CHAPTER 17
Delivering Value with Peak/End Selling
What are you doing to create peak events and make your selling memorable? How can you create a Value Gap with each sales interaction? To answer these questions, let’s look back at some of the important sales topics we have covered so far.
Creating a positive first perception. It doesn’t matter what form your first contact with the customer takes. It could be a cold call, a meeting at a networking event, responding to a sales lead, or a referral from another customer or mutual acquaintance. Always be prepared to make a first impression that will create a positive perception of you, your product, and your company. I once worked with a salesperson, John, who reliably created a positive perception and a peak event in the minds of his customers by asking during their first interaction what he called his “killer question.” This question would expose a gap in the customer’s thinking about the requirements, leaving customers to wonder why they hadn’t thought of it themselves. It was a great trust-building step that was memorable for the customer when the time came to make a purchase decision.
Immediate responsiveness to inquiries and questions. If customers have been trained through the years not to expect responsiveness from salespeople, just imagine how they feel when they get it. It is a memorable event. As mentioned previously, IBM has set a standard for responsiveness that it feels will differentiate itself from its competitors. Now just imagine if IBM could turn that 24-hour window into one-hour responsiveness. That would be a peak event for customers. I implemented a process for one of my clients that enabled it to respond to every sales lead within 30 minutes. This became a peak experience that often won the sale on the first call.
Discovery. Demonstrate deep domain expertise and business acumen with the quality of the probing questions you ask about the customer’s industry, business, and specific requirements. Build your expertise to a level where you can create “aha” moments in the customer’s mind by asking questions about the requirements and business objectives that the customer hadn’t thought of. Causing customers to change their thinking about what would constitute the best solutions to meet their needs leads to peak experiences.
Shaping the buyer’s vision. We will get into this in detail in Chapter 18, but in short, it means shaping the vision in customers’ minds of the optimal solution that will meet their needs. This process begins during the discovery stage of your selling process. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, this is a peak event with a demonstrable payback for the salesperson who can make it happen.
Provide meaningful insights and context. These days, customers have no shortage of content to analyze about the products and services they are evaluating for purchase. But they may require more information to help them make decisions. Illuminate customers’ problems and the decisions that they must make by using third-party information to provide insights and a context for that decision. The Internet is full of information (white papers, industry reports, industry surveys, academic reports, news articles) that can create a context for a decision in relation to overall trends in the customer’s industry relating to technology, operations, marketing, sales, distribution, capital investments, and competitors, among others. The value you deliver through context can be decisive for customers in their decision making and therefore a peak experience.
Stories. Well-crafted sales stories are another source of context. The best are concise tellings of how an existing customer is gaining tangible value from using your product or service. These stories can often trigger a deeper understanding of the value of the solution you are selling. Follow the story format that I lay out for you in Chapter 37, and your stories will be valuable and memorable.
Delivering a peak experience is half the battle. Making your last, or end, interaction memorable for the customer is essential as well. Creating the peak event often results in winning the sale, as explained in Chapter 9. But winning the sale or providing a peak experience for the customer is no guarantee that you will win the order. It means that you just need to work that much harder to lock in your advantage by finishing strong and making your last interaction count.
What should be the last interaction you have with customers before they make their decision? And does it really make a difference?
Yes, it does really make a difference. A story often told about the Peak/End rule has to do with taking a vacation. Two people, Jack and Jill, took vacations on Maui with their spouses. Jill stayed for two weeks and went whale watching, took a sunset cruise, and went snorkeling with sea turtles during the first week. Then for the second week she stayed by the pool or beach to catch up on her reading. Jack was on Maui for only a week. He golfed, went whale watching, snorkeled, and on his last day went with a tour to the 10,000-foot summit of Mt. Haleakala to see the sunrise and then rode a bicycle down the mountain all the way to the ocean. Jill’s vacation began strong but ended on a quiet note. Jack’s vacation had some good moments but ended with an incredible experience cruising down the side of a volcano. Of the two, who had the more pleasurable memory of their vacation? Studies of the Peak/End rule show that it would accurately predict that Jack would have the more pleasurable memory of Maui. As Schwarz says in his book, the Peak/End rule demonstrates that we evaluate our experiences based on “how good they feel at their best, and how good they feel at the end.”
I believe that the best way to finish your sales process is to ask what I call “closing questions.” I don’t mean, closing-the-order questions. Asking a closing question is not the same as asking for the order. In fact, you can pretty much guarantee yourself that asking for the order is neither a peak event nor a positive memorable last sales interaction for a prospect.
Closing questions are the questions you ask to verify that there are no gaps in your understanding of the customer and the problem that needs to be solved, the customer’s understanding of your product or service and the value that it will deliver, as well as to ensure their understanding of your proposal and how it will meet his or her business and financial objectives. In addition, closing questions ensure that the customer has used the right assumptions in her internal analysis of your offer. My experience of more than 30 years has shown me that customers are reluctant at the end of your selling process and their buying process to admit that they don’t fully understand the details of your proposed solution. Incomplete information can be problematic for your chances of winning.
Closing questions attempt to verify that the customer has enough information to make a decision. Examples include:
“At our first meeting you stated that you needed a cost-effective method to improve control over critical production processes. Do you understand how our solution will provide the needed process improvements, as well as the IRR (internal rate of return) on your investment, which exceed your stated requirements?”
“I have this spreadsheet that we have developed to help our customers project the financial returns from their investment in our solution. Have you performed this calculation yet? Let’s take a few minutes to enter some of your assumptions and verify that we can meet your internal financial hurdles.”
“Earlier I provided you with a detailed project plan and installation management guide. Do you understand how our solution will integrate and improve the performance of your current systems? … With your permission, I’d like to take a few minutes to review some of the key implementation steps with you.”
Closing questions are like discovery questions; you have to be professional but direct. Customers rarely volunteer their lack of understanding. You must be sensitive to them and to their perception of the time you are using. But you don’t want any competitive advantage that you created through peak experiences to disappear if customers decide they can’t buy from you because they have incomplete information.
Your closing questions will leave the customer perceiving you as a detailed, customer-centric professional. By focusing on clearing up lingering questions or uncertainties, you will have created value by making it easier for the customer to reach a decision faster. Think about what the customer’s perception of you will be at that moment compared to that of a competitor who is just asking for the order without making sure that the customer has gotten all the necessary information.
One final point about Peak/End selling. During the annual Tour de France bicycle race, there is another competition taking place within the overall competition. At the top of each major climb during the 22-day race, points are awarded to the first rider to reach the summit. The rider who wins the most points on climbs throughout the race wears the distinctive white-and-red polka-dotted jersey to signify his status as the King of the Mountains.
Similarly, in selling you want to be King of the Peaks. The peaks are those moments in the sales process at the apex of a customer interaction. They are the moments you use to create the maximum value for your prospects. These are opportunities to set yourself apart from the competition, to rise above the noise, to help your prospect move closer to making a decision, and to put yourself in the lead position to win the deal.