Same Side Selling

by Ian Altman

  Why We Don’t Always Educate and Why We Must

  A Same Side pitch that connects the target customer’s problem to your solution is a great way to start the conversation. In most cases, however, buyers will not reach for a credit card without learning more—nor should they. At that point, your most important function is to educate.

  All successful educators must be confident in the subjects they teach. How you approach your role as an educator will reveal the answers to three critical questions:

  • Is your value proposition compelling enough?

  • Are you committed to educating your customers?

  • Can you convey your message effectively?

  These questions are interdependent. If you don’t have confidence in your value proposition—if you’re not certain that there are puzzle-builders out there who desperately need your pieces to make their pictures look right—then you will feel less committed to the idea of sharing it. So before you try to educate prospects about something you feel mediocre about, revisit your value proposition. If you are not highly enthusiastic about how you have defined your role in the marketplace, then you might want to reread Chapter 2, Be Unique.

  When you can define your role clearly, share dramatic success stories, and differentiate yourself from others, teaching will be far easier. Even so, you might still be unclear about how much to share. That is natural, especially given the legacy of the game mentality in selling.

  If you have doubts about whether (or how much) you should educate your prospects, that uncertainty will be conveyed and the prospect will be confused or unimpressed. So let’s address the reasons you might resist the role of an educator.

  The Fear of Sharing Too Much

  Withholding information is standard when you are playing games. The best poker players never reveal what their cards are. They hold them “close to the vest.” Sometimes, even after a hand is finished, a losing player may still keep his cards hidden so as to not reveal his strategy.

  Protective tactics like these make sense in the adversarial trap. After all, someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. Bluffing is part of the game. Has this type of thinking infected your sales team? It might sound like one of these statements:

  “Why do they need to know that now? We’ll tell them after they pay us.”

  “Let’s leave it vague, so we’ll have some options once we learn more about their situation.”

  “If we reveal our process, they might just do it themselves.”

  “If they see the full cost of implementation up front, they’ll run away.”

  These statements represent legitimate questions and concerns that may reflect getting burned in the past. Maybe a one-time prospect copied original concepts from your proposal and shared them with your competitor. Or a potential anchor client pushed hard for price concessions and then stayed with their incumbent vendor—they were simply using you to negotiate with their existing vendor. Perhaps a would-be buyer engaged you for several sessions of design that turned out to be free consulting.

  When negative experiences drive the approach to selling, the seller is often doomed to stay in the adversarial trap. Has your team made a vow of “we’ll never let that happen again” related to sharing information with a prospect? If so, you may first want to weigh whether that defensive posture has cut short other opportunities. Second, keep reading the guidelines in this chapter to see if anything we suggest is likely to lead to those negative outcomes. When done correctly, education should not open your company to being taken advantage of.

  The Reluctance to Be Pushy

  Other sellers might resist educating their prospects for an entirely different reason: because it seems like a “hard sell.” They prefer a style that is not aggressive or in any way pushy, and fear that guiding a prospect through too much information might damage the relationship.

  It is important to note here the distinction between educating and convincing. Some traditional techniques of objection handling may feel more like convincing, or like showing prospects enough data so they realize that their concerns about a purchase are wrong.

  The goal of being an educator is not to convince, but to include a prospect in your perspective or knowledge base so that you build a common, mutual understanding. If you are truly Finding Impact Together, there will be some areas where the client needs your perspective and expertise to see the impact.

  Why You Have to Be an Educator

  Being an educator will confirm the fit, increase your likelihood of sales, and set you up for greater success and impact when you do sell. If those benefits aren’t enough of an incentive, here’s one more reason to be an educator: you have to.

  Information Is Available and Expected

  A generation ago, sellers could get by and even thrive by hiding or controlling information. Today that approach will not succeed because of three emerging realities.

  REALITY 1: The age of asymmetrical information is over.

  Businesses used to depend on having access to information that others didn’t have. For example, repair technicians for home appliances once had exclusive access to parts and schematics that are now a few clicks away. Similarly, thirty years ago, auto dealers kept factory invoices for cars locked in a safe, so that not even the salespeople knew the costs basis. Now you can find retail and wholesale costs for virtually any car, and multiple dealerships, in just seconds.

  Any value proposition that depends on asymmetrical information is quickly evaporating. If one of your competitors has not yet posted a white paper that describes your company’s expertise and operations to 80 percent accuracy or better, it is probably coming soon.

  That leads us to the next reason to be an educator.

  REALITY 2: Your secrets are probably not really secrets.

  There are more than seven million patents registered in the USPTO. Many of those filers hoped to become millionaires, and a few of them did. But it is rare that ideas in themselves are extremely valuable; the lion’s share of the work and the reward come with applying those ideas.

  In your business, consider the possibility that your trade secrets and intellectual property might not be the treasure you hoped they would be. As with the fabled McDonald’s Big Mac, your special sauce might just be salad dressing.

  Buyer’s Perspective: When sellers come in and start talking about all of their proprietary knowledge and technology, I get uncomfortable. My gut tells me that most of the information is smoke and mirrors. Plus, I know that the more proprietary it is, the more expensive it will be.

  REALITY 3: Your toughest competitors are two search words away.

  The next time you have a free minute, go online and pull up your favorite search engine. Type the words “competitors to” and then the letter “a,” and watch the auto-complete window below your text input box. Do you see the names of some companies you recognize, and some you don’t? Next, change the “a” to “b,” and take another look at the auto-fill options. Interesting?

  Now instead of “a” or “b,” type “competitors to” and—are you sitting down?—your own company name (or your category, if you are a smaller business). The Internet, search engines, and easy access to competition are not likely to go away.

  Teachers Are Needed and Valued

  The ubiquity of information might suggest that the role of the educator is less important. In fact, the opposite is true: because there is so much information, there is a desperate need for teachers who can navigate the sea of data. Buyers need to find the right information in the right context.

  These new realities do not imply that you should not have any secrets, should never charge for information, and must answer every last question a prospect asks. Being an educator does not mean that you must or should offer full transparency into your practices, technology, and economics.

  The key takeaway is that getting access to competition and information is easier than ever before. Information can be found quickly and alternate vendors can be readily id
entified, making it even more important to get on the same side as the buyer, and stay there. You can do that by being an effective educator who teaches buyers what they need to know.

  Education That Is Buyer-Focused, Not Product-Focused

  For many people, education in the sales process means product education. The traditional thinking is that prospects need to know all about the product or service—what features it has, how it works, and how it differs from the competition’s.

  Product-driven education may not be completely wrong, but it is misleading. Educating is not about the product or even about the seller; it’s about the buyer. Education begins with the buyer and ends with the buyer. More specifically, it begins with the buyer’s challenge and ends with the buyer’s overcoming the challenge. Everything you need to teach connects to that beginning and that end.

  Throughout the process, keep thinking FIT: the buyer and seller are Finding Impact Together. Education as a part of selling is not academic or theoretical. You are teaching with a goal of action. Your tactics need to reflect this goal.

  It’s worth repeating: the education you provide to your prospects should begin with their challenge and end with their overcoming that challenge—not incidentally, with your help along the way.

  Challenge … solution … success! These are the components of a great story. In fact, a great story is the best way to educate.

  Mastering the Third-Party Story

  Although brochures, white papers, and statistics can be useful tools, they are best suited to building agreement on facts. In the quest for action, the student (or buyer) needs to actively gain insights and come to realizations.

  Our favorite tactic in helping a prospect move to action is the third-party story. The third-party story shares a challenge or success to which a listener can relate. It offers an opportunity for a buyer to buy in and say, “Yes, that’s just like me!”

  Third-Party Stories Illuminate the Problem

  Here are a few examples of third-party stories used to illustrate the impact of a prospect’s challenge:

  “Some of our customers find that after the training, their team doesn’t really have the tools to follow up. How might that be a challenge for your organization?”

  “Several of my clients have excellent CFOs who keep an eye on cost, but find that from week to week they are dealing with more strategic issues, like company financing and investor relationships, so they could use some help getting their savings projects off the ground. How common is that?”

  “Some companies find that while the local print shop has good prices, they end up spending too many hours on design and communication. How do you address that?”

  “A client in your sector was talking to me recently about the challenges they face in finding qualified technical personnel. What is your secret to avoiding that challenge?”

  The components are simple: a real example with a problem that the listener might relate to, and then an invitation with an open-ended question. This approach marks an important distinction from the medical analogy: the goal is not for you to provide a definitive diagnosis, but for you and the client to reach a conclusion together. As you aim to uncover the truth efficiently, recognize that what seems critical or obvious to you might not be important to the person in front of you.

  Third-Party Stories of Success

  Using a third-party story to educate buyers about the impact of their problem will help them acknowledge and understand the costs of their current situation. It is equally important to paint a vivid “after” picture of success.

  Again, a third-party story is extremely effective and is the best way to promote your qualifications while you give the buyer a taste of the good future that awaits. Since the story is about someone else, it allows the listener to evaluate without feeling defensive. A key benefit of the third-party story is that it is not about the person in front of you at that time. Rather, it is a safe reference to someone else.

  One note here: a third-party story is often more effective without a specific name, so you can present it that way. In any case, before you do share names of companies or individuals, be sure to get approval in writing.

  When Ian speaks with companies about the Entice, Disarm, and Discover process, he could tell them that they should implement it in their business. But a third-party story is more compelling:

  One of my client organizations was calling companies for whom they knew they could have a huge impact, but their message was falling on deaf ears. They were seeing a 1 percent response rate. For every hundred calls they made, they got one meeting. Not only was it frustrating, but they also didn’t realize how much the effort was costing them.

  They went through a process to define the problems they solve, and now they call using the Entice, Disarm, Discover approach. How do you think their results have changed? They now get a 30 percent response rate. How do you think that approach might affect your type of business?

  The third-party story provides a comfortable way to let someone relate to a situation as if he is viewing it from the outside. From this position, the listener can think, “I’d like to have a story like that.”

  Educating on the Impact of Your Solution

  The third-party story above illustrates the impact that Ian’s solution had on a client. Just as the buyer is more important than the product, the impact of your solution is much more important than the solution itself. Buyers need to understand that you are uniquely qualified to solve their problem, but those qualifications usually don’t come from what you sell or how you deliver. Buyers are most interested in knowing that you understand the problem completely and that you can guide them to a resolution with results.

  We’re not saying that the product or service doesn’t matter—of course it matters. But in the conversation about impact, the particulars of your solution and experience have relevance only as they directly relate to either the buyer’s challenge or your solution to it.

  In fact, providing too much information about your qualifications and product features presents not just one but two paths to the adversarial trap. First, sellers are more likely to be concerned about disclosing too much sensitive information or to feel like they need to prove themselves. Second, buyers who are presented with too many details can feel like they’re being dazzled and sold to.

  Making the solution itself more important than the solution’s impact for the buyer caused a huge loss for a company selling to one of Jack’s clients, as described in the following story.

  Ed and George were presenting to a national non-profit about a training program that would be worth seven figures over three years. The two men had built a highly successful company with many recognizable brand names as clients, and their company had become one of two finalists vying for the job.

  They flew across the country for the meeting. Ed began with a quick thank-you and then launched into some background about the training company. Then he shared MORE background about the company. Five minutes in, the non-profit executives were exchanging glances and rolling their eyes. Ed continued. He seemed to be speaking more quickly than usual, and he detailed the high-profile clients the company had won, the projects they had taken on, and the truly impressive results that ensued.

  Finally, after twelve minutes that seemed like forty-five, Ed finished his introduction and said, “so now let’s talk about your goals.”

  Though a good conversation followed and the company was highly qualified, the executives were lost. Their comments after the meeting suggested that the long biographical preamble did more to hurt the sellers than to help them:

  “Those other companies they work with are pretty different from us.”

  “I think they’d just put us into the same category; I’m not sure they really understand our particular needs.”

  “Do you think we’d be as important as their other customers that are national names?”

  Ed and George suffered from an extremely common premise in sales. They started with their
qualifications, instead of with the buyer’s problem.

  In the context of our puzzle metaphor, this is like finding someone who says he wants to work on a puzzle, and then telling him all about your pieces in great depth before you realize that he’s working on a crossword puzzle and you have a cardboard jigsaw puzzle.

  Educating Is Another Round of Qualifying

  Buyers will sometimes drill down on specific parts of the solution that the sellers are excited to talk about. So you may be asking yourself: are Ian and Jack suggesting that educating buyers about your outstanding qualifications or industry-leading technology in response to their questions is a bad thing?

  The central concept is that any diversion from the buyer’s challenge decreases your chances of having an impact. This is true even when the buyer leads the diversion. (We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 6, Focus on the Fit.)

  Educating the prospect is another step in qualifying the opportunity, for both the buyer and the seller. To confirm that your puzzle pieces fit together in a way that can deliver high impact, the buyer’s organization needs to:

  1. Have the problem or challenge that you can help them address

  2. Be in the right demographic categories

  3. Be willing to spend money to solve the problem

  4. Believe that YOU can help them

  As you read the last item, we want to note that at this point in the sales cycle, it may seem that the prospect is qualifying you as the seller. But there are only faint lines between being qualified, being evaluated, being judged, and being rejected. When those lines blur, there is a high danger of winding up in the adversarial trap, ending the cooperative, Same Side spirit you worked so hard to build.

  Our assertion is that as you continue Finding Impact Together, it is better to see even the education process as another layer of qualifying the opportunity. Part of the buyer’s qualification is his belief that you can help his organization. But we’ll say it again: that belief will be based on your understanding of the buyer’s situation, much more than on your experience, product, and features.