A single vantage point is an absurdly narrow vantage point from which to view the world.
—Aleister Crowley
As i warned you at the start of this book, the main threats to being One-Up are hubris and arrogance. Consider, for example, the tone in this paragraph:
Were I to decide which one of us should determine what steps to take to improve your results, I would humbly insist that I should lead the process, given that I am One-Up and you are One-Down. You might believe that you should be able to have a say in this process, since you desire better results, a position I fully appreciate and support. Any conflict around the process would result from your attempt to circumvent some important conversation or commitment, in which case, I should decide for you, and you should defer to my judgment.
Now, I hope you never use this specific language when talking to your clients. Despite its thin veneer of humility, bordering on servile obsequiousness, every word in the paragraph is about making your audience feel One-Down, so they never forget your superior abilities and certainly never see you as a partner. That's why one rule for being One-Up is never make the other person feel One-Down. But as cringy as the paragraph is, you must believe every word of it and allow every idea to drive your actions.
You must lead your client through the conversations they need to reach the outcomes they want, and you can't stop leading just because there's conflict or even a challenge to your authority. But the best leaders are often the best diplomats. In this situation, for instance, you could execute the same move by asking a simple question: “Can I share with you what my concern is and help you ensure you can move forward, without having to worry about some of the challenges that will prevent you from generating the better results you need?” No arrogance, no hubris, no conflict. Instead, counsel, advice, and suggestions.
You cannot guide your clients without leading them, but you cannot truly lead them if every conversation is about your own superiority. As we explore how to utilize your One-Up vantage point to facilitate a needs-based buyer's journey, please don't forget that your language and your attitude matter just as much as your insights.
You've probably heard that to succeed in sales, you need only “sell good products and solve your client's problems.” While those things help, that general strategy—the legacy solution approach—actually prevents salespeople and sales organizations from producing better results because it underserves their clients. The “sell the problem, solve the problem” approach limits your ability to occupy the One-Up position because it doesn't allow you to see what actually stops you from winning deals: your client's buying problem.
To be One-Up, you must distinguish between two kinds of problems. On one hand, there are the presenting problems your contacts are experiencing that you are well-prepared to solve—things like labor shortages, inefficient logistics, poor communication, or low employee morale. But on the other hand, there are deep-seated, strategic challenges that prevent them from successfully changing and improving their outcomes. One-Down salespeople often pick up on the first kind of problem but aren't even aware of the second kind. But if you can't help your clients improve their problem-solving in the first place, it won't matter how many solutions you have for their presenting problems.
No matter how you were taught and trained to sell, chances are that your sales processes and sales methodologies are concerned with your own success, not with meeting your client's needs. In fact, all the hype about “the sales process” was that it would provide a repeatable, paint-by-numbers way to win deals, helping every salesperson reach their goals. Thus, sales enablement became about improving the salesperson's ability to follow directions and (somehow) improve their effectiveness. Neither process helps your contacts and stakeholders buy in a way that ensured they succeeded. In fact, for decades, few sales organizations paid serious attention to the challenges their client companies have with buying.
Without ever having seen the slide deck that outlines your sales process, I can tell you what it includes: “target,” “qualify,” “discovery,” “presentation,” “negotiation,” and “won/lost.” If you use Salesforce.com, you have eleven stages that include “market-qualified lead,” “sales-qualified lead,” and a number of stages that are even more unnecessary, except to give marketing their props. Tell me if these steps sound all too familiar: “awareness of a problem,” “exploration,” “evaluation,” “purchase,” and if your marketing team has optimistic cheerleaders or is located somewhere close to Silicon Valley, the last stage is “evangelist.”
Those models aren't all bad; they at least give you a way to know where you are in space and provide some direction about where to go. I have always been dubious about linear sales processes, believing that a dynamic conversation doesn't lend itself to simplified models. While there is nothing inherently wrong with outlining the sales process and the buyer's journey, the view of sales enablement is not the view of buyer enablement and has proven inadequate to helping companies change and improve their results. I am even more convinced now that One-Up agility beats a slide deck any day.
A friend wrote a LinkedIn post that included the statement “Salespeople need to sell the way buyers want to buy.” I was admittedly triggered and fired off a comment, condemning his idea as incredibly dangerous and largely responsible for poor B2B results. What clients say they want on surveys by insight-based groups doesn't match their behaviors, especially with big companies. Your clients don't know that they are skipping conversations and making it less likely they will succeed. Following that advice cements the salesperson in a One-Down position: compliant, reactive, servile, and ready to take orders like a fast-food cashier. If all you do is take (or follow!) your client's orders, you can't create value for them.
It's time to raise the bar on how you engage with your clients. Think of it this way. You spend every working day guiding companies to the better results they need. Your client changes only occasionally, giving them very little expertise about how best to decide, what factors they need to consider, what steps are necessary, and what choice will serve them the best. Because you have more experience, you should lead a facilitated, needs-based, buyer's journey.
The word “facilitated” means you will lead your contacts and the other stakeholders who are part of the conversation. “Needs-based” means that you will recognize what your prospect needs to do to successfully decide and improve their results. Like my Sherpa at Basecamp One, you have guided many people to the summit, helping them arrive there safely. Your client rarely even visits the mountain, so allowing them to lead the climb is almost certain to end badly. Your contacts are bright people with a lot of experience, but you are One-Up because you have much greater experience making the decision you will ask them to make, the one that will move their business forward.
Before we describe the facilitated, needs-based buyer's journey in more detail, let's look at why buyers can't—or don't—buy.
An enormous number of challenges prevent buyers from changing, even when the change is necessary. Whatever problem your product or service solves, you must first deal with the complications that prevent your decision-makers and shapers from acting. Being One-Up, you are perfectly positioned to identify and resolve these complications, allowing your prospect to move forward in the sales conversation and, eventually, improve their position. Here's what to look for.
The list of complications above isn't anywhere close to complete, but it should put you on the trail of whatever your buyers do that keeps them from successfully changing. You can't solve what you can't see. My thesis is that 70 percent of change initiatives fail because the company treated what is a complex buying decision as something merely transactional. Trying to sell like buyers want to buy leaves you in the One-Down position, taking orders—and failing your client by allowing them to fail.
Let us turn the spotlight on the buyer's journey, since that is the context in which your vantage point is most valuable. Your sales conversation is your best vehicle for enabling this journey, but you must actively facilitate it by identifying what your client needs to move forward. Let's look at a practical, tactical, non-marketing-department-designed buyer's journey.
The first stage of the buyer's journey is not awareness. You must reject the One-Down belief that your client has to suffer negative consequences before you can offer help. Instead, demonstrate your proactive ability to compel change before your client experiences the harm that might otherwise cause them to change. Your approach will differ depending on where you find your client.
No matter what your clients are experiencing, there are certain things that will benefit them. When you're One-Up, you will be able to give you buyers the things they need, including the following:
Maps are valuable because they let you recognize where you are and plot a path to where you need to go. The traditional sales process functions the same way. It doesn't provide your prospective clients with a tremendous amount of value, especially if you perceive a sale as a straight line, but it does remind you of some things you need to do to enable your clients to succeed.
In my book The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales, you will find a very different map of the sales conversation. The chapters follow a pattern you might recognize: not a linear set of instructions, but ten conversations your prospective client needs to make a good decision and execute an initiative that provides them with better outcomes. I've included a shortened version of the map below. Hopefully, it will help you recognize when your prospective clients are trying to skip critical conversations, avoid the decisions they need to make, and postpone the actions they need to take.
To remind you about nonlinearity, I want to remind you that at any time, starting with your first conversation, you may find your main contact asking their peers to join the conversation. More broadly, you don't always get to control when your clients pursue some of the outcomes they believe they need. They may also hit you with a barrage of concerns about the path you are leading them down or about the change they need to make. Overall, you may have to facilitate the consensus conversation when it occurs, not when you believe it makes the most sense.
Now you have a One-Up map that presumes you are not going straight from point A to point B with no real challenges. Instead, it provides you with a way to recognize what conversations your client has completed and which ones are still necessary. Your clients may need additional conversations, and they'll probably happen in a different order. Recognizing those variations is part of what makes you One-Up, making your vantage point your client's advantage.
Being One-Up and possessing a useful set of maps allows you to recognize the conversations your clients need to complete their journey, always with your help, and always following your lead. When you recognize that a conversation was skipped or has not been successfully concluded, you must ensure it is completed. You will find that your contacts don't always know who they need to include in these conversations, and they often wait too long to begin the process of important outcomes like building organizational consensus. It is often necessary to explain why your client needs to have the conversations necessary to make the best decision for their business, and how they are critical to successfully conducting the change they need to make.
The first obstacle you will encounter when trying to share your vantage point will come from clients who believe in—and are committed to—their legacy buying process, even when it harms their decision and their results. Imagine a client who releases an RFP and then meets with three companies, giving each one ninety minutes to make their case in a bake-off. Any process that treats a strategic decision as if it were transactional neutralizes your One-Upness by ensuring you are One-Down.
Because you are One-Up (or will be after practicing these strategies), you have the knowledge and skills to disrupt this arm's-length process in a meaningful and diplomatic way. You are not doing so out of some sort of malice—though I would understand your emotional response to a value-eliminating process—but to prevent your prospective client from making a mistake that would be easily avoided.
The One-Up strategy for disrupting the RFP process is to read the RFP from the end, searching for something you can use to complain about the way the questions and prompts are written. (This should not be difficult, since most RFPs are usually based on a template not updated since the Clinton administration.) Once you discover something to gripe about, call the person who sent you the RFP, and ask them a question they cannot answer. Here's a good one: “I am not sure how to respond to some of your questions. A number of them are written in a way that doesn't allow us to answer them. How do you want us to describe the way we do these things now to lower costs and provide a better result?” The game you are playing here is called “I know something you don't know.” Just like that, your contact is now in the One-Down position, especially if they feel like they are missing something they might have been expected to know.
If you are really One-Up you should call the person who is going to care most about the results the RFP is designed to deliver, instead of calling the purchasing department. When you call an executive, you tell them their RFP has problems and ask them to intervene with the purchasing function, to allow you to provide a newer, better approach that they will want to consider. At worst, you will get a second look. One reason executives prefer to work with people who are One-Up is that it allows them to outsource the expertise they lack. When you make sure your clients know what they need to know, you prevent them from having to worry about the area you have covered for them.
Another challenge comes from the intermediaries who stand between you and the people you intend to serve. Third parties, brokers, and professional buyers are paid to treat every purchase as if they were buying a bushel of apples. No matter how complex the purchase, no matter how important the results, it's just another transaction to them. There is only one way to get in front of third parties and that is a strategy called Year Zero. The Year Zero strategy starts the day your target client signs a three-year contract with your competitor. That very day, you start a campaign to create relationships with the people who made that decision. Your One-Down competitors will sit passively, waiting for the three years to end so they can fill out another RFP. Getting this right means creating more—and deeper—relationships than the third party, the broker, or their purchasing agent. You will find you have little trouble being One-Up over any third party, especially one that lacks your expertise.
Never let it be said that I believe that anything I write about is easy to execute. But all these strategies are necessary and especially important to being One-Up—and you can quote me on that. The key is explaining to your contacts what they need to do and the value it will bring them. Being One-Up means using your vantage point to explain the value of what you are asking your client to do, the potential negative consequences for avoiding that action, and the positive outcomes that come from following your instruction.
One sales organization I know found that helping their clients required sixteen different steps. They built a slide deck to show their clients all the things they would need to do together to transform the client's business and their results. They shared their map with their clients, who responded by asking for a copy of the roadmap they would need to follow together. For the first time, their clients recognized that the better results they needed would not be obtained by finding a supplier with a lower price. The adoption of the sales organization's map is proof positive of One-Upness.
The complex environment that seems to provide a constant, disruptive, and accelerating change makes it more difficult for people to decide to change, primarily due to a lack of certainty and a reasonable fear of getting a decision wrong. Because this is true, the new competency is one we can call agility. Physically, agility is the ability to move quickly and easily, pivoting when necessary and changing direction on a dime. But it also means being able to think and understand quickly.
The sales process's nonlinear character means you need to recognize where you are, where your client is, and how to serve them. Your vantage point—your understanding of what your client needs from you—provides you and your client an advantage. It unlocks both of you from a static, linear process, opening up the possibility to work together to ensure you reach the summit.
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