Same Side Selling

by Ian Altman

  Turning Questions About the Seller into Questions About Impact

  When the buyer grills you with questions, it may seem like you have to provide answers, but the best response is often another question in return. Here are a few examples of common buyer questions and ways you can artfully redirect them to a conversation about the buyer’s challenge and your solutions.

  The fact is that if you answer immediately, there is a good chance that you won’t yet have enough information to answer properly. It is in neither your interest nor the client’s to answer a question before you understand the underlying reason for it. Consider the following three examples:

  Buyer’s question: Exactly how long will it take for you to fix this problem?

  Seller’s response question: That is a common question. At this point I’m not sure if we know enough to give an accurate answer. Once we learn more about the problem, if we can fix it, we can let you know how long it would take. How long have you been dealing with this challenge?

  Buyer’s question: “Have you served other companies in our sector?”

  Seller’s response question: “Even though we have served others in your sector, those examples may or may not be relevant, depending on your situation. We may have clients in other sectors where the situation is an exact match with your situation. I don’t yet know enough about your situation to know which example is most appropriate to share. Can you tell me more about how this problem is affecting your company?”

  Buyer’s question: “Do you use technology X like your competitor does?”

  Seller’s response question: “Technology X is good technology. What is it about that technology that you think would be helpful to address your company’s challenge?”

  It may feel unnatural to respond to a buyer’s question with a different question instead of just answering. There’s a good chance that responding in this manner contradicts the way you have been trained and the way you have sold. Even though you know that everything needs to relate to the prospect’s challenge, it may take some practice to gracefully guide the conversation away from details and toward impact. (In his seminars, Ian includes an experiential learning exercise in which attendees pair up and ask each other questions, then practice responding to those questions with more questions instead of answers. After some awkwardness and laughter, participants learn to turn the spotlight back to the questioner.)

  It’s About You, But It’s Really Not About You

  The shift from product-based education to buyer-based education may seem subtle, but it is profound. It can change the tone of the conversation from a defensive grilling to a cooperative exploration. By definition, it changes the focus of the conversation from the buyer to the seller.

  This is not a matter of charity or humility. This shift is necessary because the path to you goes through the buyer.

  There’s an old comical line attributed to an over-talkative, self-centered person after minutes of spouting off:

  “… but enough about me. Let’s talk about you—what do you think of me?”

  The guiding principle on educating your customer is just the opposite. It’s as if you were saying:

  “Enough about you and your problem. Let’s talk about me—how might I fit in to solving your problem?”

  If you are selling, then it’s about you. When you are solving, not selling, the path back to you goes through the buyers.

  Putting Boundaries Around Education

  We have stressed the importance of connecting all customer education to the prospects’ challenges. The most important subjects in that education are the impact of the buyer’s problem and the impact of your solution. Other relevant subjects are industry trends, your product’s features, and the competitive strengths of your solution versus others.

  Of course, the buyer may ask for information that is not related to the fit. How much education is too much, and how do you respond to questions that you don’t want to answer?

  The first key to avoiding the adversarial trap is to not be offended. Remember the adage that you never know what you can get unless you ask. Many of us have been trained to expect free information, and your competitors may be training your prospects to expect the same.

  Buyer’s Perspective: Vendors sometimes seem offended when we ask a lot of questions. Our job is to learn as much as we can, as inexpensively as possible, and then make the decision that is best for our company.

  It is fully ethical to ask companies to provide information and even consulting, as long as you are up front about the context in which you ask. It is also fully acceptable for a company to say “no,” and a refusal does not necessarily end the conversation.

  Another thing to remember is that the individual asking the questions might not be the end-user of your services. This is especially true when companies use a Request for Proposal (RFP). If the guy managing a procurement seems like a jerk … well, he might be. But the company might still be filled with mostly wonderful people.

  Education vs. Free Consulting

  When we talk about the importance of education, this does not mean that we encourage you to provide free consulting. The main difference is that education informs your potential client about industry trends or similar challenges faced by other clients and the way you helped them solve those challenges. Free consulting, on the other hand, occurs when you describe the specific solution for a client. Once you set these parameters, it will be easier to determine whether you are educating or giving away free consulting.

  We recommend setting guidelines establishing what you will give away and what you will not, and holding firm to those policies. Here are two basic guidelines:

  • Give away general information.

  • Don’t give away the specific, customized application of information.

  And here are a few examples:

  A software company could share a report on best design practices, but would not draft a specific design for the prospect until the sale is made.

  An outsourcing company would share their general implementation plan, but not meet with the team and begin discussions until the buyer has committed.

  A marketing company might share a white paper on effective content marketing, but would not design a specific campaign for a prospect.

  As information is applied to the specific context of an individual company or situation, it begins to cross the line from information to consulting. Depending on your field, the expectations may vary, but it is up to you to decide how much to share. When a buyer asks for what you consider to be free consulting, you need to consider the likelihood of that buyer’s becoming a great long-term customer.

  The Right Perspective on Free Consulting

  Just because your competition is providing free consulting, that does not mean you should follow their lead. In most cases, customers respect companies that offer education but also make it clear how far they can go without a fee.

  If you were a high-end restaurant, would you be threatened by the food court vendor giving away free samples? The food court vendor might be competing with other food court stands, but none of them are truly your competitors. Educating your customers about the care you take in sourcing and preparing your products might help them appreciate your value. You could even share a story about a company that won a huge contract after entertaining customers in your restaurant.

  Which kind of customer are you seeking? There are people and companies that are constantly looking to get things for free or for the lowest price possible. If you are offering something of value, focus on those who are willing to pay for it.

  Put Same Side Selling to Work

  You can get on the Same Side by educating your prospects. Being an educator is more needed than ever, but traditional product-based training is often ineffective and sometimes distracting. Buyers and their challenges must be at the core of education. Third-party stories allow your prospects to gain their own insights and are more likely to inspire action. Set boundaries so that when prospects
ask for too much information, you can politely lead the discussion back to something productive for both of you.

  On a scale of 1–10, how confident are you in your value proposition? If you are not 100 percent confident, then you need to adjust your message.

  Have you been burned from sharing too much information in the past? What was that experience like? How would you approach that differently?

  What third-party stories will help your prospects better understand the problem that you solve? Write down two or three stories, and practice sharing them in your next sales meeting.

  What third-party stories will help your prospects better understand your solution and success? Write down at least three.

  What are the two most common qualifying questions that you face? What responses could you use for each one to qualify the impact of the prospect’s problem and your solution?

  CHAPTER 6

  Focus on the Fit

  Imagine that you are sitting at the table looking at puzzle pieces. You think you see a match. As you pick up one piece and start to position it near another that looks like a fit, your partner at the table protests:

  “Not so fast—let’s not put those pieces together quite yet. First I have a few questions: Where did you get that piece? How much did it cost? What’s it made of?”

  Can you feel your chair moving from the same side to the opposite side as the puzzle turns into a game? Perhaps you’ve had a similar feeling in the sales process, when the buyer asked a question like one of these:

  “What is the procedure you use to do that? We need to understand your methods better.”

  “Your competitor is using technology X on their back-end. Is that what you use?”

  “Do you have certification in XYZ?”

  We have proposed that the how and what in your solution are far less important than understanding the buyer’s problem and your solution to it. Yet the how and what are almost always part of the conversation. It’s natural for buyers to ask questions like the ones above, and for sellers to want to share details of their solutions.

  The problem arises when the details take center stage, and either the seller or the buyer loses sight of the overall impact. This distraction can sidetrack progress toward building value, and it can easily pull both sides into the adversarial trap.

  In this chapter we explain how to keep your sales conversation focused on results instead of resources, and how to establish clear boundaries of expertise that will serve you throughout the relationship. Keeping the focus on the fit will help you stay on the same side and deliver impact.

  Never Lose Sight of the Buyer

  It won’t surprise readers at this point that the buyer must remain at the center of the conversation. Everything should tie back to the buyer, the buyer’s problem, or the solution. Maintaining this focus requires that we revisit some widely accepted selling wisdom.

  Go Beyond Features and Benefits

  In the early days of mass advertising, marketers defined a distinction between features and benefits:

  A feature is an attribute of a product or service—some way to describe it.

  A benefit is the ultimate good that comes to the buyer.

  Features lead to benefits. The conventional wisdom is that good marketing and advertising emphasize the benefits, and that is why people buy. As a classic example, people don’t buy Volvos because they have more airbags than other cars; people buy Volvos because they are perceived as being safe.

  The advice to focus on benefits rather than features is helpful in Same Side Selling. (It’s also insufficient, as we will see in the coming paragraphs. But we’ll take one step at a time.) After all, it is the benefit that is more closely connected to solving the client’s problem. A posture of solving, not selling, naturally builds off of the benefit. When a seller-buyer conversation centers on features, it is far more likely to have a tone of selling. Sometimes a buyer drives this tone, and sometimes the seller creates it.

  The Temptation to Promote Features

  At the beginning of this chapter, we shared some common phrases that buyers use to zero in on features. But this feature-centric thinking doesn’t just come from the buyer. Many sellers draw attention to features:

  “Our system represents over six million dollars invested over three years. There’s nothing else like it in the marketplace.”

  “We have the largest database of ____ in the state.”

  “We have been in business longer than any of our competitors.”

  “Our people are all certified in XYZ.”

  We hear these types of claims on a daily basis, and it may seem important to present our qualifications when we are selling. But if the buyer perceives these statements to be boasts or exaggerations, this perception may move the buyer closer to the adversarial trap.

  More important, claims like these are rarely related to the buyer’s problem. If I am facing litigation related to a zoning matter in Florida, is it important to me that the law firm I am considering is a full-service firm with offices in twelve cities across the country? Details that are not related to the buyer are distractions.

  It can take extreme discipline for a CEO to practice self-restraint in effusing about her team’s achievements, but that enthusiasm must be contained and pointed directly at the specific problem the buyer is talking to her about. If it isn’t, it dilutes the attention of the buyer in the best case. (Think back to the “hundred pennies” analogy in Chapter 2.) The worst case is that it can send a message to the buyer that the seller is too busy congratulating himself to listen well. (This situation is illustrated in the story of Ed and George in Chapter 5.)

  When the Buyer Fixates on Features

  Sometimes the buyer can drive the emphasis on features. Perhaps buyers saw a demo they loved, they got to know a consultant they trust, or they heard from a colleague at a different company about a technology that will solve their problems.

  Buyer’s Perspective: There are times when someone in the executive team fixates on one feature or product attribute and sees it as the cure-all. I call it the “CEO crush,” and it can hurt the buying process if it’s too much of a factor. For one thing, it kills any bargaining power, but more important, it might not really be the best solution to the problem at hand.

  The “CEO crush” presents an interesting challenge for the seller. In fact, it may even look like a moral dilemma. For example, if potential buyers are so crazy about our technology that they’re eager to sign the contract right now, should we slow them down and make sure they are more focused on their problems and the results? Why not just make them happy and give them what they are enthusiastically ready to buy?

  Consider this: When potential clients come to you suggesting that they already know which of your products or features they need, which is more common: a) they end up needing exactly what they originally suggested; or b) they end up needing something that is a little different from what they originally suggested? Ian has asked this question of nearly a thousand CEOs and executives. The universal answer is that it is more common that clients end up needing something a bit different from what they thought they needed when they self-diagnosed. So, if we just reply to their requests, we might be selling them the wrong thing—even though they asked for it.

  Get Back to the Buyer’s Challenge

  Forgive the repetition, but a seller’s features are NEVER as important as the buyer’s problem. In fact, they are relevant only as they address the problem. Discussing features apart from how they directly apply to the client’s situation is a waste of energy.

  It is not about you. It is not even about your achievements or capability. It is about the client’s problem. Clients don’t want your brilliance and gadgets; they want results.

  Results Are What Really Matter

  Let’s define an important term that is more important than the feature and even surpasses the feature’s benefit: the result. The result adds purpose to the benefit. You can think of a result as the benefit specifi
c to the client. If you take the time to educate clients and get to the truth about their needs, you will know each client’s desired result.

  Imagine that you are in the business of providing recruiting services to consulting companies. You meet a prospect and identify her organization’s problem: they have not been able to hire enough qualified people to staff a large contract they recently won, which means they are losing revenue. You are able to offer them not just a general benefit of making qualified hires, but the specific result of greater revenue at their company. Will they pay for that?

  (The answer is YES!)

  The term “results” is necessary because “feature” is about the product, and “benefit” is based on the feature. Neither term originates with the buyer or her problem. That’s fine if you are just selling or playing a game of sales. To sell from the same side, though, you need to come from the buyer’s point of view. The best way to accomplish this is for you and the buyer to focus on the results.

  Sell Results Instead of Resources

  To learn more about why results surpass even the fabled benefit, let’s turn our attention to one of the most common and subtle adversarial traps: a focus on resources instead of results.

  Is the Buyer Looking for a Tool or Something More?

  A resource is essentially a tool. It is a means to an end. In people terms, adding resources means making a hire. The hire could be virtual—vendor support or extended staff on another team. When a person buys a tool, it’s up to the buyer to use it correctly and to get the right results. You wouldn’t return a hammer to a hardware store and say, “Something’s wrong with this hammer—the deck I built looks terrible!”

  In contrast, a results purchase solves a problem. Buying results is more comprehensive. It implies that the risk shifts to the seller, because the seller will manage the resources to make sure the job gets done. The buyer is paying money to remove a problem. The buyer is buying the expectation of an outcome, not the supply of a resource.