I never made a good deal with a bad person, and I never made a bad deal with a good person.
Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.
I’ve asked many sales managers what they think is the most important thing in selling. Some say that it’s closing, some say prospecting, and some say process. I say it’s trust.
Trust is always the strategy. Trust isn’t about what you do; it’s about who you are. If you want to be trusted, you have to be trustworthy first. And it starts with the heart— you can’t fake it.
You can lose with a great product and a great company through a weak salesperson whose messages are not believed. All your value can be lost because there is no bridge of trust between the buyer and the seller. All your investment in your company, product, and marketing can be lost just as if it went off the edge of a broken bridge.
Although character is the foundation of trust, most companies don’t interview for it, don’t require it, and don’t reward it. And yet it may be the root cause of most sales turnover, sales losses, and customer problems.
I had one salesperson who was struggling in a given year and asked me for advice as his manager. I told him, “I’m your manager and your friend — and you can take it or leave it — but I think I’ve identified your problem. You are doing almost everything right except one thing: You’re a snob. You like the finer things in life — which is fine — but you have no tolerance for those who don’t. You basically don’t like your customers, and you can’t hide it. You aren’t a good enough actor — none of us are.
I watched you in one sales call where you were disdainful of the administrative person and barely tolerant of the project leader, and you patronized the decision maker. None of those emotions are genuine. I can see it, and I’m sure they could see it, too. You have to find something about your clients to like and discard the rest. But most of all, you have to be genuine. You have to build sincere relationships that have value.”
Alignment — Opening the Door to Rapport
The first decision a buyer makes is about the salesperson. The first step in the process is alignment. This is sometimes called neurolinguistic programming and means matching one’s voice, rate of speech, level of humor, level of familiarity, and body language to those of the buyer. It removes the physical barriers of bias from the salesperson’s message.
You can lose a great product and a great company through a weak salesperson whose messages are not believed.
Alignment is the first step in building rapport. Many salespeople ruin the entire call by aligning badly—becoming too friendly too fast, laughing at things that aren’t really funny, being too familiar (this is especially deadly internationally), or dressing inappropriately for that industry.
How many salespeople have you met who were too aggressive and turned you off? They could have been selling one dollar bills for 50 cents and you still wouldn’t have bought from them. They create barriers to what may be a very sound solution. A good message can be lost through a bad messenger. Sometimes salespeople are so bad at this that they become sales prevention people. They just annoy us.
I once walked out of a clothing store that had a suit I had been looking at for months. I ended up leaving because I refused to buy it from that particular salesperson. Unfortunately, when I went back for the suit later, it was gone. I didn’t find it again for two years, but it was still better than buying it from that jerk.
A good message can be lost through a bad messenger
I later went to a store where the salesperson knew the manufacturer, called and had them check next year’s stock for my material, pull it out of inventory and make my suit. Now I always go there first.
The salesperson was ex-IBM and very organized, but he had poor alignment and interpersonal skills. We once went on a sales call to a “good ol’ boy” in Alabama. The salesperson began the call by pulling out a checklist of all the things he had done in the sales cycle and started ticking them off one item after another while sitting on the edge of his seat. After listening for a few minutes, the gray-haired IT director leaned back in his chair and said, “Son, you’ve got a really good memory. Think you can remember your way outta here?” It was over.
This is a case of very bad alignment. Everybody knows that in the South, you spend the first 30 minutes “cracker barreling,” talking about traffic, the weather, football, BBQ — anything but business. On the other hand, in Manhattan, you have about 30 nanoseconds to get to the point or you must be from somewhere “out West” — like New Jersey. It’s called alignment. And this salesperson didn’t have it.
Alignment can be based on gender, cultural background, or personality. In the movie My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci plays a New York lawyer who has to try a murder case in a rural Alabama courtroom. When he shows up for court in a leather jacket, the stern, conservative judge eyes him suspiciously and demands angrily, “Mr. Gambini, what are you wearing?” Joe Pesci looks down at his outfit, confused, and says, “Clothes. I don’t get the question.”
Some people who have become involved with sales don’t get the question. Customers have the right to discriminate. And you’ll never even know why you lost.
In business, different people align differently with different personalities. Some people like to be approached by task first and then relationship. Others like to establish a relationship before talking about business. Internationally, there are many cultural rites and practices that must be observed. If you get it wrong, your sales call will be ineffective at best — disastrous at worst.
One of our principals, Nick Holbrook, was shopping with his wife for a new car in England, where they live. As they entered the showroom, a salesman appeared and introduced himself to Nick, shaking hands with Nick first and then Sue.
It was the last interaction he had with Sue that afternoon.
Instead, the salesman spent the next 15 minutes asking Nick a series of questions about his budget and timeframe for buying a car. Then he showed the interior and external features of the car to Nick and offered him the keys for a test drive. He asked Nick what he was looking for in an engine, his color preference, and which accessories he would most like to have. Before they left the showroom, he loaded Nick down with brochures about the car, explaining the different makes and models.
But it was Sue who was car shopping that day — not Nick. She is also a very successful sales manager for a major software firm. That day, Sue was the decision maker with the sum of all votes plus one.
The salesman lost the sale because he made the false assumption that Nick was driving the decision-making process and held all the power.
As Nick and Sue walked out the front door of the showroom, the salesman made one last-minute effort to reach out to Sue. He called out, “And what about you, Love? I’m sure we could find a nice little run-around for you?”
No understanding, no rapport, no trust, no sale, no going back ever.
Alignment is usually different by industry. Bankers dress and act differently from academics, who dress and act differently from manufacturers. If you are selling to consulting firms — and we learned this early in our company history — you have to do a universal “search and replace” on your vocabulary. Most industries have a language and style of their own, and insiders can spot outsiders easily.
There are a number of training courses to help people with this fundamental skill going all the way back to Meyers-Briggs and DISC—all of which are strong fundamentals and help salespeople match their selling style to the personality of the buyer. The challenge, of course, is to avoid stereotyping by nationality, race, or gender and approach each individual as an individual. Different people want to be sold to in different ways.
One of the most enduring books on this topic is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. It has stood the test of time for decades. In his book, Carnegie talks about such tips as learning and saying people’s names, the importance of a firm handshake, and finding things in common with other people. As old and fundamental as these concepts are, it is amazing how banks and grocery stores today have never learned the importance of remembering and repeating their customers’ names.
Consultative Selling — The Answer Is a Question
Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf.
By far the most important step in building rapport is probing and listening. In the early seventies, Neil Rackham, author of the best-seller SPIN Selling, was hired by large companies to observe what successful salespeople did right and what unsuccessful salespeople did wrong. Rackham discovered that the best salespeople actually held back the product for the longest time and were not necessarily the best talkers but the best listeners. This was the birth of consultative selling. Listen first, talk second — no matter if it’s a one-hour call or an entire-day demo.
And yet, 20 to 30 years later, one of the most common mistakes we find among salespeople is still “dashing to the demo”—running out and showing the product or solution before doing a needs assessment with the client. The reason is this: There is a whole new generation of CEOs, sales managers, and salespeople who have to learn to break this habit all over again.
When I was in the software business and I started doing needs assessments before demos, my partners and I cut our presentations from eight hours to two hours — and they were better. The irony was that not only were our presentations more focused, but we also were winning at the needs assessment — before the real demo. This is where the selling really took place.
Through better listening and understanding — elbow to elbow with the client, face to face — we not only began to “outcare” the competition, but we also were able to better understand the decision-making process, politics, our competitive position, and the needs of each buyer as an individual, as well and the needs of each buyer as an individual, as well as their culture.
By the time we got to the presentation, most of the deals had already been decided (as they are now). We had friends in the audience, we knew their terminology, we knew their strategic issues, and we had planted subtle traps to get the competition reacting to us rather than vice versa.
We began to get inside their competitive loop much earlier, and our presentations were more focused on their needs and motivators rather than on our features. In addition, we qualified out of bad deals earlier.
Listen first; talk second — no matter if it’s a one-hour call or an entire-day demo.
This is especially a problem when selling a complex product or solution. There may be over 100 reasons why someone might buy from you, but they are really only looking for five or so. Which five? Or if they’re only looking for five or six capabilities of your product and you come in talking about 105, not only will you bore them, but you will appear uncaring about their problem. You also will look too complex. This sets you up for commoditization because they see a lot of things in your product that they don’t need and don’t think they should pay for.
Consultative selling begins to build rapport because you are focused on their issues rather than on your capabilities.
One of our clients tells a story of a sales call early in his career. He sat down with the executive and began to lay out a “partnership” between his organization and the client’s. The executive stopped him, midsentence, and retrieved a two-inch stack of business cards from his desk.
“This is a stack of cards from all the different salespeople from all the different divisions of your company who have come to see me in the last two years. I never see the same person twice. When you have called on me for a year and know more about my business than I do, then you can talk to me about being your partner. Until then, you’re the vendor and I’m the customer.”
After you build rapport, which moves the client to an open state of mind, you can begin building preference.
Growing from rapport to preference to trust takes time. This means that salespeople need to stay on the same accounts long enough to become a source of trust. Every time we churn accounts, we set the registers back to zero. A client relationship management (CRM) system might give you continuity of information, but that’s not the same as continuity of a relationship. Trust between people builds over time.
From Rapport to Preference — There Are Two Roads
Building preference is achieved through one of two traditional routes: You either (1) link your solution to your client’s pains or gains or (2) build preference through influences and relationships. Preferably, you do both. Most of the earlier selling methodologies address one or the other (see Figure 8–1).
Consultative selling begins to build rapport because you are focused on your client’s issues rather than on your capabilities.
It is important to remember personality types when choosing which of the pillars of trust to build on first. When building preference, not only must you link to solving your client’s business problems, but you also have to differentiate why you can do it better — and you need to do it in a professional manner.
Competitive selling isn’t negative selling unless it’s done incorrectly. If you are too heavy-handed too early in your differentiation or too negative, you can come across as defensive and unprofessional. However, if you don’t find ways to show why you’re better, the client might buy the wrong solution for all the wrong reasons. You could fail to serve your client by not being aggressive enough.
How fast you can approach competitive differentiation depends on your relationship with the individual buyer in the particular country or culture that you are in. In the United States, we’ve had competitive advertising on television for over 20 years. In some countries, however, it’s illegal to even mention your competitor. However, there are ways to differentiate yourself without ever mentioning the competitor’s name. For example, you can suggest that the client look for a specific capability from all the vendors or ask the same question of everyone including you.
The Differences in Differentiators
Differentiators fall into several categories. There are unique differentiators, which are a capability, functionality, or service that you have but that your competitors simply don’t offer. Unique differentiators that solve strategic problems for powerful buyers are a salesperson’s nirvana. If you ever get in this position, never discount the deal.
If you don’t find ways to show that you’re better, the client may buy the wrong solution for all the wrong reasons. You could fail to serve your client by not being aggressive enough.
Some differentiators are relative differentiators. You do it, but so does the competition. In this case, you have to show how you do it faster, better, cheaper, at lower risk, or with more experienced, dependable people than the competition. The consulting industry is full of relative differentiators. There is almost nothing a big consulting firm cannot do with enough time and money. Differentiation there comes from other sources, such as limiting risk, sharing risk, industry focus, qualifications of personnel, or actually meeting and bonding with the people who will be handling your project.
Unique differentiators that solve strategic problems for powerful buyers are a salesperson’s nirvana. If you ever get in this position, never discount the deal.
Some differentiators are motivators, and others are only satisfiers. For a capability to be a motivator, it must present significant political gain, recognition, glory, or lower risk.
I remember hearing one salesperson proclaiming the differentiating advantage of her user groups. Oh, wow. This is a compelling value proposition? I don’t think anyone ever chose a vendor because he or she had better user groups. This is an example of a satisfier. If you didn’t have one, it might hurt you, but having one just satisfies an item on a checklist. The higher up the food chain of value toward strategic, financial, political, and cultural benefits that your solution can provide, the better chance you have of motivating that buyer into action.
Products to Solutions — Want My Trust? Solve My Problem — Want Big Bucks? Solve Big Problems
Alignment and listening are the gateways to rapport. Linking solutions to problems and differentiation begins to build preference. To gain trust, however, you must solve your client’s problem. And to move from personal trust to organizational trust, you have to solve bigger, more strategic problems.
“Moving from products to solutions” has been in the sales and marketing vocabulary for over 40 years, but I’m not sure that the average salesperson knows exactly what it means or what his or her contribution is to this process.
It is helpful to start at the origin of the idea. In the early 1980s, Theodore Levitt, in his book, The Marketing Imagination, addressed the subject of differentiation beyond the product. Recapping an earlier Harvard Business Review article, he wrote of “The Differentiation — of Anything.”[5]
His description of the generic product, the expected product, the augmented product, and the potential product defined the conceptual difference between a product and a solution for the next four decades.
Marketing departments seized on the idea early and began expanding offerings and solutions. With the exception of the consulting industry, which has no product to sell, salespeople often have lagged in their ability to sell solutions rather than products (see Figure 8–2).
Selling solutions means building trust by lowering risk for the buyer — especially when you deliver results instead of tools. But salespeople have often struggled with how they can contribute to the value of the solution rather than how they just describe it.
How can salespeople contribute to and be a part of the solution rather than just provide information and entertainment? Salespeople contribute to solution value in the following ways:
• When they do a better job than the competition of linking the benefits of a complex product to the client’s needs. The more they can link into strategic issues and uniquely differentiate their solution, the more value they can command.
• When they can help the client to understand the differences between their product and the competitors’ and what advantage that brings to the client.
• When they can turn relationships into results and lower risk by problem resolution and command of resources within their own company.
• When they can understand the political power structure of the buying committee and what part each person will play in the decision-making process.
• When they can effectively read accounts, devise and communicate a winning strategy, and lead a sales team to victory.
• When they can contribute knowledge to the client beyond their product — industry trends, best practices, innovations, contacts, ideas, benchmarks, and an outside expert’s assessment of their own company.
References — A Treasury of Transferred Trust
Because trust is generally low in the early parts of an evaluation, you will need to provide proof statements of your capabilities. This is where references play an active part in your sales process. If you have a capability and your client doesn’t, you should encourage thorough reference checking in your client’s evaluation process.
References need to be developed and rewarded, and their time needs to be treated respectfully. They deserve notice that they will be called, what the issues may be, and — whereas a reference should not be bought or bribed — they should be rewarded for the time required by extra service, responsiveness, or other acknowledgments.
One caution about giving references before the prospect has “earned” the right to talk to your best customers: Most salespeople don’t understand that when you ask a client to be a reference for a particular prospect, you have used up a reference call whether the prospect calls or not. You also have to be careful that you don’t give references so early that the prospect calls without enough knowledge to ask the right questions, and your reference is put in the position of being the salesperson.
By the way, calling and debriefing your references after they have been contacted by your prospect is an excellent way to get a perspective on where you are in the sale. The prospect will tell them things that he or she won’t tell you. Another way to provide trust in a competitive evaluation is through unsolicited references. If you can get your references to call your prospects and give unsolicited references, that may be even better than simply providing them with a list.
Keep ’Em Honest
Also, never give a list of references to just one person on the buying committee. I’ve seen an excellent list of references given to somebody on a buying committee and the deal lost to bad references. How does that happen? The person calling probably had negative preference for you and biased the questions or the answers. And since he or she was the only one calling, the result went unchallenged until after the sale.
If you think evaluations are conducted fairly and without bias, you can skip this step. But you had better be independently wealthy.
Give lists to everyone on the buying committee. This will keep the checkers honest because they know they aren’t the only ones calling. If you think evaluations are conducted fairly and without bias, you can skip this step. But you had better be independently wealthy.
As preference is built among individuals on the buying team, people start to move beyond neutral to where they really want your solution. These people can become good sources of information about your competitive position, hidden agendas, or competitive tactics.
Without good inside informants, you are flying through mountains in a fog. If no one is helping you or telling you that you’re winning, ask yourself what your real chances are in this deal. Again, if you’re not getting signals that you’re winning, you’re probably not. Good salespeople listen for what their prospects don’t say.
The Pronoun Shift
If you’re not getting signals that you’re winning, you’re probably not.
One way to tell if you are winning is that as preference grows, people start changing their pronouns and questions from if they buy to when they buy and from whom to how. If you’ve given your presentation and your prospects aren’t asking questions about implementation, risk management, contract issues and support, then you are in trouble. If they are not talking about how to do business with you, they are probably not planning to do business with you. This is when you are in that dreadful zone of, “You’re not winning, and they aren’t telling you.”
This is always when salespeople get a terrible amount of misinformation. Not because buyers are mean — although in some cases they are — but they may tell you what they think is true and might not know for sure. Or they might like you personally but not prefer your company or product. Or they may want to keep you in the game as a safety net in case they can’t reach terms with the other vendor.
By the time you get to the presentation or proposal, you need more than inside informants — you need power sponsors at high levels. As prospects reach the decision-making phase, politics erupt, and the process can change dramatically. As they approach the crucible of decision, multimillion dollar deals can change in as little as 24 hours. At this point, you need people who really want you to win — people who will give you the information you need, introduce you to the people you need to meet, and go to bat for you with procurement and the decision committee.
Account Management—From Preference to Trust
Many companies define account management objectives in different ways. Some want caretakers, whereas others want to dominate the account by making it so that the customer never has a reason to call a competitor.
Quality is defined by customer expectations. The salesperson’s job is to properly set those expectations high enough to get the business but not so high that you can’t deliver.
All awnings leak. Yours do, and so will the next guy’s.
One salesperson tells the client, “Our awnings never leak.”
Another salesperson instead offers the customer a piece of chalk and tells her, “When the first leak occurs, take this chalk and circle the leak. Call us, and we’ll fix it.”
Both salespeople may get the sale. But which salesperson will end up with an unhappy customer?
If your competition then says that their awnings don’t leak, they may win the initial business, but they won’t win the next time. And when that first leak occurs, they will have lost the customer’s trust forever.
They may win once, but they will fail to make winning a habit. And that unhappy client is now a vocal negative reference.
To build company-to-company trust, you have to make the first people who choose you look good for doing so. If you overpromise or underdeliver, you make repeat business — where true opportunity lies — an uphill battle. And you end up with a customer base of largely unhappy people.
The purpose of account management is to build company-to-company trust. The gateway is performance and quality on the first sale. If you don’t exceed expectations on the first sale, you may have inoculated the client against future business.
You have to do more than deliver and perform on the first business — you also have to document your value. The customer will not always do this. If you want to build from rapport to preference to trust, you have to go in and document and publicize what you’ve done for the client and why it was a good decision to choose you or keep you. Rarely will the client go to much effort to dispute these claims if they are reasonable, but it gives ammunition to your supporters.
If you have built trust with powerful individuals in an organization, you then can borrow that trust for access to other people you need to meet. This is called sponsorship, and it allows you to radiate successfully to the rest of the organization or industry. The last step of an implementation process is to proactively ask your sponsor who else you can be doing this for in the company, in the industry, and in the network. Then you need to ask those people to help you gain access to the people you need to meet.
Equal-Rank Meetings
There are many other things you can do to build company-to-company trust. If top executives can meet each other, this reduces risk because they know that if the salesperson leaves, they still have someone at the top they can call on who has skin in the game. Corporate visits and executive meetings are also important because they assure buyers that there is a company vision that supports the buyer’s agenda — that the seller is going to continue to commit resources to product, industry, or geography.
Before Enron became the poster child for corporate abuse (before Ken Lay), the company was one of the best-run organizations in the southwestern United States.
During a very competitive evaluation, Joe Terry had developed relationships with the divisional presidents but had not been able to penetrate to the corporate executives.
Our chairman, John Imlay, was an icon in the industry and known as a very charismatic speaker. He was going to be in Houston to meet a very prestigious client, and Joe took advantage of the trip to arrange a breakfast meeting with the divisional presidents so that he could use John’s name to get an audience with the corporate executives.
John made a huge impression on Enron’s president and CEO. The CEO asked John, “We are considering investing a substantial amount with your company. What are you going to do to ensure our success?”
John smiled and answered, “I’m going to let Joe make the good decisions he always makes, and everything will work out fine.” Baton passed. Deal won. Happy client.
These equal-rank meetings are especially important overseas, where there are greater class differences between managers and non-managers. The executive may say nothing different from what the salesperson has said all along; it’s simply that the executive has the stripes. It’s important in these executive-to-executive meetings to make sure that trust is left with the account executive after the call.
If the executive steals power during the sales call, he or she can’t give it back. That executive is now the actual account manager, and the salesperson is now the gun bearer. Every effort must be made to pass power to the account manager during the sales call. This also reduces vendor abuse if the people inside the account know that you have inside access to executive management.
Relationships
One of the reasons I may trust you and your company is because you solve my problems. The other pillar of trust is personal relationships — moving from alignment to rapport to trust. If I am going to trust you, I have to know that I can depend on you for at least a win-win in every transaction. (Dependability alone is not enough. There are some people I can depend on to stick it to me every time.)
My father-in-law was trusted for 39 years in the insurance business because his clients all knew that he would never do anything to his gain and their detriment. Most of these rural people never quite understood the implications of the insurance they were buying, but they knew he would never do anything that wasn’t in their best interest.
This is called trusted-advisor selling (the seventh generation of selling), and the height of it is when the buyer says, “I’m not sure what I need. Why don’t you study it and tell me what I need. Whatever you’re selling, I’m buying.” It takes years to build this kind of trust with buyers and only one abuse to break it, but it is the highest level of selling.
Sometimes we trust people only because we know that the risk of loss of future business will keep them honest. Danger comes from sellers who only want to sell to you one time. This is why a contract is still important. Without it, there is really nothing to ensure that trust.
In order to trust you, I need to know that you are dependable. I need to understand your principles and values and trust that you will never do anything that is not in my best interest. Principle-driven people are consistent, not situational. And principles are values acted on consistently.
If that trust grows into personal friendship, this is even better. This is when I not only trust you, but I also enjoy your company. I appreciate your counsel, and you are fun to be around. This is a great benefit to the buyer-seller relationship, but if it doesn’t have the underpinnings of strong product or performance, it can melt down quickly.
Even your best sponsors cannot go into implementation saying, “Buy from this guy. I like him. He’s my friend.” You have to build on both pillars of trust. I trust you because you are an industry expert, you know my business, and you can solve my problems. Or I will trust you because we work together, you are my friend, I know your family, and you will never let me down.
In the end, the only thing your company really has to sell is trust. It’s at the heart of brand management. Just look at all the images in advertising that focus on trust.
| Trust Scorecard | |||||
| Best Practices, Trust | Importance | Execution | |||
| Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high) | Agree, but we never do this | We sometimes do this | We often do this | We do this consistently | |
| Individual | |||||
| Salespeople are trained in fundamental skills for discovery, linkage, and presentation. | |||||
| Opportunity | |||||
| We consistently conduct needs assessments with the client before showing our product and solutions. | |||||
| We consistently debrief each reference to get perspective of where we are in the sale. | |||||
| Account Management | |||||
| Our references are developed, rewarded, and their time treated respectfully. | |||||
| We consistently document our value to our existing clients. | |||||
| We have earned preferred vendor status in accounts. | |||||
| We get exclusive evaluations and noncompetitive business. | |||||
| We maintain continuity of the same reps on the same accounts from year to year. | |||||
| We conduct customer satisfaction and loyalty assessments regularly. | |||||
| Industry/Market | |||||
| Our sales force is organized and focused by industry so we can focus on industry-specific solutions for our clients. | |||||
Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Imagination (New York: Free Press, 1983). p. 79.