CHAPTER 10

The Speed of Responsiveness

In PART I, I took you through all the key ingredients for increasing your sales effectiveness—except for one. I left out responsiveness, which is the single most important skill you must master and integrate into your selling. It’s so important that it requires its own section of this book. If you’re not completely responsive to your prospects and customers, you’ll never reach the sales goals you have set for yourself.

A lack of responsiveness in sales affects companies of all sizes. As you’ll learn in Chapter 12, even a company like IBM, a global behemoth with virtually unlimited resources, suffers from poor responsiveness. It doesn’t have to be this way. Responsiveness is not only the most important sales attribute to master, but it’s also one of the easiest. And, for you, what could be better than having such a simple and practical method for building trust, credibility, and differentiation with your prospects?

Responsiveness has a specific definition in sales. It’s the combination of two inseparable elements: information and speed. Take away one element, and you’re no longer responsive.

Being responsive to your prospect is about more than just being quick to respond. For instance, if you’re fast to respond to your prospect’s inquiry but can’t provide any data or information that the prospect can use to move forward in the buying process, then you’re not being responsive. Being fast is good for gold medals, but in the absence of information, speed is not a virtue in sales.

The easiest way to remember the formulation for complete responsiveness is to see it as an equation:

Responsiveness = Information + Speed

Speed, obviously, is the time it takes to provide the requested information to a customer. To become a truly responsive seller, speed needs to be measured in minutes or hours, not in days or weeks. We’ve established that time is in short supply for your prospects. Your performance has to meet or exceed their expectations. It’s all too common for salespeople to feel good about themselves when they receive a question from a customer in an e-mail and provide a response the next business day. But what if your primary competitor satisfactorily answers that same question within 30 minutes? What has happened to your competitive position? Has it (a) worsened, (b) improved, or (c) stayed the same? The only realistic answer is a, worsened.

So flip that last question on its head. What will happen to your sales results when you commit to being absolutely and completely responsive to every customer enquiry and request? What will happen to your competitive posture on every deal you work on when your competitors have to struggle to keep pace with your responsiveness? And what will happen to the size of your commission checks when you set your standard to be responsive to all customer questions within an hour as opposed to a business day or a week?

Before we move on to the next chapter, I want you to consider responsiveness in another important light. You probably don’t consider the impact of physics on your sales efforts. But you should.

Think of your prospects’ buying processes in terms of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, is well known, among other things, for his Uncertainty Principle, in which he demonstrated that the act of observing or measuring a process changes its outcome. Although Heisenberg arrived at his famous formulation through his work with the behavior of subatomic particles, I’ve found that a variation of the Uncertainty Principle applies to sales as well.

According to the Andy Paul Uncertainty Principle of Selling, the process of selling to your prospect invariably changes the prospect’s requirements and decision criteria moving forward. The very process of discovery, of helping a prospect define her requirements, and of providing the data and information in response to her questions, forces her to reassess her needs and redefine the criteria she will use in evaluating sellers and making an informed purchase decision.

What happens when you sell to a prospect? What happens as your prospect moves through the decision-making process? What happens when the prospect learns that your product provides a feature and an associated value that she hadn’t anticipated when she first put her requirements together? Or what happens when your prospect’s expectations for the new machine tool she’s looking to acquire aren’t fully met by any of the products she has evaluated? The trajectory of the buying process will change, and the information required to make a decision will also change. This necessarily forces immediate strategy adjustments on the part of the seller.

Picture yourself making a purchase decision. Let’s say you are buying a home. You began with certain requirements in mind. But as you move through the process of gathering information about various homes, you develop a fuller picture of the various neighborhoods and house sizes that are available in your price range. As a result, your requirements change, and the criteria you established at the beginning of your housing search also change. Suddenly you’re armed with a new set of questions that you need your real estate agent to answer.

Why is this uncertainty important to you? Because it reinforces the necessity of being completely and rapidly responsive to your prospects in their search for the information they need to gather and evaluate in order to make good decisions. Too many salespeople fall into the trap of thinking about their sales process and their prospects’ buying process as the instructions on a shampoo bottle: just lather, rinse, and repeat. However, your prospect’s buying process is anything but a linear, inflexible sequence of static events. It’s a living, breathing, dynamic series of questions to which answers typically generate more questions. This places a very real premium on responsiveness.

Embracing responsiveness enables you to quickly and effectively react to changes in the customer’s decision-making criteria. This is a quality that every salesperson needs to cultivate and master. It’s an essential tool to build trust with prospects, to develop credibility around the solution you’re selling, and, most important, to differentiate you in tangible ways from your competitors. All of which lead to more sales.