Don’t overcomplicate

You likely know better than your customers exactly how your range of products or services can solve their immediate needs, fit in with other systems they have, and overcome potential problems. The first sale you make to new customers may be only the tip of the iceberg in terms of everything you can do for them, so don’t overcomplicate it. Focus on solving the initial need. Letting your customers know that your solutions can provide much more and that they’re buying into a long-term solution is fine, but don’t focus too much on the future. If you do, you run a serious risk of delaying your sale. Instead, keep customers focused on the here and now and on the initial problem that you’re solving.

Any presentation or discussion about the capability of the solution needs to be straightforward and easy to comprehend. Don’t get sucked into product-speak or sidetracked by other things you can do. You need laser-sharp focus on pitching an easy-to-understand solution to a stated need.

I have seen many examples of salespeople losing a piece of business that really should have been won by overcomplicating matters, even when the customer was saying yes. One particular example involved a salesman having gone through the basics just fine and essentially having won the order, but then he went on to discuss some completely irrelevant technical considerations that the customer hadn’t even thought about and that wouldn’t ever be something that was important in delivering the solution. The net effect was that he worried the customer — who delayed the decision, spent the next few weeks deciding how to cope with some imaginative future need, and canceled the entire order process.

There’s a big difference between not overcomplicating and leaving out important information. You need to ensure that your customers have all the pertinent information as you guide them to making an informed choice.

Use the prospect’s terminology

When creating a proposition, discuss the merits of your solution, using language that your customers are familiar with. Take the time to understand the vocabulary used in their line of work. Your customers don’t need to know that your “widget type 7 interfaces to a type 9B and is driven by software version 8.6”; they need to know that your solution will work with whatever they’re currently using and that existing staff can use it without massive amounts of re-training.

For example, if a customer refers to clients, then you should use the term clients yourself and not customers. If a customer uses the term training, make sure you don’t say skill sets or education — stick to training. Your objective is to make your customers comfortable in dealing with you, and using a common vocabulary is a big part of this.

The last thing you want to do is alienate customers by talking in terms they either don’t easily relate to or may consider complicated. On the other hand, if a customer is using terminology that you’re not sure of or don’t understand, don’t just go along with it and echo it. Check. Ask questions. Not knowing doesn’t display a weakness; rather, it demonstrates that you’re actually listening and are acknowledging the customer as an expert. It also shows that you’re keen to ensure a good problem-to-solution fit while also ensuring that clarity and understanding occur in your communications. Customers love to be seen as experts and will usually be only too happy to explain in terms that you, as deferential to their knowledge, will understand.

You also need to be aware of natural language. Even English has different dialects, so you want to make sure you and your customer are talking about the same thing. If one of you isn’t speaking in your native tongue, this becomes even more important. Nothing is wrong with seeking clarification if in doubt rather than continuing based on your assumptions only to find you were wrong and have delayed getting to the yes decision.

Avoid introducing additional elements

If your solution addresses all the customer’s needs and also does a lot of other things, don’t get sucked into focusing too much on what else your customer can do with your solution. If it isn’t broken in the customer’s eyes, then don’t try to fix it. Making your customer aware — at least on a superficial level — that your solution will enable him to do x, y, and z better that he currently does is completely fine and even encouraged. But if z is the only thing that is driving the customer’s purchase needs, that is where your entire focus needs to be. Maybe y can help him better if he changed some aspects of his business, but introducing this when it isn’t a key requirement is asking for trouble and at an absolute minimum will cause a delay in getting your sale.

In some cases, introducing additional elements can lead to losing a sale altogether. The customer either becomes too focused on a non-core element or becomes concerned that something on the periphery isn’t quite right for the future and so decides to do nothing.

Being mindful of the lifetime value of a customer (see the nearby sidebar for more information), you can explore this area after the initial sale is made and implementation is underway. You want to avoid doing it too early, especially during the initial sales process, because your initial focus needs to be on closing the “now” sale.

After covering the customer’s requirements, don’t then get sucked into peripheral areas. If the customer takes the conversation into these areas, bring the discussion back to what you’ve both agreed the objectives are and ask the customer to affirm. If the customer opens up more areas of importance that suggests that he hasn’t thought through what he’s trying to achieve, revisit the objectives that you’ve agreed on to understand where the new requirements have arisen. (Chapter 3 provides more detail about agreeing on objectives.)

Focus on the prospect’s needs

In all likelihood, your customers are speaking to you about your solution because they have a specific problem that needs solving. Your first task in getting a yes is to discover exactly what that perceived need is and then focus your selling messages on how your solution is going to address that need or needs. However, you want to avoid getting sidetracked by elements of the solution that, although exciting to you, aren’t part of the core issue that your customers are trying to solve because you run a risk of losing focus on addressing the key issue. The narrower you can make the key issue, the easier it will be to address it and get to the yes decision faster.

I recently was given a demonstration of a software system that was going to make it much easier for me to quickly identify target prospects according to the salesman. He had correctly identified my core need as fast access to quality data that was 100 percent accurate. The salesman kept straying away from this core need in his demonstration, though, by showing me lots of different things that I could do with searches and lots of interesting but irrelevant information I could discover. When I managed to focus his attention back on the core need of accuracy, I quickly discovered that the proposed solution had some glaring problems. Rather than try to address my issue, the salesman ignored it and continued to push other features. By failing to focus on my core requirements, he quickly lost any chance of making a sale.

Sometimes your customers will know exactly what they want and how they want to achieve it, in which case your primary objective is still to focus on how you’re going to meet their needs better than any competitor. In these cases, how you focus on ensuring their needs can be met is often the key differentiator in making sure you, and not a competitor, get the yes vote.

By having laser-sharp focus, understanding your customers’ needs, and then meeting their needs, you’ll quickly gain the respect you need to be perceived by customers as someone they can do business with. Forget the size of your commission check — that will take care of itself. Focus instead on the needs of your customers and then how your solution is going to meet those needs. Keep this at the forefront of your mind when looking to win new business, and you’ll be on the right track; lose sight of this, and you’ll soon discover that you’re in trouble.

Getting objections in the open

An objection in a sales process is simply a reason for your customers not to accept your solution or an issue that needs to be overcome to get to the yes.

In any remotely complex sale, you’ll likely have customer objections to overcome. The important thing to remember is that you need to discover what these objections are as early in the sales process as possible. Doing so enables you to present your solution in a way that deals with each of the objections. The last thing you want is to be ready to sign the order when an objection rears its head for the first time. That will lead to at best a delay and at worse a lost sale.

To bring out the objections, you can ask upfront whether the customer has any reason not to buy your solution. However, this approach may still not get the objection into the open and may make you seem pushy. So you need to find ways around this.

Another approach is the trial-close approach. Here, when discussing the key issues from the customer’s perspective, you can ask a question like, “If we cover x, y, and z, is there any other reason you may not go ahead?” This approach gives the customer an opportunity to disclose any hidden agenda that you have yet to uncover, and it enables you to put down a marker that is difficult for the customer to turn back from later. You’re not asking for an order at this stage; you’re merely covering the bases and ensuring that you both understand what needs to be achieved to progress the deal to a yes. It also shows the customer that you’re professional and serious about meeting his objectives. If you get any form of pushback from the customer at this type of question, then you need to consider your qualification criteria (which I look at in Chapter 19).

Objections in a typical sales situation include the following:

• Affordability
• Complexity
• Compatibility
• Trust

I talk about trust in the next section. The other standard objections should be covered early in the sales process. In Chapter 10, I look at the importance of overcoming objections in more detail.

You never want to dismiss or ignore anything that your customer says to you that implies a problem or concern. If you commit to come back to him with an answer to any question, then make sure you do. Unless you take note of these issues and adequately address them, they’re likely to come back and bite you.

Building on trust

In winning new business, you’re not setting out to become best buddies with your customers, nor are you looking to become a “yes man” to their every whim. You’re building a business relationship based on supply and demand of a product or service that you’re providing. You need your customers to be able to trust you to sell them something that will meet their needs and to ensure that you’re perceived as an expert in your field who can be relied upon to be responsive, open, and trustworthy. You want to be someone who they can happily go to for advice on the solution and who they’re happy to refer to friends and colleagues with similar needs.

This trust is something that you earn; it’s not yours by right. Your customers are many times more likely to say yes to someone who has established this trust bond and has proven to deliver on commitments. This is why it is important not to overstate your benefits and to always do things that you say you will.

When you’re involved in a competitive sales situation, it can often be tempting to trash your competitors and to expend negative energy in running them down or showing why they’re not the right solution for your customers. This approach is unlikely to help you build trust, and you should avoid it at all costs. Doing this is risking telling your customers that they’re wrong in considering any alternative — and who are you to tell them they’re wrong? Your energies will be much better and positively spent by focusing on how your solution can meet their needs. Although you may need to reference competitive offerings, you should always do so in a professional manner. If your competitors do the opposite, then that just adds to your credibility and helps in the trust-building stakes.

Trust works the other way also; you need to be able to trust what your customers are telling you in regard to both their objectives and their proposed solution. See Chapter 20 for more details.

Considering performance-related payment

In a complex or financially large sale, especially where the product or service is delivered over time, offering a structured payment plan based on performance criteria that you determine with your customer can both benefit the customer and show him that you’re confident in your offering. Remember that your objective is to get to a yes decision as quickly as possible and that you want to make it easy for the customer to give this to you.

I cover how to structure a deal in Chapter 11. Don’t be afraid of the concept of performance-related payment, but you need to ensure that you build in safeguards for your business as well as for your customer. Performance-related payment can be a bit of a minefield, and you shouldn’t agree or enter into it lightly. But in the right circumstances and handled in the right way, it can be a powerful tool in your mission to get to a yes as quickly as possible.

If your specific sale doesn’t lend itself to performance-related payments for whatever reason, don’t be afraid to rule this out because it will apply only in some circumstances. If structuring a deal this way is obviously going to lead to delay, then stay clear of suggesting it.

Generally, I am wary of proposing performance-related payment and don’t consider offering it upfront. I am inclined to hold it back until one of two things happen: either the customer raises it as an issue or it becomes obvious that you’re not going to get to a yes quickly — and then only if the qualification criteria are met. If the customer raises it, then you can turn this to your advantage by, for example, making it conditional on an order date being agreed.

Your company sales guidelines or terms and conditions of business are likely to have a bearing on the parameters you have at your disposal in this area, so make sure you’re completely familiar with them. You don’t want to be in a position where you have to tell customers that you don’t know or will have to get back to them if the issue is raised. Remember that you’re positioning yourself as the expert and as such you should be well versed in both the product or service specifics as well as the commercial terms.