decided to center his discussions on the interests of his audience—their greed, desire for fame, or need for wealth. His strategy worked magnificently.
Although Columbus was an unproven explorer, and knew less about oceanic navigation than the average sailor, in one area he was an absolute genius. Christopher Columbus knew how to persuade an audience. He had developed an amazing power to charm and convince his listeners by focusing on their vanity, conceit, and self-interest—and not his own. Queen Isabella was no exception. Columbus spent years in the queen’s court convincing her of the financial and geopolitical benefits of establishing a shorter trade route to Asia. His strategy finally paid off. With the Spanish defeat of the Moorish invaders in 1492, and the wartime burden of the treasury lifted, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decided to patronize Columbus’ maritime expedition. On August 3rd, 1492, Columbus set sail with three ships, equipment, the salary of the sailors, and a lucrative contract for himself. Although his mission failed to discover a shorter trade route to Asia, he made the most influential exploratory discovery of all time—the Americas.
Had Christopher Columbus continued making presentations focused on the details of the exploration instead of the financial benefits associated with funding the exploration, he probably would never have made his famous journey.
Columbus, however, was cerebral. He adjusted his approach and focused on the benefits the financiers would experience with the success of the proposed voyage rather than the features of the voyage itself.
Focus on Benefits
Every experienced salesperson has been advised to “Focus on benefits, not features.” Nevertheless, how many salespeople actually know how to distinguish features from benefits? More importantly, how many of them implement the advice? Most salespeople repeatedly violate this principle, not because they disagree with the advice, but because they do not know how to implement it.
To avoid delivering a “feature bomb,” sellers need to resist the natural instinct to jump in and tell buyers all about their good or service. For example, let’s say a buyer shows an interest in a product by asking, “Does your air filtering system eliminate odors?” Non-cerebral salespeople immediately respond by providing a laundry list of capabilities. “Why of course. Our air filtering system not only eliminates odor, it also eradicates dust, fungus, and helps people with allergies breathe better. Not only that, this particular air filter…” Cerebral sellers, on the other hand, avoid delivering “data dumps” and instead question buyer inquiries. “Are you currently experiencing odor problems?” “How bad is it?” “What do you think might be the cause of the odor?” Rather than spewing a list of features, intelligent sellers identify the exact needs, concerns, and motives of buyers, and then address them.
A colleague asked me to assist him negotiate the purchase of a new truck. As he was examining a particular model, a salesperson approached him and said, “This truck has special equipment designed for pulling boats and trailers.” My colleague responded, “I don’t have a boat or a trailer, and I don’t want to pay extra for features I won’t use.” By immediately hammering on the features of the truck, this salesperson actually deterred my colleague from buying.
I listened to a salesperson carry on and on about the capability of his customer service staff to support its clients in eleven languages. The buyer responded, “That’s nice, but we only operate in the U.S. and don’t need that.”
There are multiple steps salespeople should follow in order to drive home the benefits of their products and solutions rather than the features. The first step is identifying the needs, pains, and problems that buyers experience. The second step is using the Sales Messaging Matrix (see Figure 5.1) to differentiate product features, advantages, and benefits—and then matching them to product solutions. The third step is using solution-benefit questions to help buyers see the benefits of implementing proposed solutions.
The Sales Messaging Matrix
Rather than focusing on benefits and solutions, many salespeople engage in low level feature wars that distract buyers from grasping the benefits of proposed solutions. More often than not, salespeople just feature buyers to death. This is especially true with cold calls. Sellers often “throw out” features hoping a few might stick.
Doing a little homework and identifying potential benefits prior to cold calling can make a huge difference. Successful prospectors identify a target rich environment and develop a USP based on value creation. The way to craft a message based on value creation is to focus on client needs and problems.
After a tour of duty overseas, a certain officer was appointed to a stateside induction center where he advised new recruits regarding their government benefits, specifically G.I. insurance. Within a few months, he had an almost one hundred percent sales record.
His supervisors were amazed at his extraordinary achievement. Rather than ask him how he accomplished such a remarkable rate of success, one of his superiors stood in the back of the room while the officer delivered his presentation. The officer introduced the general provisions of the G.I. insurance to the new recruit. He then concluded his presentation by saying, “If you buy G.I. insurance, go into battle and are killed, the government will have to pay $35,000 to your beneficiaries. If you don’t buy G.I. insurance, go into battle and are killed, the government will only have to pay a maximum of $3,000. Now, which group of soldiers do you think will be sent into battle first?
Note: People don’t buy features. They buy benefits. They buy solutions to problems. The world’s best product or service is worthless if it fails to solve a problem or satisfy a buyer’s needs.
The key to focusing on benefits instead of features is to distinguish product benefits and features prior to cold calling. The best way you can ensure that a cold call focuses on benefits is to clearly identify the benefits a product or service provides prior to cold calling.
Differentiating benefits and features is not always as easy as it sounds. In order to assist salespeople in making the distinction, I recommend using The Sales Messaging Matrix. The Sales Messaging Matrix is a sales, marketing, and presentation tool designed to analyze products and services in problem-solving terms. It was created to assist sales and marketing professionals when they need to identify and understand the differences between buyer pains and problems, product features, advantages, and benefits.
The Sales Messaging Matrix
Figure 6.1
There are five steps used in The Sales Messaging Matrix:
1. Identify the category of analysis (industry, market, business, department, person, job title, etc.).
2. Identify the needs and/or problems experienced by the category selection.
3. Identify the pains experienced by the category selection, i.e., the consequences of unfulfilled needs or unresolved problems.
4. Ide
ntify the solution that resolves the buyer’s pain.
5. Identify the benefits to the buyer of fulfilling the need, resolving the problem, and eliminating the pain.
Once you have identified client pains and problems, and the product features and advantages to resolve those pains and problems, you are prepared to create a winning cold call script by incorporating the identified benefits into the presentation.
Sample Sales Message Matrix™
Figure 6.2
Note: Benefits only apply to explicit needs. You may have some nifty features, but if product capabilities don’t address specific client pains and problems, they are advantages, not benefits.
Information gathered from The Sales Messaging Matrix equips salespeople with the information needed to shift from the general to the specific. Salespeople can take the general needs and pains of prospects and apply them to the specific capabilities and solutions of their products. Using this information, salespeople can adapt the presentation to cover selected features that offer advantages relevant to the prospect’s criteria, i.e., the benefits of the product or service. By keeping track of the needs and problems of buyers and then creating scripts and presentations to address and solve those needs and problems, sellers ensure that they focus their presentation efforts on the benefits of their solution.
Because product features are meaningless unless they help buyers eliminate pains and problems, winning salespeople use The Sales Messaging Matrix to demonstrate how their proposed products and features can fulfill needs, eliminate problems, and reduce pain—in other words, the benefits of the proposed product or service.
Note: Amateur salespeople sell products. Cerebral sales professionals sell solutions. Use the above questions to focus on benefits, solutions, and positive consequences associated with problem resolution.
Features: Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bath Water!
By emphasizing the importance of focusing on benefits, I am not implying that salespeople should leave out any mention of the product features and capabilities that create the benefits. On the contrary, features form an important part of the sales process. Features must be demonstrated, but only in order to focus on the benefits the buyer gains from using the product. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Discuss and demonstrate features to introduce and validate the linked benefit.
In Summary
For ultimate impact, salespeople should address the needs, goals, and objectives of buyers and focus on the benefits buyers will experience by implementing your product or service.
Using The Sales Messaging Matrix, salespeople can clearly distinguish benefits from features. By asking solution-benefit questions, salespeople help buyers articulate and verbalize product solutions. By selling solutions, salespeople demonstrate the benefits associated with their product or service.
Use The Sales Messaging Matrix to develop scripts, questions and unique propositions that focus on product or service benefits and not features.
The Point? Remember: Disneyland doesn’t sell rides—they sell fun. Black and Decker doesn’t sell drills—they sell holes. Orthodontists don’t sell braces—they sell smiles. People buy benefits, not features.
Chapter 7
Pre-Call Planning: Online Tools, Tips, & Tricks
Six former Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee founded the Ku Klux Klan in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. They named their organization “kuklux,” from the Greek work kuklos, meaning, “circle.” They added “Klan” because they were all of Scotch-Irish descent. Among its regional leaders were five former Confederate generals but its staunchest supporters were the plantation owners for whom Reconstruction posed an economic and political nightmare. Within barely a decade, however, the Klan had been extinguished, largely by legal and military interventions out of Washington, D.C. But if the Klan itself was defeated, its aims had largely been achieved through the establishment of Jim Crow laws. The Ku Klux Klan lay largely dormant until 1915, when D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, originally titled The Clansman, helped spark its rebirth. The film quoted a line from A History of the American People by a renowned historian; “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” The book’s author was U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. By the 1920’s a revived Klan claimed eight million members, including President Warren G. Harding.
But with the onset of World War II, public sentiment turned against the Klan as the unity of the country trumped its messages of separatism.
After World War II, Atlanta became the Klan headquarters. Atlanta was also the home to Stetson Kennedy, a thirty-year old man who came from a prominent southern family whose ancestors included two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Kennedy saw the Klan as a terrorist arm of the white establishment and sought to destroy it. Kennedy decided—as any foolhardy, fearless, slightly daft anti-bigot would—to go undercover and join the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy began attending weekly meetings writing notes in cryptic shorthand. He learned the identities of the Klan’s local, regional, and national leaders and deciphered the Klan’s hierarchy, rituals, writings, and secret language. Before long, Kennedy was so embedded in the Klan’s organization that he was invited to join the Klavaliers, the Klan’s secret police. For this privilege, his wrist was slit with a jackknife so that he could take the blood oath of loyalty and secrecy.
Kennedy attended local and regional meetings and passed on the damaging and illegal activities to the attorney general of Georgia, suggesting grounds to revoke the Klan’s charter. But none of Kennedy’s efforts produced the desired effect. Kennedy was supremely frustrated. He recognized that central to the power of the Klan was its secrecy—codes, names, signs, and passwords. Kennedy knew that if he could expose and publicize the secrecy, he could weaken the Klan’s power and prestige. After months of frustration, he had a stroke of brilliance. Kennedy identified an ideal outlet: The Adventures of Superman: A radio show broadcast each night at dinnertime to millions of listeners. Superman had spent years fighting Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito, but with the war over, he was in need of fresh villains. Kennedy contacted the programs producers and discussed conducting shows about Superman taking on the power of the Ku Klux Klan. He passed along information about the secret names, passwords, and passages from the Klan’s Bible called the Kloran. He explained the role of Klan officers and spelled out the Klan hierarchy from the local to the national level. The radio producers began to write four weeks’ worth of programs in which Superman would wipe out the Ku Klux Klan. It was a simple plot: Superman against the Klan! And it was smashingly popular.
After the airing of the first show, the Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Dragon promised to expose the Judas in their midst and immediately changed their passwords from “red-blooded” to “death to traitors.” Kennedy attended the Grand Dragon’s meeting and after that night’s gathering, phoned in the new password to the Superman producers who put it in the next show. The producers called Superman’s efforts “Gang busting” and updated the new secret names and passwords. Kennedy’s plan proved to be extraordinarily effective and in the weeks following the show, applications for new Klan membership had fallen to zero.
Of all the ideas that Kennedy had thought up to fight the KKK, his Superman campaign was easily the cleverest and most productive. It had the precise effect he hoped: turning the Klan’s secrecy against itself, converting precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery. It happened because Kennedy understood the raw power of information. The Ku Klux Klan was a group whose power was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information. And once that information fell into the right hands, the Klan’s power and popularity disappeared.
In any endeavor, knowledge is of supreme importance. This is why athletic teams study film of their opponents and countries spend immeasurable amounts of money and take huge ris
ks to finance spies—to gain information. Information is power, especially in sales and, in particular, first-time sales calls. Successful salespeople know the value of information and how to use it to establish credibility and relevancy with new prospects and existing clients.
The data is overwhelmingly clear: In B2B prospecting calls, if you conduct even a modicum of online, pre-call planning, you are more likely to make a strong first impression, connect on a personal level, and provide information that is relevant and interesting to a potential buyer. More importantly, client-specific information can convert cold calls into warm calls.
The “Fourth R” of Education is Research
The “Fourth R” of education in our technological age is Research, especially in sales. The value of developing account-specific sales intelligence cannot be exaggerated. Quickly and ethically conducting online research prior to a sales call is a discipline that separates average sales representatives from elite sales professionals—effective warm calls from ineffective cold calls.
Archaic, cookie-cutter prospecting approaches are juxtaposed to the razor sharp methods of high-earning prospecting professionals. And the key difference is pre-call planning: identifying and leveraging insightful, interesting, and relevant information. Highly successful sales professionals focus on acquiring pre-call sales intelligence and apply it in ways that build unique, different, interesting, and engaging conversations. Armed with sales intelligence, sales professionals communicate knowledge, insight, and information that can be applied to issues that are interesting to buyers.
I understand that sales people are busy and don’t have endless time to spend researching potential client information. For that reason, I recommend no more than 5-15 minutes of research prior to making an initial prospecting call. Anymore and it’s likely you’re spending too much time researching and not enough time calling. It’s only when you are invited for the first, in-person meeting or asked to provide a proposal that you need to spend more time thoroughly researching and understanding your prospects business, background, needs and challenges.