Utilize Broadening ‘Agents’

In the process of developing Question Based Selling, I have invested significant time and effort studying Conversational Dynamics, which refers to the science not just of ‘what’ you might choose to say, but also ‘how’ you choose to say it.

Once you have successfully piqued the customer’s interest and established your own credibility, using Diagnostic Questions, there are certain conversational devices we call broadening agents that will expand the scope of the dialogue. These include:

Q:  “How familiar are you with _____________?”

Q:  “To what extent is ____________ important to your project?” 

Q:  “What types of __________ are you focusing on the most?”

Essentially, the deliverer of the question is asking the other person to quantify, describe, or characterize their thoughts regarding a given issue or topic.

Key Point: Since you, as the salesperson, are ultimately in control of the questions you ask, how you formulate and deliver the question will likely how productively prospects and customers will choose to respond.

Work Backwards to Move Your Sales Forward

Whether it’s fair or not, salespeople are often presumed to be self-serving. Some of that reputation has been earned by the way some sellers have behaved. That said, it’s totally acceptable that a salesperson receives a bonus or commission for their efforts. Your incentive just can’t be the primary impetus that’s driving the purchase of your product or service.

Too often, sellers chase deals by focusing on the transaction. “When can we get a PO?” Or they ask, “Do you have all the approvals?” Sometimes, sellers just ask, “Mr. Customer, can we wrap this deal up by the end of the week?”

For those items where the value doesn’t get realized at the point of transaction, like in technology purchases, certain healthcare devices, or when implementing new financial programs, the actual value to the customer may not come until long after the purchase.

In those cases, the question that will ultimately determine the timing of your deal is:

Salesperson: “Ms. Customer, if we look past the purchase decision and transaction for a moment, if you do choose to move forward with this proposal, when would you like to start realizing the benefits we’ve discussed?”

The Last Mile: Sales Effectiveness

Salespeople and sales teams have been inundated with strategies, process, and automated tools, particularly within the last year since the economy turned. But, if you stop and think about it, most salespeople don’t need more selling philosophy or management tools. What they need is something that will increase their value in the eyes of potential customers in order to increase their success rate.

Our focus has always been on bringing sales philosophy to the customer conversation level. The value your company offers is really a function of customer perception. I’m not suggesting that your company and products aren’t valuable! Just the opposite. Your solutions are valuable, but only to the degree that customers recognize their needs and trust your ability to provide the best solution.

If you look around your sales organization, you will notice that some salespeople are more effective than others when it comes to helping customers to identify needs, and positioning the value of your products and services. Why is that?

One could attribute this difference in capability to personality, charisma, or the salesperson’s DNA. While I agree that people sometimes have certain gifts, I disagree with the adage that you are either born a salesperson or you aren’t. I wasn’t a born salesperson, and I have transformed enough people over the years into top performers to know that I can assure you it’s not about personality, style, or charisma. This is good news, because there not much that can be done to adjust someone’s DNA to increase their performance.

Today, the difference makers in a competitive selling environment are the intangibles that get communicated over the course of the sales process. In 100% of your interactions, customers are forming impressions about the salesperson, in terms of their competence, credibility, confidence, knowledge, thought leadership, integrity, work ethic, passion, experience, and preparedness, not to mention whether or not you seem customer-focused or self-serving. These are not just training buzzwords, rather these are the girders that ultimately foundation the customer’s perception of your value.

Note that intangibles like credibility or experience are not something you can just pull out of a briefcase and hand to a potential customer. The problem is, a salesperson can’t really claim these intangibles verbally. Humility, for example, is a very attractive human quality, but imagine declaring to a customer, “I am the most humble person in the world!”

Intangibles like competence, credibility, experience, confidence, knowledge, thought leadership, integrity, work ethic, passion, preparedness, and being customer-focused must, in fact, be demonstrated as opposed to being claimed. How exactly can a salesperson demonstrate their credibility, competence, or experience in a particular industry? That’s where sales philosophy and process must be distilled down into something that can actually be applied to the customer conversation.

Last week, a colleague and fellow trainer, Steve Thompson, likened this to a similar challenge facing the telecom industry. Large telco companies have been building their bandwidth capabilities and infrastructure for decades. But, the ‘holy grail’ for these companies has always been what they call The Last Mile–connecting the capabilities of a large telecom backbone to the end user’s computer or television set.

Many sales organizations now face a similar challenge. Do you have an internal sales process? If so, I assure you that your competition does as well, and I bet their sales process looks very similar to yours. Do you have talented and experienced salespeople? So do your competitors. Has your marketing team been hard at work trying to craft a new message to give the sales team? Guess what, your competition has a marketing department, too.

The decision to buy (or not) in your next prospect account will likely to have more to do with the customer’s perception of the person representing the product or company, than the actual product itself. Even so, companies have spent the bulk of their resources and productivity efforts developing strategy, process, and tools, when your sales effectiveness, including whether you win or lose will more likely be determined by “how” those tools are implemented.

As my wife (Laura) has been telling me for years, it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it. She’s right! We live and compete in a rock, paper, scissors world, and “technique” wins over “process” every time.

–Thomas A. Freese
President/Author, QBS Research, Inc.

Ask for Feedback and Ye’ Shall Receive

Constructive feedback can be invaluable. How else can you assess how you are progressing in the eyes of your customers, partners, colleagues, employees, or other constituents like family and friends. Asking for feedback is the hard part. Getting an accurate perspective is difficult because people don’t want to hurt your feelings.

The following three questions are guaranteed to generate valuable insight and feedback.

Q:  “If you were me, would you be doing anything differently?”

Q:  “Do you see a better way to handle this?”

Q:  “If you were in my shoes, what approach would you take?”

Humbling oneself to the point where you are able to outwardly admit that you don’t have all the answers is the quickest way to cause other people to open up and share their perspective.

Kicking-off Interactive Sales Presentations

Let me guess…your best sales presentations are the ones that end up being bi-directional, back-and-forth conversations between the salesperson and customer about how your product or service adds value…as opposed to a monologue pitch of features and benefits.

Some customers will jump into the conversation and actively participate. Too often, however, skeptical customers will sit back with their arms folded, essentially causing the presentation to fall flat.

A proactive salesperson can easily prevent this by using a question-based approach that brings customers into the discussion from the onset.

Salesperson: “Thanks everyone for taking time out of your busy schedules. In preparation for today’s meeting, I’ve had several conversations with Robert from Accounting and Lisa in Purchasing in an effort to understand your needs. Although I don’t yet know everything about your business, I have put together some ideas that I think will help.

Frankly, there are a couple of ways we can do this. One options is for me to simply deliver a generic sales presentation. We have lots of PowerPoint slides and I can talk for a long time. Or, we could put aside the standard ‘pitch,’ roll up our sleeves, and have a more specific conversation about how our solutions would impact your business.

Let me throw it out to the group…which would you rather do?”

If you can pause long enough to get an answer, in addition to choosing the more specific second option, they will also breathe a sigh of relief that they don’t have to sit through a standard sales presentation.

‘Coaching Up’ the Softer Skills

Tracking deals on the forecast is important part of any sales role. But, so is managing your sales effectiveness. Managing your selling effectiveness presents some challenges, because it tests your understanding of the softer skills and your ability to adjust to different selling scenarios. The payoff potential is huge!

Sample QBS Coaching Questions:

Q: What are you doing to leverage curiosity throughout the sales process?

Q: What’s your strategy for causing prospects to “want to” share information with someone they don’t yet know or trust?

Q: If the decision comes down to a virtual tie, what makes you different than your competition?

Q: How have you adjusted your sales approach given that prospects and customers are increasingly more standoffishness toward vendors?

Q: What are you doing to increase the prospect’s sense of urgency for moving forward?

For many years, our sales culture has put way too much emphasis on asking lots of questions, as opposed to giving salespeople a clear strategy for what causes prospective customers to “want to” share with someone they don’t yet know or trust.

It’s simple, really. If someone doesn’t want to share with you, it doesn’t matter what questions you ask. On the other hand, as they become more curious and begin to pereive greater value, facilitating productive conversation with potential customers is not difficult at all.

Clarify Vague-O-Nyms

Do you remember synonyms from high school English class? Synonyms are words that have similar meanings, like big and large. Homonyms are words that sound the same, like sense and cents. Antonyms are opposites. So what’s a Vague-O-Nym?

The English language is highly interpretable, as are most types of communication. A vague-o-nym, therefore, is a word or phrase that without additional information or context, doesn’t mean much because it could mean different things.

Suppose for example, a salesperson says to the boss, “We’re gong to get the PO soon.” The sales manager replies, “What do you mean by soon?” A little defensive, the salesperson says, “Hey, I’m just telling you what the customer told me.”

When a customer says, “We plan to make a decision soon.” Are they saying it will take a few days or several weeks? When they say “we,” to whom are they referring? When they say “decision,” are they talking about a technical recommendation or a purchase? Does “plan” refer to a high level strategic plan or an action item for moving forward?

I’m not suggesting that you should dissect everything that’s being said. But, the next time a customer says “quality” or “cost” is very important to them, a good salesperson will realize that without clarifying specific vague-o-nyms, the customer could be referring to any number of different things.

2010 QBS Methodology Winter Summit: Jan 7-8

“Given the extraordinary shifts in the overall business marketplace, sellers must do everything possible to make themselves invaluable to their customers, colleagues, and company.”         -T. Freese

If you would like to kick the NEW year off with a renewed focus on increasing sales effectiveness and giving yourself an unfair advantage over the competition, join us for the first ever Winter QBS Methodology Summit, to be held in dual locations on January 7 – 8, 2010.

Simultaneous events, featuring Alan Rohrer (QBS Certified Trainer) in Phoenix and Tom Freese in Atlanta, will be held on the first Thurs-Friday after the holiday break.

The feedback from previous QBS Summit events have been “off the charts” positive. The learning environment will be energetic and highly interactive, with participants from a variety of industries including technology, financial services, healthcare, consulting, insurance, real estate, manufacturing, advertising, hospitality, and retail.

With limited seating, reserve your seats early since we are expecting a full house. You might also want to bring extra pencils and a stack of writing pads with you.

“Tom! I wanted to thank you for an amazing training two weeks ago-my head is still spinning from all of the great info. I met with our Regional Manager yesterday and he wants you to train the rest of our team. You will be hearing from us very soon…”    -Liz B., Michigan…your newest QBS groupie!

Click for REGISTRATION AND SUMMIT DETAILS.

“How do you mean?” vs. “What do you mean?”

Can changing one word in your question really make a difference?

When people share information, they tend to share fractionally. As a result, there are many opportunities in your everyday conversations to say, “Tell me more.” When interacting with best friends, saying, “Tell me more,” will generally cause people to expound on whatever the topic is that’s being discussed.

For salespeople who are forging new relationships, however, it’s a little different. Notice that the phrase, “Tell me more…” is actually a command. But, if you don’t yet have an in-depth relationship, commanding a prospective customer to “tell you more” can sound a bit presumptuous.

Instead, ask, “How do you mean?”

Try this experiment. Next time someone says or asks you something, simply respond by saying, “How do you mean?” If you button up, they will share two, three, four, or five paragraphs of additional information. That’s a pretty good return on investment in response to four words, don’t you think?

Of course, a grammarian who sits through our training will often point out that “What do you mean?” is more grammatically correct. That’s true! I’m just more focused on increasing the productivity of my conversations than conforming to grammar rules.

Here’s the difference. Asking, “What do you mean?”, generally causes people to go backwards in the conversation, by revisiting or justifying what they just said. But in sales, we’re not wanting to go backward. Rather, we want the other person to share more detail.

By asking, “How do you mean?”, you won’t have to worry about grammar. Whenever you deliver these four words, what people really hear is: “I am very interested in what you just said, can you please tell me more?”

Do people like it when you’re interested in what they have to say? Yes, absolutely!

QBS Live Mondays: Selling Intangibles

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