Selling is NOT Informing
No, the product does not sell itself.
This is true now more than ever. For the past 10 years, we have lived in a growth market that has allowed sellers to slide into a perilously comfortable position of informational selling, where “getting the meeting” opens a path to success. To get the meeting we enlist armies of Sales Development Resources (SDRs) to “put the message out” through a myriad of A-B tested programs to drip, ping, and connect our way to a meeting, a demo and a sale.
Those were the days. Now, however, people have a lot on their minds.
If you are fortunate enough to crack through the glass bubble and engage a prospective customer, your tried and true methods of selling fall flat.
You cannot expect to transfer information about your product in order to elicit interest. Nor will you find customers ready with a laundry list of easy-to-categorize problems that are tailor-made for the consultative-selling solutions that have worked for you a thousand times before. Instead, you are more likely to find someone with their arms folded, a furrowed brow and spewing phrases like “no budget”, “no time”, “heads down” and possibly a reference or two to drowning (a state of being overwhelmed).
Oh, my goodness. And I’m supposed to hit my number how, exactly?
You have been running infomercials. And as a salesperson worth hiring, you can no longer expect customers to readily accept your infomercials. What infomercials? These are your pre-scripted, pre-rehearsed, and pre-packaged list of features, benefits, and references.
Customers have way too much on their minds to make time to listen to your infomercials. The mechanized world we inhabit has conditioned us to listen to everything as information processors, chunking “data” in our brains and then sorting it into pre-built buckets of likes and dislikes. We then tally up the score and decide to accept or dismiss what we’ve just heard. This knee-jerk style handicaps us as listeners, by summarily reaching conclusions without really listening to what’s being said we forfeit our ability to listen, learn, and explore through conversation.
But if the customers aren’t listening to my information, how can I sell to them?
That’s a misleading question because the truth is that you cannot sell by informing. You must instead listen to them, hard. If you listen hard enough, you will hear messages that are more insightful than your customers’ apparently negative moods might foretell. By listening hard, I mean listening intensely and care-fully; being full of care while listening. A successful salesperson is someone who listens hard and can hear offers within the customer’s messages and negative moods. Rather than inform, you listen and make an offer; your offer is an offer to dance.
Wait, now I’m dancing? That’s right, put the needle on the record and get ready to Pump Up The Volume.
Just recently, I was engaged in a discussion with a prospect who was sharing with me the woes of his business in the affiliate advertising market. His arms were folded. His head was down. He was in no place to hear me if I were to break into a 10-minute rundown of features and benefits of my product. At that moment, I thought back to a recent news story that I had heard and I asked him if the COVID-19 Pandemic had taken its toll on his partners’ call center operations. “Oh my goodness, yes”, he responded as if something jolted him from his stupor. From there the dance began. We proceeded to talk about the impact on the industry and implications for his business. He did most of the talking. I did most of the listening. Checking in every now and then with an encouragement (“hmm”, “I see”, “really?”), recognizing his pain, and making notes in my head of where I could help. By the time the conversation was over, he had said: “if you could solve these problems, I would be very interested in hearing how.”
Future invented.
Thanks to Saqib Rasool for editorial assistance.