- If you are going to sell "solutions" the thinking goes, you're got to first "discover" your customers most pressing points of pain and then build a tight connection between whats keeping them up at night and what you are seeking to sell.
- Customers don't actually know what is going to solve their problem. They know the problem but not the solution that will solve the problem.
- Rather than asking customers what they need, the better sales technique might in fact be what they need.
- Its not what you sell, its how you sell it:
- Offers unique perspective in the market.
- Helps client navigate alternatives.
- Provides ongoing advice or consultation.
- Helps clients avoid potential land mines.
- Educates clients on new issues and outcomes.
- Supplier is easy to buy from.
- Supplier has widespread support across buyers organization.
- The Power of Insight:Customer loyalty is much less about what you sell and much more about how you sell. The best companies don't win through the quality of the products they sell, but through the quality of the insight they deliver as part of the sale itself. The battle for customer loyalty is won or lost long before a thing ever gets sold. And the best reps win that battle not by "discovering" what customers already know they need, but by teaching them a new way of thinking altogether.
- Not just any teaching, commercial teaching:
Bad place to be: You've given the customer what they want, but in the process you've actually given your competitor exactly what they want too - your business. It's one thing to challenge customers with new ideas, and another thing altogether to ensure you get paid for it. To make this happen teaching efforts have to meet very specific criteria. The following are the key rules of that help in establishing the specific criteria using commercial teaching.
- Lead your unique strengths: Commercial teaching must tie directly back to some capability where you outperform your competitors. If what you're teaching inevitably leads back to what you do better than anyone else, then you're in a much better position when it comes to winning the business.
You've only really succeeded when the customer asks, "Wow, how can I make that happen?" and you're able to say, "Well, let me show you how we're better able to help you make that happen than anyone else."
If you leave the cients troubled by a new problem they never knew they had and with no real way of doing anything about it. Yes, customers want insight on how they could operate more productively, but insight they cant't do anything about actually makes things worse, not better. Then you really have given them something to keep them up at night.
In order to ensure that your teaching efforts ultimately lead to your unique strengths, you actually have to know what your unique strengths are.
The key question that a challenger sales rep should ask themselves, why should customers buy from you over anyone else?
- Challenge customer assumptions: Whatever you teach your customers has to actually teach them something. It has to challenge their assumptions and speaks to their world in ways they haven't thought or fully appreciated before.
Challenger reps are looking for a different customer reaction altogether. Rather than, "yes, I totally agree!" they know they're on the right track when they hear their customer say, "huh, I never thought of it that way before." The best indicator of a successful re frame, in other words, isn't excited agreement but thoughtful reflection. You've just shown your customer a different way to think about their business - perhaps a land mine they'd overlooked, a trend they under appreciated, or an alternative they prematurely dismissed - and now you've got them curious. They're wondering, "what exactly does this mean for my business?" or even better, "what else do't I know?"
Just because we've helped them see things differently doesn't mean we've necessarily persuaded them to do things differently. That's next and it's just important.
- Catalyze action: A well executed teaching conversation isn't about the supplier's solution at all - at least not initially, It's about the customer's business, laying out an alternative means either save money or make money they'd previously overlooked. In a conversation like that, traditional ROI calculations prove useless because they're focused on the wrong things.
Before you convince customers to take that action, you first have to show them why the insight you just shared with them merits any action at all, especially when that insight competes directly with conventional wisdom.
If you're going to build an ROI calculator, make sure it calculates the return on pursuing the reframe, not purchasing your products. Before they buy anything, customers first need to understand what's in it for them to fix their problem.
- Scale across customers: Challenger reps should have small set of well-scripted insights along with two or three easy-to-remember diagnostic questions designed to map the right insight to the right customer.
- Lead your unique strengths: Commercial teaching must tie directly back to some capability where you outperform your competitors. If what you're teaching inevitably leads back to what you do better than anyone else, then you're in a much better position when it comes to winning the business.
In B2B sales environment there is a good chance of out performing the competition if sales/buying experience provides the following
How to build insight-led conversations
A conversation involving teaching for differentiation isn't so much about delivering a formal presentation as it's about telling a compelling story. Along the way, there should be some real drama, perhaps a bit of suspense, and maybe even a surprise or two. Ultimately, the goal is to take customers on a roller coaster ride, leading first to a rather dark place before showing them the light at the end of the tunnel. That light, of course, is your solution.
A purposeful choreography: The six steps of a world class teaching pitch
- The Warmer: Building credibility by reading their mind, demonstrating empathy [Customer State: Intrigued, Customer Excitement: Neutral/negative]
A well-designed teaching pitch starts off with your assessment of your customer's key challenges.
Never underestimate the value in being able to demonstrate to your customer that they're not alone when it comes to their most pressing challenges. The conclude your review by asking for their reactions. When you pit all together, it should sound something like, "We've worked with a number of companies similar to yours, and we've found that these 'N' challenges come up again and again as by far the most troubling. Is that what you're seeing too, or would you add something else to the list?"
The whole point, of course, is to build credibility. Essentially, what you're saying to your customer is, "i understand your world," and "I'm not here to waste your time asking you to teach me about your business."
- Reframe: First reframe of on-recognized problem, need or assumption. Commercial teaching follows boot camp theory of shocking the customer with the unkown.[Customer State: Drowning, Customer Excitement: Positive]
At this stage you now introduce a new perspective that connects those challenges to either a bigger problem or a bigger opportunity than they ever realized they had.
The Reframe is simply about the insight itself. It's just the headline. And like any good headline, your goal is to catch your customer off guard with an unexpected viewpoint - to surprise them, make them curious, and get them wanting to hear more.
If you're going to reframe, then be sure you really reframe. This is not the place to be timid, as the entire approach rests on your ability to surprise your customer and make them curious for more information.
- Rational Drowning:Gradual intensification of their problem, both in degrees and closeness to the customer. [Customer State: Drowning, Customer Excitement: Neutral/negative]
In this phase it's time for the data, graphs, tables and charts you need to quantify for the customer the true, often hidden, cost of the problem or size of the opportunity they'd completely overlooked. Rational Drowning is the numbers-driven rational for why your customer should think differently about their business, but presented specifically in a way designed about their business, but presented specifically in a way designed to make them squirm a little but - to feel like they're drowning. Marketers often refer to this as the "FUD factor" - fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Before you demonstrate how your solution can economically solve a key customer challenge, you've got to convince the customer that the challenge is worth solving in the first place.
- Emotional Impact: Psychological features of the problem, or presence in the individual's workflow, humanizing the problem [Customer State: Involved, Customer Excitement: Negative]
Emotional impact is all about making absolutely sure that the customer sees themselves in the story you're telling.
Emotional impact isn't about the numbers; it's about the narrative. You've got to paint a picture of how other companies just like the customer's went down a similarly painful path by engaging in behavior that the customer will immediately recognize as typical of their own company.
- Value Proposition - A New Way: A new framework for addressing the problem - implicitly tied to the supplier value proposition. Then building back the customer's confidence in a new solution. [Customer State: Involved, Customer Excitement: Neutral/Negative]
This is a point-by-point review of the specific capabilities the clients would need to have in order to make good on whatever opportunity to make money, save money or mitigate risk that you've just convinced them they're facing. As tempting as it might be at this point to launch into a review of how you can help this step is still about the solution, not about the supplier.
- Your solution and implementation map: Map of supplier services or solutions linked back to key teaching points; highlighted path to implementation. [Customer State: Relieved, Customer Excitement: Positive]
The goal of this step is to demonstrate how your solution is better able than anyone else's to equip them to act differently.
You've taught the customer something new and valuable about their business (which is what they were looking from the conversation), in a way that specifically leads them to value your capabilities over those of the competition.
