by Ian Altman
When the Importance Just Spills Out
In fact, after a good discussion of impact, you might not even need to ask how important a problem is. It might simply spill out: “I can’t tolerate this problem anymore—who can help me solve it? If anyone has a solution, please share it with me because I need this thing FIXED!”
Does that sound like an 8, a 9, or a 10?
When a prospect clearly identifies an issue, understands the full impact, and then rates the importance high, selling becomes easy. In fact, it’s not really selling; it is solving.
The buyer’s urgency is an essential qualifier, and assessing it should be part of any formal sales process. Many sales organizations monitor every potential opportunity in their “pipelines” or “funnels.” As you look at your open leads, consider recognizing only those opportunities where you can define the prospect’s issue, impact, and importance. Would the urgency justify the change or investment? If not, does this opportunity really belong in your pipeline?
Have the Right Conversation
We have presented the issue/impact/importance (I-3) model as a way to guide your conversation with a prospect. The framework is immensely helpful, but it does not work well as a checklist or worksheet that you hand to a prospect. Finding impact happens in the context of a relationship. Questions and discussions are your best tools to get to the truth.
Just as in a conversation with a friend, each question needs to relate to the prior answer. If you simply jump from question to question without acknowledging the other person’s responses, then you’ll sound like you are pursuing your own agenda (and get perilously close to the adversarial trap!). The answers about the issue, its impact, and its importance might emerge in a different order or be intertwined.
Remember, your goal is simply to Find Impact Together (FIT). You don’t need to convince anyone, promote yourself, or defend your solution. It’s not about your solution; it’s about the client’s problem. This posture allows the seller to stop thinking about selling and simply listen and learn.
Same Side Questions and Answers
The goal of every conversation is the chapter title: get to the truth. While we will refer to our overall mantra of Finding Impact Together, it’s possible that you may conclude that the prospect’s issue is not significant enough to solve at this time. Consider these questions and possible responses:
• “I want to be sure that we don’t miss anything important. Can you please share what sparked you to pursue this project?”
* Weak answer: “We’re just trying to do some research on our options for the future.” (The prospect lacks urgency.)
* Strong answer: “We all of a sudden realized that this issue is costing us $X per quarter. If we don’t find a solution quickly, I’m going to be looking for a new job.” (Here we have a clearly defined I-3.)
* Adversarial alert: “Why do you need to know that? Can’t you just give us the price?” (Behold the adversarial trap in full regalia.)
• “Let’s say you don’t solve the issue; is it just a nuisance? How is the organization affected by it?”
* Weak answer: “I don’t know that there is any real impact. But we’d like to find a solution.” (Demonstrating a lack of clarity, the client assumes that he’ll get approval because he wants it.)
* Strong answer: “Nuisance? Only if $2 million of loss is a nuisance. This is our top priority.” (Here’s another clearly defined I-3.)
* Adversarial alert: “The impact has a direct connection to your price. At this point, you guys need to sharpen your pencils or we are going to have to go with another vendor.” (Prepare for the adversarial trap onslaught—this prospect has already focused on price over value.)
• “How will we be able to measure success? If we can’t do it, we want to get out of your way.”
* Weak answer: “Everyone is on board with this. We don’t need to worry about metrics. Just get it done.” (A vague impact statement often leads to long delays or to decisions that favor the status quo.)
* Strong answer: “We should be able to see an improvement of x percent within six months. Is that reasonable?” (They know exactly how to measure success, and they are circling back with you to make sure you can deliver.)
* Adversarial alert: “We’ll worry about that. Just get us the proposal.” (They don’t see you as being on the same side of the table with them.)
These questions all center on the buyer’s perspective, not the seller’s. Do not try to persuade your client to give a specific answer. Rather, uncover the truth. Take a look at these examples and develop your own questions. Then consider what would constitute strong, weak, and adversarial responses to your questions. This way, when you ask the questions and get responses, you’ll be prepared to interpret them.
What If They Just Don’t Know the Impact?
There are times when clients know they want to fix something, but don’t recognize the impact that “something” is having on their business. One of the best ways to help them discover the impact is through third-party stories (which we will explain further in Chapter 5, Be an Educator). Those brief stories might sound like this:
“Our other clients in your field tell us that XYZ is a big issue because it affects their compliance fines. How common is that?”
“We were speaking with another client who shared that the XYZ issue cuts their production by more than 20 percent. How do you address that?”
“Another organization like yours said that by fixing XYZ, they could drive another 15 percent to their bottom line. How realistic is that?”
In each case, notice that you are not asking yes/no questions. Rather, you ask open-ended questions to invite thoughtful responses.
Common Questions to Avoid
Do you use the following questions in your sales qualification process? We call attention to these questions because they often lead directly to the adversarial trap.
“Who is the decision maker?”
This question will almost always produce the same answer regardless of the facts: “I am.” The question can make the other party feel uncomfortable. Are you asking to cut this person out of the process and get to the “decision maker”?
Instead, consider asking, “When you made decisions like this in the past, who else got involved?” This question taps into the person’s experience. You can even follow up with “How do you envision this process differing from the last time?”
“What is your budget?”
When you ask this question, what are you hoping to learn?
Buyer’s Perspective: When you ask “What’s your budget,” I’m thinking “Whatever I tell them, they are going to give me a price that is 99.8% of that number.”
The moment you ask the budget question, the buyer starts guarding his wallet. At that moment, you are focused on how much money the prospect has to buy your product or service, not on the issue, impact, and importance. This approach triggers an adversarial trap in which you are focused on the sale, not the result. Instead of asking about budget, remember to focus on FIT—Finding Impact Together. Once you and the client realize the impact of the issue, you’ll be able to determine the value of the solution.
The Budget Trap
Asking about the budget may seem like a good idea, but what if the prospect’s number is too low? What if the budget is double what your solution might cost? Have you ever won a deal that never happened because the client’s budget went away? Have you ever landed an account when the company did not have a budget, but found the money because the issue was important enough? Instead of asking about budget, keep Finding Impact Together.
Their Readiness Is Your Concern
When your prospects lack urgency, you may be in for a long wait before they sign the contract. But even when clients are eager to sign your contract, it is still critical to get to the truth about their readiness to adopt your solution.
Again we point to the contrast between the Always Be Closing mentality and Finding Impact Together. If yo
ur ultimate goal is to sell, then the buyer’s ability to benefit from your sale is simply his responsibility. But if you are solving, not selling, then the client’s readiness is very much in your interest. And you should not move forward until you know that the client can implement your offering to achieve the desired results.
Your interest in how the client company is positioned to use what you sell them is not purely selfless. Implementation problems can cause other, long-term problems, especially when you’re delivering services. Perhaps you’ve learned that lesson the hard way, as Jack did years ago:
Our invoice processing firm brought in a national software company on a large contract, and we were all excited to get started. The implementation was bumpy from the beginning, because the client did not have the centralized operations that we expected and relied on. We ended up helping the client make the needed changes, but that was really outside of our expertise. After months of delay, the client was extremely disappointed that the savings we targeted were not materializing. It truly was not our fault—we just couldn’t get our solution in place because the client was not ready.
Part of the truth you must uncover while qualifying your prospects is about whether they can take advantage of your solution. When this readiness depends on specific factors, they must be identified. When buyers fail to get results, they will often feel that the seller let them down—even if the failure is the buyer’s fault.
Stakeholders and Structure
The sale itself is not the finish line. (We will expand on this in Chapter 9, Deliver Impact.) To ensure that your prospect’s organization can enjoy the impact from your solution, what tools or processes must they have in place? When you think back on some of your spectacular client success stories, you can probably identify factors that expedited success. With the failures, those key factors may have been missing.
Depending on what you sell, the cause of a failure may be technical, organizational, or political. It is important to note that your main contact during the sales process might not be the person directly affected by the solution. He might not have the answers you seek. In that case, you need to ensure clear communication with the stakeholders. Failure to do so is analogous to playing a game of telephone. The lead buyer communicates his needs to someone on his team, who passes it along to someone else. Eventually an answer gets back to you, but it might lack the definitive clarity you need. This situation is a recipe for failure.
To engage others in the process, try asking questions like:
“In our experience, if we don’t get stakeholders involved to explain the underlying issues up front, we run the risk of delivering the wrong solution, which makes us all look bad. I‘d hate to put either of us in that situation. What’s the best way for us to include them in a way that’s comfortable for you?”
Notice that in this example, we illustrate how perilous it is for both buyer and seller if the right people are not included. Note also that we avoid asking for the “decision maker,” but still reach for the people with authority.
“Who else is affected by this project? How can we engage them in a way that works for you?”
In this example, we ask who else is affected, and then—to signal our intent to work together—ask how “we can engage them in a way that works for you.” With this approach, you respect the position of your direct contact and indicate that together you’ll include others.
Bringing additional people into the effort of getting to the truth is likely to slow down the sales process in the short run, but this step is an investment that will save you time and pain later. A little extra work and care up front will put you and the customer on the same side of the table so you can solve the customer’s problem.
Clarity on the Shape of the Solution
We want to address a specific area where failure to get to the truth can cause great pain for service providers: outsourcing. In recent years, companies have turned to the marketplace to provide functionality that was traditionally handled in-house. This change provides more opportunities for sellers to serve, but also more potential for overlaps or conflicts with the internal capability of their customers.
It is critical that the client understands where the offered solution starts and stops before the sale is made. Consider what happens if a solution purchase is made when the buyer’s organization doesn’t really know the size and shape of their puzzle pieces—that is, they don’t know their own capabilities well enough to understand how the seller’s solution will fit in. How will that situation play out? In one of three ways:
• The gap: The buyer overestimates his organization’s capability and coverage, so the solution bought doesn’t meet the needs that the buyer expects and leaves part of the problem unsolved.
• The overlap: The buyer underestimates his organization’s capability, so pieces overlap and the seller ends up fighting to implement parts of a solution that the buyer doesn’t really need.
• The miracle: You get really, really lucky and things just happen to fit.
If you’re selling a simple solution (maybe a twenty-piece puzzle?), you have greater odds of catching the miracle. But even then, it’s better not to leave it to chance. How will the buyer react if you slow down the sale and persuade him to take a closer look at his company’s needs?
When They Won’t Answer Your Questions
As noted previously, having open conversations begins with the tone of your first interaction. If your contact is holding back, you may have sounded like someone trying to sell something instead of like someone solving a problem.
It’s also possible that you presented everything in the best way, and the prospect is still reluctant to share. As context, remember that many buyers have been conditioned to expect the adversarial trap, and they may fear being burned in some way because of prior experiences. Or there may be political reasons that someone on the buying team is uncooperative. Then again, you may have just come across a less-than-pleasant personality.
No matter the reason, the inability to adequately assess urgency or readiness should be a warning sign. If the Same Side approach and the tactics presented in this chapter don’t help you get to the truth, you might need to reconsider the opportunity. For most of us, poor communication will limit our impact and is one reason that pieces don’t fit together.
You need to get to the truth.
Put Same Side Selling to Work
After understanding why a buyer would buy, the seller needs to assess the buyer’s urgency and readiness. These two factors determine when prospects will become paying customers and whether they are able to truly adopt and benefit from the seller’s solution. The medical diagnosis model is a great tool for getting to the truth with a buyer, and using the issue/impact/importance framework will reveal the buyer’s urgency.
Does your standard sales process include a diagnostic step? If not, do you think you should add one? If so, how well do you perform the diagnosis?
Think of a specific selling situation in which your urgency as the seller outweighed the buyer’s urgency. Talk to someone on your team about the situation, describing the context and how it felt.
Identify three of your most promising sales opportunities. For each one, write out the issue, impact, and importance as you understand them. How confident are you in your assessment for each of the three components? What conversations do you need to have with each prospect?
Define the most insightful questions for your buyers, and define what makes strong, weak, and adversarial responses so you are prepared for the answers you might get.
What are the key factors you need to know to determine if a prospect is ready to fully benefit from the solution you offer?
CHAPTER 5
Be An Educator
So far we have laid out the idea that it’s better to solve puzzles than to play games, explored the importance of knowing which pieces you carry around, and explained how to find and understand prospects who want to solve puzzles. Now we’re ready to sit down on
the same side and start solving that puzzle.
But before you can assemble the pieces, you need to put them all on the table. In selling, this step translates to education. By educating your prospects, you help them understand that you are not only unique, but also uniquely qualified to solve the problem they face.
Effective education cannot be taken for granted; in fact, the lack of it is often a point of failure. How many times do promising sales opportunities end with a whimper and a sigh and one of these conclusions?
• “They didn’t really understand what we offered.”
• “They need us, but they don’t realize it.”
• “We’re so well qualified for this project, but that didn’t seem to get through to them.”
It’s bad enough to lose business because the buyer prefers a different solution. That hurts, but it happens. (Nobody converts every qualified prospect.)
But when prospects decline to buy because they don’t understand what you offer or how much you can help them, it’s worse than just a lost opportunity. The effort invested feels like a complete waste of time. Sadly, sellers often bring this problem on themselves by failing to educate their prospects. They resist sharing information, they focus on the wrong areas, or they share ineffectively.
The good news is that these are all fixable problems. In this chapter we explain why it is more important than ever to embrace the role of educating your prospects. We will define the areas where you must teach and where to draw boundaries on what you share. We will also discuss how to educate efficiently and effectively through the third-party story.