The fundamental challenge for most salespeople – the thing keeping them for achieving maximum results – is that they don’t know what would compel their buyers to move from no to yes. If they ever find out what would compel someone to buy from them, it’s often after the decision is made, and there’s nothing they can do about it. And this isn’t unique to deals they lose. They generally don’t know this information when they win either, but when they win nobody cares.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one. A salesperson walks into a buyer’s office…
If a salesperson walked into a buyer’s office and simply asked, “Would you like to buy from me today?”, there would only be three possible answers. Yes, no, and maybe. Here is an absolute, fundamental truth, there is always something, some set of characteristics or series of events that would compel the buyer to move from no to yes. There is always something! Unfortunately, VERY FEW salespeople have the knowledge, skill, and discipline to figure out what that is. Instead, they “pitch their wares” and hope what they pitch aligns with what the contact will buy. When it is, the salesperson attributes the outcome to their selling skill. And when it isn’t – well, not the salesperson’s fault, the solution wasn’t aligned with that their contact wanted to buy. It was too expensive, lacked critical features, didn’t solve the problem. Whatever, but it wasn’t the salesperson’s fault.
Marketing often tries to address this by helping the salespeople get better at pitching the solution in a more compelling way. (Which, by the way, means the way marketing wants it pitched.) WRONG! While this broad approach is good marketing in that we are focusing on a message that resonates with a broader audience, it is terrible selling. In selling our people are working with an audience of one. Even when multiple people are involved in an evaluation, they aren’t working with a broad homogenous audience, they are working with more individuals, each with their own issues and criteria.
If we are going to get results that are above average, let alone great, we must reframe the job of the salesperson. Job #1 is to understand exactly what will compel the buyer to move from no to yes. That’s even more important than winning because winning without understanding isn’t repeatable and scalable. In fact, you might even say, winning without understanding is just good fortune, not good selling. However, losing with understanding is fixable.
When people know what will compel their contacts to choose one option over another, they:
- Waste less time on business they cannot win
- Win at a significantly higher rate
- Have more satisfied customers
- Are able to provide product marketing with meaningful information that can be used to deliver a more compelling solution
Now this might be easy if every contact could tell every seller exactly what they’d need to see to be convinced to buy their solution now. But buyers simply cannot do this consistently, and when they can they rarely talk with salespeople at all – they simply buy what they want. Fortunately, the inability of buyers to do this creates an enormous opportunity for salespeople who have the skill, knowledge, and discipline to help them figure it out. We know this to be an undeniable truth and if you’ve ever seen it in practice, you know it too.
The future of selling belongs to the people who do this best. At Axiom, we’ve helped develop some of the most effective sales teams in the country by equipping them to do this better than their competition. Want to learn more, connect with us here and let’s determine if and how we can help your team achieve exceptional results.