by Ian Altman
Tina is the CEO of a consulting company that relies on project managers to manage proposals. Using project managers to manage proposals seemed to work. Tina asked her project managers to work on proposals in their free time just as the founding team used to do. They would regularly “burn the midnight oil” to bring in clients.
But Tina was starting to hear complaints, which culminated in the heartfelt resignation of their tenth hire. The employee, Sam, said, “I have really enjoyed working here. The team is fantastic. I can live with sacrificing a little time away from my family. I’m happy to put in the effort, but I feel like the time is wasted. In the last twenty proposals, we won three projects. I feel like I spent more time on proposals than we will bill on the projects that we won.” Tina realized in that moment that winning just 15 percent of their proposals was not only costing them money, but was also the reason for losing key personnel. She had to find a way to better identify the opportunities worth pursuing. If she didn’t, she would struggle to attract and retain top talent.
Even when no one leaves the team, poor qualifying dilutes your resources and can often trigger infighting in organizations. It is common to see salespeople arguing with operational people about which party is to blame when they lose a deal. The flaw is that many organizations play the “numbers game” (you know by now that we’re not big fans of playing games in the sales process). They fill up the pipeline with a high quantity of prospects and give insufficient attention to the quality of the prospects.
This is exactly what happened with Tina’s company. They chased any potential opportunity without accurately evaluating their potential for success.
The good news is that this unfortunate situation can be turned around. By narrowing their focus and properly qualifying opportunities, Tina’s company eliminated half of their pursuits without expending effort and found greater success with the other half. You will probably find a similar upside by improving your qualification process as well. To capture that benefit, though, you might need to revisit how you view the potential outcomes of the selling process.
Embrace the Second-Best Outcome
The numbers-game approach—make enough phone calls, get enough meetings, and you’ll find enough business—is based on a disconnect between what sellers think they want and what actually is in their best interests. Take a look at the following scenarios, and rank them from best to worst:
• The initial meeting leads to a follow-up meeting and then results in a sale.
• Immediately after the initial meeting, the client says, “No. This isn’t a fit for us.”
• The initial meeting leads to a follow-up meeting, and then to two more meetings over a period of months. Finally, the client says that you came in in second place, and they’ll consider you in the future.
Everyone would agree that the sale is the most desired outcome. (A sale to the wrong client can be a disaster, however, as we explain in Chapter 7, Don’t Force the Fit.)
Which scenario did you select as the second-best outcome?
Instinctively, many people are drawn to the third scenario. With follow-up meetings, the sale seemed to be progressing along the right path. There appeared to be strong interest from the buyer, and the seller’s solution almost won (at least that is what the buyer implied).
We suggest, however, that the second-best option is the quick “no” (scenario #2). The follow-up meetings in scenario #3 seemed promising, but the net result was no sale and a great deal of additional invested time. If you do not have the fit that will result in a sale where you can make an impact (and get paid), then your best option is to get to “no” as soon as possible.
Protect Your Team: Avoid Silver-Medal Syndrome
Research has shown that silver medalists are less happy than bronze medalists in the Olympics. While the reasons may be different, coming in second is just as undesirable in the business world. In reality, it’s often rare that the race is extremely close, with the winning and second-place companies separated by the equivalent of only fractions of a second. Yet in a competitive sales process, the “silver” finisher puts in just as much work as the winner.
Let’s take this metaphor a bit further: if you are not going to get a gold medal, you want to be out of the race as soon as possible so you can enter the next contest. Too often, companies fight hard through a long endurance race, only to learn at the end that they never had much of a chance to win.
You can dramatically improve your chances by qualifying your prospects in the right way. Let’s turn our attention to the one big thing you need to know to efficiently qualify those prospects.
Qualify by Knowing Why
How do you efficiently attract the right prospects and quickly filter out the wrong ones? The key is to get to why they want your solution. We will explore this step in two parts. In the rest of this chapter, we explain how to get to why as soon as possible. In the next chapter, we will explain how to determine how badly the prospects want what you sell.
Tune in to the Buyer’s Challenge
Recall that you must focus on the challenges that your client is facing, instead of focusing on the things you are selling. This principle is true at every step of the selling process.
Buyer’s Perspective: Salespeople have been trained to ask for need, budget, and authority. The good ones ask questions about the important problems that need to be solved and about ways we can measure success together.
In To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink explains the concept of “attunement.” Attunement is being highly aware of the customer’s viewpoint and always having that at the forefront of your mind. To successfully qualify a potential buyer, you must be attuned with the person. The sooner you tune in to the prospect’s perspective, the more efficient the sales process will be.
Too often, salespeople aim to bring buyers over to their own point of view. They drown prospects with a fire-hose of information in the form of lengthy spiels, glossy brochures, and slick, animation-filled slide presentations. Old-school sellers figured that qualifying prospects meant showing them everything and then saying, “Are you interested?”
You can move ahead of the competition with effective attunement. Ask yourself, “What would be important to me if I were in their shoes? What would I want to know before I made a purchase?” Most important, ask yourself, “Why would the prospect need what I am selling?”
Know the Most Important Buyer Questions
Ian has led more than five hundred CEOs through the exercise below, and the results show an interesting pattern in how executives make purchasing decisions. The exercise starts with the following scenario:
Someone on your team comes to you to buy a service for $20,000. What questions would you have to ask your employee to determine whether you want to make that purchase or save your resources for another purpose?
Working in groups, the executives have to come up with a list of questions they would need answered in order to make an informed decision about buying a fictitious service called the Gazertenblatt service (we told you it was fictitious).
It costs $20,000, it requires no resources on your part, and the company guarantees that you won’t need the service for another ten years or you get your money back. They are not the only company that offers the service, but their clients tell them that they are the best.
The first assignment for the executives is to develop five questions they would need answered in order to make an informed buying decision. Take a moment to think through that process and formulate your own five questions before continuing.
The executives are then asked to narrow the list to three questions. After you have narrowed your list down to three questions, continue reading.
The common questions are almost the same across industries, genders, and company sizes. The three questions needed to make an informed decision come down to:
1. What problem needs to be solved?
2. What are the likely results if we buy this service?
3. Why should we
buy it from this company?
An interesting pattern has emerged: In most groups, the first question written down is “What is it?” However, when narrowing the list of questions, participants realize that knowing what the service is has little meaning compared to knowing why they need it. As one CEO explained, “If I know the problem it solves and my likely outcome, I don’t really care what you are doing or how you do it.” In other words, why bumps what off the list.
Your list might have contained other valid questions: questions about risks, guarantees, or references. Those questions roll up under the topic of “likely results.” Buyers ask about references and risks to gain confidence that a seller can actually deliver as promised.
But the main takeaway turns much of accepted marketing on its head. Sales literature and discussions that center on the product are missing what is most important. Instead of trumpeting what you sell, your best starting point is a solid understanding of why a buyer would be interested.
Get on the Fast Track to Why
In the previous chapter, we presented an effective method of presenting a problem and solution in your Same Side pitch. Now we are going to show you the next level in presenting that pitch.
You Probably Won’t Be Able to Help Them
Let’s say you have a meeting with a potential client. Minutes before you arrive, someone asks that executive, “I see a meeting on your calendar. What is it about?” She can give one of two answers: 1) “Someone is coming to try to sell us something”; or 2) “We have this issue we are facing, and we have asked this person to meet with us to see if he can help.” Our preferred answer, of course, is the latter. But even if the prospect sees you more as a seller than as a solver, you have the ability to pull the situation out of the adversarial trap within the first three minutes of your meeting and set a completely different tone for the conversation.
To get (or stay) on the same side, we will build on the understanding that you are not the best fit for every potential client (nor is every prospect a good fit for you). It will help us to be more specific on the second point, so let’s ask a specific question: Of all the people you meet, what percentage of them are likely to become paying customers in the short term?
Either write down the number or just think of it. In Ian’s experience, having posed this question to over a thousand executives, sellers universally recognize that they are likely to do business with less than half of the people they encounter. Most sellers, in fact, say the number is less than 5 percent, but nearly everyone (maybe you, too) agrees that the number is less than 50 percent.
Entice, Disarm, Discover
Whatever your number is, it shouldn’t depress you. In fact, we are going to use it as part of a highly effective tactic to quickly qualify a prospect. The formula is:
Entice Entice the customer by identifying something you have that might be of interest.
Disarm Make it clear that you are not there to sell, but want merely to see if there is a fit.
Discover Trigger a discovery phase in which you learn about them (instead of spending a meeting talking about your stuff).
Any three-step formula might sound overly simplistic, so it’s OK if you have an instinctive resistance to Entice, Disarm, Discover. But this approach is worth pursuing because it will almost certainly accelerate your efforts in Finding Impact Together. We’ll illustrate with one of Ian’s clients, a benefits insurance broker called Potomac Companies, Inc.
The Same Side pitch for Potomac Companies starts with their typical client’s elevator rant (we covered elevator rants in Chapter 2): “We hate the trend of our healthcare costs’ growing from $1 million to $2 million over the next seven years. We’d rather have that money for other things.” Potomac Companies’ formula to Entice, Disarm, and Discover sounds like this:
[Entice] We work with clients who are currently spending $1 million on insurance benefits and who realize that if costs are left unchecked, that number will grow to $2 million over the next seven years. At that point, clients will have spent an additional $3.5 million. They tell us they have other things they’d rather do with that money. For the right clients, we can help them reduce their future healthcare costs.
[Disarm] We find that we can have a dramatic impact on less than half of the organizations we meet with about this issue. But if addressing those cost increases is important to you,
[Discover] we’d be happy to speak with you to learn more about your situation to see if we can help.
Potomac Companies found that using this formula early in a sales meeting had a palpable impact on the conversation. The difference-maker was the Disarm step: it seemed that as soon as the Potomac reps mentioned that they could help only half of the companies they met with, the prospect appeared eager to be among that fortunate group. In some cases, the prospects began to convince the seller, presenting a passionate case for why they were positioned to benefit from Potomac’s solutions.
This situation seems like a flip of the usual selling dynamic, and it is. But Entice, Disarm, Discover is not a manipulative Jedi mind trick. It is based entirely on integrity and reality. Potomac Companies tracks the progress of each client and finds they can actually have a dramatic impact for about half of the companies with whom they meet. They even provide a scorecard that illustrates where they believe they could have the greatest impact. This combination of awareness and openness demonstrates to the client that Potomac is focused on solving the client’s issues and delivering results. Acknowledging that they might not be able to help the prospect takes Potomac Companies out of the category of “someone trying to sell something” and puts them on the same side as the buyer.
Let Buyers Qualify Themselves
Perhaps the quickest path to the adversarial trap is presumption: the belief that the seller knows the buyer’s situation and the right solution. When sellers focus only on what they are selling, this presumption might not even be perceived as a problem. When the emphasis shifts to why buyers would buy, their circumstances and rationale become more important, and the seller needs to qualify the buyer to ensure a good fit.
But the common practice of qualifying leads or prospects implies that the seller has to make the judgment of fit. In the Disarm component described above, the seller plainly states that his organization can’t help everyone, and implies that they might well not be able to help the prospect. While that candor builds trust, it also does something more important: it shifts the burden of qualifying to the buyer.
In fact, the easiest way to qualify customers is to let them do it for you. That’s right: let the buyers qualify themselves. We will share two approaches. One allows potential clients to evaluate their situation. The other falls into a category called assignment selling.
Self-Evaluation
One of Ian’s clients was being inundated with demonstration requests from potential customers. Ian’s client was expending considerable resources preparing demos for people who had no justifiable reason to make a purchase, but were mostly curious to see the client’s advanced technology. Working with Ian, the client developed a list of conditions that would warrant an investment in what he was selling. On the website was a link that said, “See if we are a potential fit.” The resulting Web page said, “Our technology is not a fit for everyone. But if you are experiencing at least three of the following seven challenges, then we might be able to help,” and presented a list of the seven conditions.
The result might surprise you. Nearly all of the requests came from people who clearly faced two of the issues and were emphatic about convincing the seller (and themselves) that they also had a third one. The result is that Ian’s client ended up spending less time preparing demos and closed a much higher percentage of opportunities than in the past. Potential buyers would call and say, “We definitely face two of the issues, and we think that we have enough parts of other ones to count as a third one.”
Assignment Selling
Marcus Sheridan of TheSalesLion.com describes a process c
alled “assignment selling.” Marcus discovered, from his Internet traffic analysis, that if a prospect read thirty articles on his company’s website, that prospect was extremely likely to become a customer. There seemed to be a clear path to more efficient selling: getting all prospects to read thirty articles. But how could Marcus get his prospects to read that much? The answer was simple: he gave them homework.
Marcus created an ebook that consisted of thirty articles. He made a practice of informing every potential customer, “I want to ensure that you are well informed in making this decision, so I am sending you this ebook to read prior to our meeting on Friday. I’ll call you first thing Friday morning to check that you have had time to read it. If you haven’t, we can reschedule.”
If the customer had not read the ebook, then Marcus, true to his word, would reschedule. In his industry, the success rate for in-home meetings is about 15 percent. Marcus’s company enjoys a success rate of over 80 percent.
Assignment selling can take many forms, in addition to required reading. The assignment can be to complete a self-assessment form or simply to list the most important buying criteria.
Put Same Side Selling to Work
Chasing too many prospects is exhausting and costly. One of the most important conditions for growth is to prune the wrong investments and focus on the opportunities where you are positioned to win and to deliver impact. To qualify those prospects, you must subordinate what you are selling and bring the prospects’ reasons for buying—the why—to the forefront. As the seller, you cannot presume to be the expert on why buyers buy. The buyers themselves are better suited to qualify themselves. As you shift the burden of qualification to the buyers through self-evaluation or assignment-based selling, your work as the seller decreases. At the same time, you solidify your position as someone who is there to solve a problem (and not just sell something).
Ensure that every discussion helps the client organization discover a) the problem you solve that makes them need what you offer; b) the likely outcome of your solution with respect to that problem; and c) why you are the best option for their current situation.