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What You Can Learn When a Prospect Pushes Back

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picture of fail early

The early days of selling a new product can rock your confidence. You may have done every single thing right to prepare: studied your product thoroughly, written your script and your best questions, studied your competition, and even practiced your pitch with colleagues. Then you start making calls. You’re so good people actually take your calls. You get through to some of the best prospects on your list, but it doesn’t go as well as you thought it might. They start poking holes in your product. They start asking questions you can’t answer right away. Their questions take all of the wind out of your sales. You want to bury your head in your pillow for the rest of the day and start over tomorrow.

That is a totally understandable reaction; you are deflated by reality hitting you in the face. What you actually do at this moment is the key that will determine your future success. Do you give up, stop making calls for the day, thinking you’ll feel better tomorrow, or do you relish the push back and learn from it?

Problem Number One: You’re Not the Subject Matter Expert Yet

If you’re in a new sales role and don’t yet have your sea legs, cut yourself some slack. Over time you will gain so much exposure to the questions you’re getting that you will have answers to most of them. However, if you’re new to the product, or, the product is new to the market, it’s ok to not know everything. It’s ok to tell your prospect that you don’t know everything, but that you can find out the answers quickly.

Instead of panicking, ask your prospect to explain their push back in explicit detail, if they will. Remember, they’re not your paid advisor, so they may feel like it is stepping over the line for you to ask them to give up too much information. Or, they may be more than willing to tell you every single thing they know about your competition and what they think is wrong with your product. This can do two things for you:

  1. Ramp up the speed of your education, allowing you to learn as fast as possible from an industry insider.
  2. Position you as the good listener you are, not the know-it-all sales person they might have expected. This interaction can build trust and empathy.

Don’t Take Their Word for It

It is great that your prospects are willing to educate you, but don’t let your education stop there. Go back and investigate the claims they made about your competition and get a deep understanding of the solutions they are currently using that they say are good enough. This continues your education about your product and business sector, but you may also find out something your prospect doesn’t know. You may find out information that you can take back to them that changes the game for both of you.

Now, the way you present this new information is critical. You don’t want to come across as if you’re enjoying a “gotcha” moment. Instead, you can choose to present it in the humblest way possible, conveying that you are hopeful that you can help your client, not simply win a deal or even a point in a discussion.

Sales Is Tough

Sales can be the most satisfying, exciting job you will find. You can be a problem solver and trusted advisor, and you can make a lot of money. But no one who does it will ever tell you it’s easy. It’s flat out tough, especially when you’re pioneering a new product or territory. The one key is to just keep going, and keep listening and learning as you go. Before you know it you will be the subject matter expert on your product and market.

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Photo credit: Embrace Your Failures via photopin (license).

 

Do You See the Walls You Build Between You and Your Customer?

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stone wall

How many walls have you built between you and your customers? Think that’s a crazy question? Then answer these questions please:

  1. Is your telephone number clearly visible on the home page of your website? Yes, the HOME PAGE, so that they don’t have to go searching for it when your prospect wants to ask a question.
  2. Is your email contact readily available on your website for customers who prefer to reach out that way?
  3. Is your cell phone number in your email signature line? Can anyone you send an email to easily call you if that’s their preferred method of communication?
  4. Is your blog filled with your own thoughts and ideas, or those of your friends and other guest bloggers? If the ideas on your blog aren’t yours, why are they there? What purpose do they serve you in building a direct relationship with your client?
  5. Does your website have a clear call to action asking your prospective client to connect with you?
  6. Is your podcast series about someone else’s ideas? Do you regularly host others so that your audience can hear about their philosophy? If the answer is yes to this, ok, I have another question. When do you showcase your own thoughts and ideas on the podcast? At the end of each episode, do you ask for a connection to the listener?
  7. Is your sales process heavy on researching leads but light on picking up the phone and calling them? Are you putting email and social media connecting in front of calling them to speak live?

Obviously, I’m asking leading questions, but for a very good reason. As someone who works with business owners and consultants, I regularly witness brilliant people putting up walls and blockades between their prospective clients and themselves. It is almost always done subconsciously, but subconscious or not, it has the same effect: it kills your sales funnel. It delays or even destroys your opportunity to turn a connection into a client.

If you’re serious about building your sales pipeline and your business, you must take down the walls between you and your prospects. Make it crystal clear that you are actively selling your services and that you want them to connect with you. Then make sure that they can clearly see exactly how to do that. Part of asking for the sale is making yourself available to the people who need your help.

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Photo credit: Rock wall- via photopin (license).

For Deeper Customer Understanding Get out of Your Element

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Pink Flower Out of its elementWhen was the last time you were in a place where you felt totally out of your element? Perhaps a place where English wasn’t the common language. Or perhaps you were the only person of your gender at a business meeting. Or someone with a very different life experience than those around you; they almost seemed to speak a different language than you.

If you get to experience being in a place like one of those, things become acutely different. Your senses are heightened. You notice more. It is likely that you are quieter. More observant. Perhaps gentler in your language, and perhaps even kinder… because you are an outsider.

Transformation From New Experiences

These experiences of being different can do something powerful for us – they can force us to rethink things we take for granted. When we don’t have the ability to easily communicate, or the understanding that most people around us think like us, we often become more thoughtful and introspective. If we are thoughtful about these situations we can translate the experience to the one our customer has when we are pushing them to think and behave differently than they ever have. Sometimes we must push our prospective clients to a place where they feel just as uncomfortable as we do when we’re outside of our element.

There are most likely risks in what we are asking our prospect to do. They may, in turn, be put in a position where they will be forcing many people in their organization to step into a place of intense discomfort if they agree to your solution. This knowledge can help you by making you more sensitive to their fears. It can help you choose your language more carefully, like you did when you were out of your element.

By pushing yourself to have experiences outside of your normal comfort zone, you can raise the level of compassion you have when pushing your prospects outside of theirs. So travel. Take risks. Go where people don’t look and think like you, and absorb the way it feels to be totally out of your element. Then hang onto that knowledge and use it to help your prospects when they need to step outside of theirs to push their organization towards a better but initially uncomfortable solution.

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Photo credit: Stand out via photopin (license).

 

What Will Stop Your Business From Succeeding

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Stop sign Have you ever watched a business with loads of potential flail around ineptly, only to slowly fade into failure?

Most of us have seen this happen because 50 percent of all businesses fail within their first five years.  After much research Gallup went so far as to define the top 10 talents an Entrepreneur needs, but the truth is actually much simpler than that.

Why Businesses Fail

Businesses fail for a very simple reason: they don’t have enough money. Money is necessary to pay bills, pay staff, and invest in marketing and other developmental needs. Without it, you are toast.

Why do businesses lack money? It is almost categorically because they do not have people who can sell. And in the beginning, it needs to be the owner. You cannot hire someone to sell something that you can’t, because if you believe in a business enough to start it, you’d better be committed to selling its offering yourself.

Why You Can’t Sell

Most businesses that don’t drive sales don’t for one reason: fear. The fear of failure and rejection can stump even the most passionate evangelist from successful selling. Without sales, there is no cash coming in, and after your seed money is spent, you die.

The only way to avoid this is to overcome your fear and go out there and fail, again and again, until you have failed enough to learn and become successful. Your customers are not going to come to you and ask to buy your product. It doesn’t matter how great your marketing is, unless you’re an e-commerce business you need to actively and personally sell yourself. It doesn’t matter how much thought leadership and dynamic writing your blog demonstrates, you need to find leads, convert them to opportunities, and close deals.

Without sales, you have no cash. Without cash, you can’t pay bills. If you don’t pay your bills, you fail. If you really believe in your idea, you need to muster up the courage to do the thing that scares you most and SELL your idea.

 

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Photo credit: Welcome to Keflavik, ghost town via photopin (license).

You Will Need to Make Your Clients Unhappy

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Picture of Unhappy and Happy ManGood salespeople understand that sometimes they have to be the bad guy. If you’re a sales professional who takes yourself, and your client’s business seriously, you must occasionally deliver bad news. News the client doesn’t want to hear. Your ability to do this is what sets you apart from your more fearful competitors. It isn’t easy or enjoyable to disappoint a prospect or client, but it is sometimes necessary. You make your job easier by understanding and preparing for the reaction your client will have.

They Do Not Want to Hear It

A client of mine delivers data to businesses, and sometimes the data tells a story their clients don’t expect or want to hear. Recently I participated in a conversation where exactly this happened. The client was unhappy with the data they got back. It wasn’t my client’s work they didn’t like – quite simply, they wanted the data to tell them something else. Something different. They wanted the data to reinforce what they believed they were going to find when we went looking.

The contact person I’m working with tried to find the data-answers they wanted… and couldn’t…because it doesn’t exist. I told my contact”you can’t make them happy. It’s your job to give them the truth even if they don’t want it.”

This interaction reminded me of many conversations our country is undergoing around race in the wake of the recent, heartbreaking murders. Some well-intentioned, good-hearted people react to facts about racism with anger because they don’t want it to be true. They don’t want to believe the data that is before them, because frankly, it’s too horrible and too overwhelming.

Understand Why They Don’t Want to Know

The anger of both the business and the individual is rooted in what the data means to their life. Most people want to do the right thing, and when you present data that tells them something needs to be done – something huge, overwhelming, time consumer, emotionally draining – they are reluctant to believe it because they will have to do a lot of work they aren’t prepared to do.

How You React Means A Lot

Your reaction in the face of this anger can destroy the trust you have built with the angry person, or, it can help you build even greater trust. If you react quickly and harshly, they will probably pull back and disconnect. However, if you are patient and slow down, giving them time to digest the information they didn’t want to receive, you can deepen your level of trust. If you have suggestions or can guide them with a vision of a future where this information actually helps them resolve problems or change their behavior, you transform from a bearer of bad news to a trusted adviser and friend.

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Photo credit: Positive side via photopin (license).

Social Courage and Sales

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lion with courageIt is common knowledge that mob mentality can make people do things outside of their normal belief system. The drunk college student throws rocks at a police car after his college team wins a championship. It’s irrational, and his parents can’t believe that their well behaved son would do such a thing. But he did.

It would be even more unbelievable if we were told our grandmother threw those rocks after her favorite baseball team won the World Series. Even though we see the college student’s behavior as seriously unusual, we find the grandmother’s behavior inconceivable.

That is because we all intuitively know what social scientists have long understood: we all have different thresholds of resistance to the behavior of those around us. Individuals all have differently held belief systems and different levels of adherence to them.

How Does This Matter in Sales?

Anthony Iannarino wrote a post recently called There are No Rules (and you have to know them all) where he illustrated the many different “rules” people have tried to create for the sales process. It’s not that these rules aren’t true, but they’re not always true in every individual sales situation, and in fact some of these rules are contradictory. Both of the opposing rules are right, in certain circumstances.

It is why there are really are no rules that are correct 100 percent of the time. It is why there is no one blueprint or playbook for how to work through the sales process with every single prospect. Every individual you deal with, and every group of individuals you deal  with will have different thresholds of social courage – the point at which they will make a brave decision or a decision that is different than what they’ve always done.

What Social Courage Looks Like

My grandmother didn’t care a lick what anyone thought about her, and she was the freest person I ever met. She did what she thought was right no matter the circumstances. During the war, she saw a soldier walking along the road in a snowstorm. She stopped to pick him up and he was black. She drove him 2 hours home to upstate NY. Alone. A white woman in her late 30s from a rural community. Other people would have been scared to break social norms, but she didn’t care what anyone said or thought about her. That sort of behavior gave her freedom that others didn’t have. She earned a unique place in her community where she was allowed to do and say what she thought was right. Because she was going to anyway, and both she and her community knew it.

This American Life did a podcast episode on why people make choices they know are wrong. The episode tells the story of Wilt Chamberlain, one of the greatest basketball players to ever play the game, but not a great foul shooter. If you understand basketball you know that not being a solid foul shooter isn’t simply about the baskets you miss when fouled, but about how opponents play against you, fouling you more in crucial situations where you might score because your foul shot is so unreliable.

Wilt was much more effective shooting his foul shot underhanded, but wouldn’t do it because he said he “felt like a sissy.” One of the greatest players of all time yet he wouldn’t make himself even better out of fear of ridicule. Then there is Rick Barry, the greatest foul shooter to ever play the game, who did shoot underhanded. Barry didn’t care about what people thought of him. He didn’t care about anything but perfection and being the best player he could be.

This an example of two individuals with totally different levels of social courage and tolerance. It is not important to know why they were as they were; what is important is to understand that individuals do have different levels of social courage.

Why the Sales Person Must Have the MOST Social Courage

The salesperson that cares about being the best that they can be needs to understand two things:

  1. Everyone you are dealing with has a different level of social courage. You will need to be attuned to this, and offer more encouragement, data, experience, or whatever it is that is needed to get some of your prospects past their own individual threshold in order to make the deal. It is why Anthony is right: there are lots of rules, you must know them all, but there are no rules as to how they should be applied. You need to be able to sense that threshold for every individual, and you do that by listening carefully to them.
  2. You must have extraordinary social courage. You will regularly need to say things that clients don’t want to hear or that make them uncomfortable. You will have to face your own fears of rejection and failure again and again. You must be like my grandmother and Rick Barry, and earn your unique place as the one who says the things that need to be said because they are true.

To be an extremely successful sales person you need social courage and the understanding that everyone’s threshold is different and the fears of your prospects must be respected. At the core of their threshold is always fear. It is your job to push past your fears – of rejection, and failure – and help them push past theirs.

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Photo credit: The boss via photopin (license).

Jargon is Killing Your Sales

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sales jargonIf you work in an industry with any degree of complexity it is likely that there is a lot of jargon used by insiders. Jargon is a great way to quickly communicating about tools, tactics, and concepts. But it can also swiftly kill your sales.

In many industries, jargon is shorthand. It serves a very clear purpose to speed through conversations, but it does not belong in any conversation where you are speaking to a potential customer. Jargon, used on your blog, in presentations, and especially when prospecting, builds a wall between you and those you are trying to reach. It leaves the hearer, especially if they aren’t clear on the precise meaning of your jargon, feeling talked down to, stupid, or worse, as if you think they’re stupid.

Your goal in your points of contact with prospects and customers is to build trust, and jargon does the exact opposite. Jargon puts you in the club, and them outside of it. They may be comfortable enough to ask you to define your jargon, but why would you put them in a position of having to do that? It is your job to constantly put yourself in their shoes, to think like them. It is your job to understand their pain points and to help them find solutions to their problems. This doesn’t happen when you try to sound like an authority (if that’s what you think jargon does). This happens when you actively listen and then explain your solutions to them in a common language.

If you’re having trouble relating to this concept, remember what it feels like to purchase something complex when you have no expertise. It may be tech, a new car, or an insurance policy. We all know exactly how it feels to be sold to by an expert. That expert can make us feel secure, or as if we have no clue. If they’re good at what they do, you feel comfortable asking for clarity, and they take the time to give it to you. If instead, they approach you with jargon you don’t understand, my bet is you don’t purchase and go find someone else who makes you feel more comfortable. That’s exactly the person you need to be when you talk to your customers. The one who makes them comfortable by speaking clearly and plainly in a language they understand.

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Photo credit: Jargon, buzzwords and meaningless expressions via photopin (license).

The Most Effective, Most Ignored Weapon in Sales

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man on phoneI am blessed to count the greatest living sales writer as my client. You may not have heard of him, but you will. His name is Anthony Iannarino, author of thesalesblog.com and of two forthcoming books to be published by Penguin. If you have an interest in sales, if it is your profession or you are a business manager, you need to know Anthony. He is the no BS, integrity-filled voice of sales wisdom. I don’t say that because he is my client; he is my client because his sales philosophy and teaching is so spot on that I’ve read him for years and regularly harassed him with the line “Your brilliance is too good for typos.” (I’m his editor).

Anthony and I have many lively exchanges about selling, rarely disagreeing because he is, say it with me, “the greatest living sales writer.” But seriously, he is that because he understands that the fundamentals of sales have not changed, despite what social selling gurus will tell you. Yes, sales is more complex, and yes, competition is global and fiercer than ever, but the fundamentals – they remain the same.

You win sales when you can gain a commitment for a meeting with a prospect, ask the right questions to understand their desired outcomes and goals, prove that you are a value creator and can partner with them to help achieve those goals, and ask for and get the deal closed. The key there is getting the initial meeting with the prospect. Anthony’s weapon of choice? The telephone.

Yes, that good old fashioned tool invented way back in 1876. It is time efficient and personal, and because so many of your competitors have bought into the social selling myth it puts you leaps and bounds ahead of them. Picture yourself in the role of prospect. Would you rather have a salesperson call you on the phone and quickly ask and inform you of why exploring her offering may be beneficial, or would you rather be messaged on social media or into your inbox? Think of the difference in how both of those feel to you. Most of us see email and social solicitations as spammy and intrusive. We may not warm up to telemarketers, but if it’s a business professional calling you up to help you with a problem, or to offer a superior solution to what you’re already using, chances are you’ll at least give them a chance.

Think of the difference in how both of those feel to you. Most of us see email and social solicitations as spammy and intrusive. We may not warm up to telemarketers, but if it’s a business professional calling you up to help you with a problem, or to offer a superior solution to what you’re already using, chances are you’ll at least give them a chance.

And if you’re a professional salesperson, most of the time all you need is a chance.

 

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Photo credit: Man calling after the Brussels attacks via photopin (license).

You Don’t Know More Than Your Customer

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Quiet person

There is a line of thinking in sales that believes you should always know more than your customer. That somehow you will win their business by making them feel that they just don’t understand the subject matter and you, the expert, are what they need.

That is a deeply flawed way of thinking and the sure route to losing your client in the long-term. You need to be your client’s trusted adviser, not their know-it-all lecturer. Of course, they will learn as they go with you – as you help them overcome challenges and fix problems. But if you talk down to them and don’t hear what they’re saying they won’t come to you with the very problems you need to help them fix in order to remain their trusted partner.

What It Looks Like When You Know More

He had his own opinions.

He did it the way HE wanted.

He didn’t see it the way we do.

These are the very words a client used to explain to me the problem she was having with the primary contact from her web development team. They were well into a website redesign and still not finished because her developer kept creating what he thought she needed instead of listening to her clearly express her needs. Sadly, this happens every day to customers everywhere.

Stop Being Your Client’s Problem

My client and “Sales Psychotherapist” wrote a post yesterday called Who Killed Customer Loyalty that lays out the problem with business/client relationships today. Many business people like to believe that society has changed, that customers are no longer what they once were, that it isn’t their own fault they don’t have loyal customers. But as Anthony points out, that isn’t the truth at all.

When you stop listening to what your customer really wants, there is no way  you are going to deliver it.

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Photo credit: meteor shower via photopin (license)