Rainmaking Conversations

Highlights

• We agree—you shouldn’t make superficial connections, you should make genuine connections. Genuine rapport sets the foundation for the rest of the conversation, and creates the opportunity for trust and a strong relationship.
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• When customers buy, they are typically thinking as much about Aspirations (the future they are seeking) as they are about Afflictions (problems they’d like to fix).
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• At the end of a well-managed sales process, your job is to create a vision of a New Reality that will be the best for your client, given their specific Aspirations and Afflictions and the Impact of doing (or not doing) something about them.
• Salespeople are often told, at some point in their careers, “The salespeople who succeed the most always ask great questions.” This is true to a point; asking incisive questions is critical to sales success, but some salespeople take the advice too literally.
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• Just because someone has the skills and knowledge to be able to do something doesn’t mean that that person will do it.
• Set the agenda; be a change agent. Rainmakers recommend, advise, and assist. They are change agents who are not afraid to push when it’s in the best interest of the customer.
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• Go into a sales conversation with negative thoughts, and even if you think you have built the best dam to keep these thoughts out, they’ll find the holes and flood your mind with doubt.
• The road to success is always under repair.
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• Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.
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• You’ll note the Investopedia definition characterizes a value proposition as a statement. Trying to boil the concept of value down to a statement is a simple, easy-to-understand, misguided approach.
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• 1. Prospects have to want and need what you’re selling. You have to resonate. 2. Potential buyers have to see why you stand out from the other available options. You have to differentiate. 3. Potential buyers have to believe that you can deliver on your promises. You have to substantiate.
• The first step to getting out of the commodity trap is to stop thinking about yourself as a commodity. If you think of yourself as a commodity, that’s how you’ll come across. Stop talking about the mechanics of your offerings, and start talking about the impact and new reality.
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• If you know the value you offer and structure the conversation right, you can generate interest and desire subtly as you move along in a conversation. Do this, and you succeed in answering the question, “What do you do?” and position yourself and your value well in any discussion.
• “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
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• Show interest, but act subservient or be overly friendly and you will only turn the other person off.
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• You have to gauge when to start talking business—too early and a chilly abruptness fills the air. Too much time chatting and the buyer wonders, “Are we ever going to get moving?”
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• One of the best ways to establish a connection with buyers is to balance asking questions (inquiry) with talking about your offerings or giving advice (advocacy). Talk too much and the prospect will tune out. Ask too many questions and they’ll feel like they’re getting the third degree.
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• “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
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• If no business problems explicitly afflict the decision maker, inertia will keep her from doing anything that rocks the boat, including purchasing from you. If, however, you unearth a latent affliction or set of afflictions, you create desire in your prospective client to do something about them.
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• Once you’ve established rapport with the prospect and then uncovered afflictions, you have created an initial value gap: a perception that the buyer isn’t where he wants to be or could be.
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• Some buyers are guarded or simply don’t share as much, so you will often need to move from these broad open-ended questions to specific open-ended questions.
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• It is a salesperson’s job to be comfortable making their customers uncomfortable. If you can’t get your customer uncomfortable at times and be okay with that, you’re never going to make it.
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• The exact “so what” questions will vary depending on the situation, but your ability to quantify and paint the “so what” picture is the cornerstone for making it clear to the prospect just how important buying from you is.
• Impact comes in two flavors, rational and emotional, and they work closely together.
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• At the appropriate time in the sales process, usually as you sense they do not see the issue as a top priority, ask the prospect, “Can you give me a sense of what you think would happen if you choose not to move forward in this process and engage us?”
• Can you think of a competitor or another company that’s more like what you want to be like in this area? Tell me about them.
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• The key to talking the right amount is balancing advocacy (giving advice … setting the agenda … talking) and inquiry (asking questions … finding out more … letting the client have the air time).
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• Although buyers value sellers who listen, they are not interested in a pseudo-psychology session where they yammer on for 75 minutes while you ask questions, listen, and take notes, all while thoughtfully nodding your head and saying, “hmmmm.”
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• Rainmakers who are capable of getting to the bottom of things create stronger relationships, stronger foundations of trust, are seen as problem solvers and change agents, keep the competition closed out, and keep selling to clients year after year.
• When sellers tell stories, they take the buyer on an emotional journey so the buyer doesn’t just know where they want to be, they feel it and see it.
• People buy with their hearts and justify with their heads.
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• The more people are familiar with something, the more likely they are to like it and trust it. People are even willing to invest money in something familiar while actually ignoring logical investment practices.2 You can become familiar to people by starting small and working your way to something big.
• Domino strategy: Provide offers that pique curiosity. Satisfy that curiosity, then present a new curiosity immediately after.
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• Buying is a leap of faith. Shorten that leap of faith with stepping stones.
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• Balance advocacy and inquiry to involve buyers in your discussions.
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• The key is not trying to seem indifferent. Be indifferent. Be okay with not getting this deal. Be okay with moving on to other opportunities. Find out if the buyer is moving toward a no when you sense her backing off. You’ll often find that when you inquire, you’ll draw her back in. If they’re truly not interested, you’ll waste less time and can move on to find better prospects.
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• When buyers perceive your indifference, they won’t feel strong-armed. This builds their ownership of the issue. Your indifference will support trust building because the buyer will perceive that you place your value on the offering and what it can do, not the sale itself.
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• Indifference also supports likeability because buyers perceive a peer relationship, and because neediness, the opposite of indifference, is repelling.
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• When you get a yes, the commitment trifecta is to get the verbal yes in front of other people, get the yes in writing, and get the buyer to communicate publicly (such as an e-mail to the buyer’s team or a press release) that they’re moving forward with you.
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• Any time prospects spend both time thinking, and energy on something, they’re making an investment.
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• Open-ended next steps are when the prospect says, “Yes, put together those solutions and e-mail them to me. Then I’ll get back to you with what we think we should do.” If you accept, you won’t have her involvement or ownership. You’ll change the dynamic of peer to subservience, and you’ll weaken your chance at winning.
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• The goal of prospecting is to capture attention and create interest and then convert that interest into a conversation. Note that we didn’t say the goal of prospecting is to find someone currently looking to purchase a particular product or service. For most, this is not what you want to do, because it doesn’t work often enough.
• Demand driven: Until it is actually needed, it is not needed (or wanted, or purchased). In this case, you’re selling to explicit need. With explicit need, the buyer perceives a need to solve a problem. Your first job is to explore the need, other possible needs, the issues creating and surrounding those needs, and then define and communicate the impact on the business of working with you.
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• Demand-driving product or service: It is needed, it is wanted, and it could provide substantial value in the right situation, but the prospective customer may not perceive the need or the existence of the solution. You have to bring it up for them to see it.
• When you are prospecting for a demand-driven product or service, you need to be either remembered or easily found at the elusive time a buyer perceives a need. Thus, your prospecting efforts will focus on getting on the radar screens of the potential clients and remaining there until the elusive time of need arises. As you stay on the radar screen, your job is to create a preference to work with you should the need arise for your products and services.
• Four in 10 buyers (42 percent) indicated that they accept cold calls. The two most important factors for them in accepting a cold call are: 1. I see a need for the offering, now or in the future. 2. The provider offers me something of value on the call—best practices, research findings, discussions with experts and practitioners, event invitations.
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• Cold calling works, but it works even better if you have paved the way with valuable information ahead of time.
• Salespeople often call too low in the organization and try to start a groundswell by working their way up. Call high to decision makers.
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• When you think about providing value, don’t just think about the value you will provide after they buy from you. Think about the value they’ll get just from speaking with you.
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• Whichever approach you choose, the prospect has to see value in the meeting itself. Eventually the prospect may get value out of your products and services, but for now, you need to sell the value of a first conversation.
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• On the other hand you also don’t always want to take yes for an answer immediately. Sometimes prospects say, “Yeah. That works,” and you can tell by their body language or tone of voice that they really aren’t happy with your proposed solution.
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• Don’t cave. It can be tempting to respond right away with, “How much can you spend?” or “Let me see if we can lower the price.” Don’t get anxious and give away the farm. Follow the guidelines outlined earlier in this chapter. Only then will you get to the heart of the issue, and you can find your way around it.
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• When someone says, “I have competitor bids for less,” you can acknowledge that other sellers’ prices are, indeed, all over the map, and that what you get from one provider isn’t necessarily the same as the other. Then ask the buyer, “Is there a reason you haven’t already rewarded them the business yet?” Clients often state why they’d prefer to work with you, and you can leverage those reasons to maintain your price.
• Anticipate and raise objections that may be below the surface. Don’t think that just because objections haven’t been raised they aren’t there. You take a risk when you bring up possible objections (welcome to sales), but if you’re not the front-runner by far, the risk is often worth taking. At the same time, you build the relationship with your honesty and openness. Buyers appreciate that.
• If you’ve presented the solution and the prospect says, “We’ll talk it over internally. Can you get back to me in a few weeks?” Your initial reaction might be, “Sure. Will do.” Don’t capitulate here! It’s better to say, “We can certainly talk again, but can you tell me what it is you’ll be discussing?” and then continue to probe.
• Once you accept a put-off you are put in the position of needing to chase the prospect. It also shifts the dynamic to one where you seem to want it more than the prospect does. You have to make sure you’re doing everything you can to maintain a peer dynamic and, as well, set actions that advance the sale versus letting it drift along.
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• Once you get your yes, get a signature and schedule the next steps. Don’t sell it and then buy it back.
• The more effort buyers expend in the process of buying, the more connected they are to seeing it through.
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• Time kills sales. The more time that goes by, the better the chance that purchasing inertia will take hold.
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• Buyers who see sellers as peers, and buying situations where the buyer is as interested in the sale as much as the seller, are more likely to yield sales.
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• A buy cycle refers to the way a person makes major purchases for themselves. If someone has a nonsupportive buy cycle, it means that the way they make major buying decisions for their own purchases negatively affects their ability to succeed in selling.
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