by Cindy Barnes
Mostly Bs: your company has a good insight into its value to customers and is doing a good job of selling on value.
References
Dixon, Matthew and Adamson, Brent (2011) The Challenger Sale: Taking control of the customer conversation, Penguin Group, New York
Howard, Tamara (2014) Who’s Paying for Lunch?, Verve Business Books Ltd, Oxfordshire
06
The sales story
Behind every good sale is a great sales story. And it mustn’t be fiction. Chapter 5 outlined the classical steps in a sales process and described the key thoughts and feelings experienced by customers at each stage. In addition to this activity, the salesperson must take the potential customer on a ‘journey’ within each sales meeting. The story they tell is vital to successful consultative selling. It takes a customer on an intellectual and emotional journey, and helps obtain buy-in to what the salesperson is offering.
When does the story begin?
The sales story fits within a company’s overall corporate story, which is derived from the overall value proposition, so that it will be consistent and fit seamlessly with the stories sent to the marketplace as a whole, including suspects who have never had any direct contact with the business. So the overall story begins with marketing, and salespeople carry it to potential customers. When the salesperson first becomes engaged with an opportunity at the qualification step, this meeting should be driven by the story itself. The whole interaction should follow an emotional rhythm, with the salesperson driving the process and telling the story.
Why a story?
Telling a story engages the listener on both an emotional and rational level. There is a code, a repeatable pattern to good storytelling. In leadership and in business, stories always follow a similar pattern. Stephen Denning in his books on leadership (Denning, 2007) gives a simple three-step approach to constructing a good story:
1 Get attention through starting with negative stories.
2 Elicit desire through a positive story to get action and buy-in to a vision.
3 Reinforce with reason through using neutral stories to explain what, when, how and why.
Even television commercials follow this pattern within a 30-second or one-minute time frame. Think about headache medication or indigestion tablets. These adverts start by setting the scene and focusing on the problem – a headache or heartburn – perhaps putting the problem into a context with which the target audience can identify. For example, ‘Celebrate too much last night and paying the price today? Headache? Queasy?...’ The camera focuses on a man, usually with a morning’s growth of beard and looking worse for wear, gazing blearily at himself in the mirror.
Next the camera shows him taking the antidote being advertised, with the announcer saying something like, ‘To feel better fast, take…!’ Then the sequence typically cuts to the same individual in a business suit, looking well-groomed and wide awake, smiling as he engages in a successful business meeting, or in tennis whites, successfully beating his opponent on the tennis court. It doesn’t matter which, what matters is that the story has a happy ending. The same process should be used in qualifying sales meetings.
Any sales story begins by setting the scene with a neutral discourse. Next, to engage the listener and maintain interest, the narrative should introduce a change in the emotional intensity. For a sales narrative the easiest and most effective way to introduce this change is to talk about ‘what happens if it all goes wrong’. The listener/customer should be led via questioning, down, down, down, until all negative aspects of the current situation have been disclosed, discussed and understood.
Clearly, it is not effective to leave a potential customer depressed and anxious, so a good salesperson should then lead the conversation back up to an emotional ‘high’. Typically this shift is accomplished by asking the listener to imagine how good things could be when a problem is solved. If done well, the prospective customer is now in an optimistic state, feeling good and envisioning a positive future with all opportunities exploited and issues addressed. Finally, the meeting ends on a more level, rational basis as the salesperson agrees the next steps.
In psychology, the ‘peak-end rule’ explains that people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (ie its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. The effect occurs regardless of whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant. Other information aside from that of the ‘peak’ and the ‘end’ of the experience is not lost, but it is not used. Listeners absorb net pleasantness or unpleasantness and how long the experience lasted (Fredrickson and Kahneman, 1993). This model says that an event is not judged by the entirety of an experience, but by prototypical moments or snapshots. The remembered value of snapshots dominates the actual value of an experience. Fredrickson and Kahneman theorized that these snapshots are actually the average of the most intense moment of an experience and the feeling experienced at the end. The length of an experience has minimal effect. The peak-end rule is applicable only when an experience has definite beginning and end periods.
In other words, people remember the most intense experiences and the end of the story. If good feelings are stronger than bad, then the overall experience is judged by the good feelings.
This format and pacing mirrors that of all good stories, from children’s fairy tales to action thrillers. Enjoyment of the story is as much about experiencing the roller coaster of emotions, as the hero tackles danger after danger and then ends his or her story successfully – ‘and they all lived happily ever after…’. Whether or not this rhythm is integral to human nature or, from a young age, almost everyone has been conditioned to expect it – it works. Under all circumstances, it fully engages the listener.
In fact the peak can be at the very beginning if this process is understood and managed well. As writer Darin De Stefano explains, ‘The goal of selling something shares a fundamental feature with all human transactions and relationships. In fact, it is a foundational aspect of nature that initial conditions predetermine the scope and form of future outcomes. They also catalyse our felt senses of context and purpose. We are all familiar with the cliché about first impressions; unfortunately, however, we are not technically aware of the power of initial conditions – by which I mean the first moments of contact – to define things like context, role, value, potential and form. The very first impressions, the first gestures and words, the emotional angles of approach – all these features ‘initialize’ the entire field of play for both parties. All future transactions, successes and failures will naturally inherit not merely character but form from the first few moments of contact.
A deeper knowledge of ‘first contact’ forms and relations is absolutely crucial to far more than ‘controlling the sale’ or manipulating a consumer – it is the actual conception-moment of a relationship.
Strong, up-front ground rules
Preparation for this first meeting is critical. It is also important during that ‘first contact’ and subsequent meetings to manage the psychological ‘holding’ of the meeting. The salesperson must ‘hold the space’ and create strong up-front ground rules. This creates a feeling of safety for the customer and aids a more relaxed meeting. Strong up-front ground rules give the following:
Establishes the content and agenda for the meeting.
The opportunity for both the salesperson and customer to ask questions.
Provides each sales meeting with an end result.
The opportunity for both the customer and the salesperson to say ‘no’ if there isn’t a fit.
The customer to say ‘yes’ if there is a good fit.
Allows for enough time.
Allows for a decision to be made at each interim meeting.
Ensures no interruptions.
Allows participants to deal with their biggest fears up-front. For example, a salesperson who has a fear of asking for money might say, ‘Before I begin talking ab
out my company and our expertise, let me tell you my concern. My concern is that we get to the end, you like what you hear – and I’m going to have difficulty discussing money. So that I can give your problem my full attention, are you okay discussing money up-front?’ This conversation must be truthful and not contrived. Only raise concerns if genuinely worried about them. By voicing them up-front it removes their power to overwhelm the salesperson throughout and at the end of the meeting.
Elements of ground rules to include are:
Appreciation for the meeting.
Agree a start and end time for the meeting and ensure that this is adhered to.
State and recap the customer’s agenda.
State and recap the sales agenda.
State possible outcomes from the meeting, for example: ‘One of two things will result from our meeting today. We may see that there is not a fit for our organizations and if that is the case would you be comfortable saying so? On the other hand, we may find a perfect fit and we can then discuss things like budgets and your decision-making process. Would you be comfortable with that?’
Wrap up and conclude the meeting with very clear next steps.
This emotional journey works very well with any qualifying sales meeting, but is crucial in the consultative sales qualification process.
How? What ‘story’ is told?
As Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE, the design-thinking consultancy, says:
The creation of selling stories in a workshop environment is heavily dependent upon the expertise of the people in the room with us. There will be blind spots in the current story so we want to get a diverse set of perspectives. Ideally we will get a customer in the room, a salesperson who has spent a lot of time with customers, a person who is technical and able to represent what the product can and cannot do, and someone who represents finance or the executive team. The idea is to get a wide range of perspectives to create a selling story that puts the customer in the centre. We use an ‘empathy map’ to keep all the different perspectives always customer-focused.
For good transactional selling, marketing or product management will prepare a ‘story’ that positions a company’s product or service as ‘the hero’. This story is then integrated into well-prepared sales material and taught to sales staff at each launch. In this way, the salesperson understands why all the thought, engineering and good practice has been put into the new offering to solve customers’ problems. The commercial for headache or hangover medicine discussed above is a very simple example of such a targeted story. It focuses on the well-defined group in the market for whom the antidote was developed.
This approach works just as well in the B2B space, but B2B selling is not usually carried out successfully via advertisements. Salespeople become the communicators of the prepared story. That is why, for transactional selling, it is so important for a business to understand and focus on the person who will hear the story – the person who will buy something from them.
Matt Dixon says:
We wrote about the Grainger example in The Challenger Sale. That is rooted in the idea that we’ve really got to understand at a very deep level what is going on with the customer. We have to figure out what the real pain points are, both rational and emotional, and then figure out what is it that we can offer that ties directly to that. And Grainger did that. It was like the floodgates opened because they were appealing at a very deep, personal and very emotional level to something they do that customers cared about a lot. The way they sell is not by starting with a discussion of Grainger and its history and its products and its services and its mission and values and how many locations they have, and all these kinds of things. They start with a story about the customer and what’s going on in the customer’s world and that they have a hypothesis. This means the story leads to a very rich discussion with the potential customer. Only then do they lead to the area that Grainger is uniquely qualified in to help the customer address some of their issues. It’s a much more powerful way to sell – beginning with the customer and focusing on what’s going on in their world and then leading to what makes you unique as a supplier.
Most companies get this horribly wrong by leading with what makes them unique and at that point the customer has really tuned out because they don’t really care about that, all they care about is solving their problems and dealing with things going on in their environment.
For transactional selling, a very skilled salesperson can create the story if the company they work for fails to do so, but it is far more effective if the rest of the business’s messaging supports the story.
However, consultative selling is different. The selling company’s story must support this selling process because designing and implementing the solution will take the co-operation of the whole business. A salesperson alone cannot follow through on any promises made. So, before attempting to sell, the company and the salesperson should work out exactly what it is that the prospective customer is likely to need and then test this solution during the qualification process.
So how does a story fit in to this?
Remember, consultative selling begins with focusing on a prospective customer’s business issues and opportunities. The initial qualifying meeting should open on a neutral emotional level with introductions, objectives of the meeting – all neutral topics and all traditional introductions to such a meeting. Rationally, information is exchanged, objectives set out and the scene is set (see Table 6.1).
TABLE 6.1 The emotional journey in the sales meeting
Rational Discussion
Emotional Context
1
Introduction, and clarifying objectives
Neutral
2
Confirm issues/opportunities
Neutral → negative
3
Ask ‘what happens if these issues are not addressed or opportunities are not capitalized upon?’
Negative
4
Keep probing for more issues and their impact and try to get detailed answers
Negative
5
Summarize what the customer has revealed
Bottom of the negative state
6
Present optimal solution
Upward movement to more positive mood
7
Check – through questioning – whether optimal solution is practical and get customer to imagine the business to create a positive vision of the desired future
Top of positive peak
Next, using directed questioning techniques, the salesperson should probe the customer’s attitude and concerns, asking what would happen if nothing is done. He or she should always encourage the customer to contribute quantitative assessments. So, for example, the salesperson might sum up a comment and say, ‘So you told me that if your computer system is not complete by 1 January, you will not be able to conduct business. I’m sure you have some sense of what that is worth. How much business would you lose per day? Per month? Of course, there is also the value of loss of customer goodwill.’ This quantification of the customer’s issues can be used later in the meeting to test price sensitivity and ultimately contribute information for value-based pricing.
After extracting all the information and possible scenarios from the prospective customer, the next step is to ‘sum up’: ‘So you have told me that your company must do something. In our discussion today we have only touched on a few of your key issues and already you have mentioned losses of X/month for every month this situation is not resolved… [the summing up can also include potential gains from an opportunity that needs exploiting]. Clearly it is not appropriate to do nothing; in fact, you need to do something as soon as possible – your business is losing money as we speak. What are you planning on doing? How will you decide? Who else needs to be involved?’ For purposes of explanation, these questions are less subtle than a salesperson would phrase them, but the point is clear. By getting to this point in the discussion, not only will the s
alesperson extract valuable information to be used in pricing and selling, at the same time he/she will also be carrying out the usual qualification necessary at this stage of the sales cycle.
By the time the customer is at the bottom of the emotional dip in this process, the salesperson should be able to determine or confirm:
that the customer knows there is a problem and that he/she is the person who feels the pain;
that he/she knows, to some extent, the cost/value of that problem to the business;
who else is concerned and needs to be involved in selecting a solution;
the cost of delaying a decision or doing nothing;
who makes the final decision.
At this stage, the meeting is only half over. The salesperson sums up an understanding of the customer’s current business and then says: ‘If I could show you a way to… would you be interested in exploring it further?’ With this summation and question, he paints a picture of a viable solution and tests whether the customer will or can actually buy anything. In doing so, the mood of the entire meeting shifts to be more optimistic, as possibilities for success are discussed. Remember, this is the first meeting about these issues, there has been no other qualification or RFP or proposal. In fact, a good salesperson will have already shaped the idea of the solution in the mind of the prospective customer. With this question he or she is actually asking for permission to sell. If the customer says, ‘Yes, if your company could do that I would be interested’, the salesperson can then ask what needs to happen to convince the customer and anyone else in the company.