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Insights and Information Disparity
Information is the resolution of uncertainty.
—Claude Shannon
You cannot be One-Up without maintaining information disparity, which means you possess information your client is not aware of or has not yet recognized. The way you improve your client's decisions and results is by transferring your insights to them, moving them from One-Down to One-Up in the course of one or more conversations. This core strategy is the execution of “I know something you don't know. May I share it with you?”
Trade Secrets
When large companies started to professionalize sales in the 1920s, they had the advantage of total information disparity. Very little product information was easily available to prospects; Google was generations away, so outside of catalogs and stores, there was no way to learn about the increasing number of products and services ushered in by the Industrial Age. Both B2C and B2B customers had no choice but to speak with a salesperson. But those salespeople also had to gain the client's trust in their company, which they usually did by talking about the company's history or reputation. Not knowing who you could trust was an obstacle to buying and selling, especially with snake oil salesmen around every corner, so the rule of the day was caveat emptor (buyer beware).
Because information was scarce, the salesperson would also have to explain their product's features and benefits, using the opportunity to insist that the customer's friends and neighbors would be jealous of their shiny new SnarfBlat 3000. A salesperson with the power of information disparity could use it to take advantage of their prospective clients, not just by manipulating their egos but by withholding information or exaggerating their claims. For many customers, there was little recourse and no significant way for the customer to share complaints with a wide audience. The negative stereotype of the untrustworthy salesman, one that has plagued the profession of sales for decades, took root in this environment.
Consider, for example, this talk track from General Motors' manual Selling Chevrolets: A Book of General Information for Chevrolet Retail Salesmen, published circa 1926. It appears in Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America, by Walter A. Friedman.
Prospect: “My old car is worth at least $100.00 more than you offer me.”
Salesman: “Your old car, Mr. Prospect, has given you a lot of pleasure and service. You are thoroughly familiar with its condition, and I can understand how it may appear to you to be worth more. But the price of a used car, just like anything else, is determined by the demand for it. It is impossible to offer you more for your old car, much as we would like to do so, but we can offer you many quality features that cannot be duplicated in any other car at or near the price of a new Chevrolet.” (Show him features and ask for the order—often.)
In this example, the rather dismissive and somewhat condescending salesperson is taught to exploit an information disparity about the market price and demand for used cars. There was little chance that the prospect would know whether the salesperson was taking advantage of them, a fact the salesperson could manipulate by unethically withholding certain information. General Motors didn't invent this bad behavior, but they did take full advantage of their customers' One-Down ignorance.
Today, however, using that technique would be impossible. The prospect would say something like, “My car is worth $1,200 more than you are offering me, and even that is below Blue Book. In fact, your dealership just sold the same make and model with much higher mileage for $2,100 more than you are offering for mine.” This relative information parity levels the playing field—and for particularly well-informed buyers, caveat venditor (seller beware) is the new rule.
The New Information Disparity
This drastic shift in information parity has rendered legacy approaches impotent. Remember that legacy approaches tend to start with easily available product information, which means they create no real value for the client. Likewise, while company reputation still plays a role, focusing on your company's history is almost never relevant to your prospect.
Here's the good news: While buyers can learn a lot from their own self-directed research, perhaps enough to make an expert consumer purchase, in a complex B2B sale, insight and experience are still necessary to good decision-making. Relying on your own knowledge for a complex purchase is like diagnosing yourself on WebMD: You might get a lot of information, but without the professional wisdom to apply it, you're likely to decide you have MacGregor's Syndrome. While there is substantial information parity when it comes to easily searchable facts, there is still an enormous information disparity; as John Cougar Mellencamp wrote, “I know a lot of things, but I don't know a lot of other things.” As it turns out, your incredibly smart doctor can know less than your Sherpa about altitude sickness, especially when you doctor lives 500 feet above sea level.
To help move your B2B clients from One-Down to One-Up, you need to engage the new information disparity. Being One-Up requires you to correct that disparity in the areas where your clients are lacking insights, recommendations, and a prescription. In the past, salespeople used information disparity to take advantage of their customers; today, we create a parity of information that generates an advantage for our clients—all while helping us earn the right to their business.
You Don't Know What You Don't Know
One of the more helpful steps to improve your ability to be One-Up is to recognize that you are mostly One-Down. It's an act of intellectual humility to recognize that, regardless of your education, you are mostly ignorant. Personally, I try to become slightly less ignorant each day, knowing that no matter how much I learn, I still don't know what I don't know. You and your clients suffer that same human malady, because we'll never quite rid ourselves of information disparity.
It's difficult to know what is good and right and true in a world overrun by data and information, especially when sleek production quality can make poor ideas, incomplete information, and flat-out lies look like insight. You need look no further than opinions about your diet. Should you be following a ketogenic diet or eating raw foods? Is it better to be a carnivore, an omnivore, or a vegan? Should you practice intermittent fasting or eat three meals a day? More information often confuses people, and algorithms designed to keep your attention bring you more of what keeps you glued to your screens, the kind of pattern that causes people to believe that the earth is flat (or that a lower price is a better value).
One of the ways to determine which information to share is to ask what value it provides your contact. Information about your company or your products does not enable your client to do anything they could not already do, making that level of information a commodity, at best, if not outright meaningless. Using information disparity to your advantage means finding the areas where your insights and experiences let you enable your clients to solve a very different, and a more difficult, set of problems.
The New Information Disparity in Six Questions
The following six questions provide a way to think about where your contacts are missing information and how that causes them uncertainty—an idea contained in this chapter's epigraph from Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. They're not exhaustive, but they're a good start.
What Is Going On?
The stakeholders you call on are head down, running their own business. Each day, they are confronted with new problems to go with an already large number of unresolved issues and challenges. Sure, they'd like to keep up with the trends, forces, and new innovations that would improve their decisions, but few have the time or bandwidth to do so. Peter Drucker, the greatest management thinker of all time, warned executives that the larger they grew their businesses, the more difficult it would be to create value for their clients, as their focus would naturally shift inward. Drucker himself had no staff, other than a typist to turn his handwritten pages into 53 books. His prediction was accurate for many sales organizations, where internal problems grow, leaving less attention for external value creation.
By creating a deficit of time and attention, the always-on modern workplace creates a new type of information disparity, but also gives you the opportunity to be One-Up, sharing information with your clients that will prevent them from being One-Down. When you can step in and give a client a briefing that catches them up on what is going on their world and how it impacts them, you are moving them closer to One-Up. Soon, they'll count on your briefings to keep them on top of their game, even requesting that you brief their teams and their bosses. They'll no longer have to worry about keeping up with what's going on, releasing that responsibility to you.
Why Am I Struggling to Produce Results?
Your clients have a deep need to discover what they don't know. This is something that is overlooked in legacy approaches, which base the entire discovery stage on unearthing a client's problem. Your clients already know they have a problem. In fact, they know they have a lot of problems, some more important than others, and a few they believe to be intractable. Here there should be parity, with both you and your client understanding the problems they are experiencing.
Much of the time, information disparity exists because your client does not understand what has changed outside of their company. The root causes of many of their problems are often trends and forces that your contacts aren't aware of (and may never recognize unless you share them). Eliminating that disparity not only helps your client but is all but certain to create a preference to work with—and buy from—you. Your ability to explain the implications of the external trends, factors, and forces preventing your clients from generating results begins to connect the dots for them. As we'll explore later in this chapter, the best way to solve your client's presenting problem is to deal with its root cause—and the best way to compel change is to show how the outside world drives those root causes.
What Am I Missing?
One question salespeople often ask is whether to tempt a prospective client by implying that they're working with the client's direct competitor. While this technically does correct a form of information disparity, it's a terrible strategy because it broadcasts that you cannot be trusted—a death knell for One-Upness. More importantly, there is a better way to use your knowledge and your experience to help your clients with the better results they need.
You would be better off saying something like, “We have learned a lot about your industry over the last eighteen months.” This approach makes two notable gains: it piques your contact's curiosity, and it shows that you know things that your contact will find valuable. Decision-makers often fail to make decisions because they are missing information, so the people you serve want to know what they're missing. Some of that information comes from what other companies are doing and how well it's working. Because you work with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of clients, you have “situational knowledge,” a form of experience that allows you to counsel your clients on what you see working, what you see failing to produce results, and the different factors that support or impede results.
Earlier in this chapter, you learned that you don't know what you don't know. It's often true that you also don't know what you do know until you're prompted to explain something to your client. The part of you that recognizes that something will or won't work for a specific client is a type of knowledge that is next to impossible for your client to match because they lack your experience. Catching them up means correcting their lack of information.
What Should I Do Now?
In my experience, there are three types of salespeople. The One-Up salesperson has recognized that they have information unknown to their client that comes from their experience, so they work to facilitate a needs-based, buyer's journey. The One-Down salesperson either does not have the experience to be One-Up or does not act on their One-Upness. The third type of salesperson is an order-taker, offering no information that would help the client improve anything.
A person considering a difficult decision will benefit from the guidance of someone who has helped other people enough, over time, to know best what they need to do. You, being One-Up as it pertains to this decision, are required to recommend what the client needs to do to successfully improve their position. You can only be consultative if you provide counsel, something the One-Up salesperson will have little trouble doing. The One-Down salesperson that lacks experience may need help to know what to tell the client to do. The Order-Taker is of no use to their client.
There is no reason for prospects to buy from a person who cannot tell them what they need to do now, as that salesperson has not corrected their information disparity. The most valuable recommendation is not “buy our solution,” but “here's how you should approach this decision.” Helping your client understand what they need to do increases their preference to buy from you.
How Should I Change?
Your vantage point is a form of information disparity, one increasingly critical to creating and pursuing an opportunity with your client. Some companies use professional buyers and processes designed to position them as One-Up, as if their experience buying something occasionally is a match for the insights of a One-Up salesperson who helps different companies with that same decision every day. That mismatch can cause your client significant problems.
John Kotter, a scholar at Harvard Business School, provides an eight-step framework for change in The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations. The eight steps are increase urgency, build the guiding team, get the vision right, communicate for buy-in, empower action, create short-term wins, don't let up, and make change stick. Imagine your client has met with four different salespeople, each of whom has asked the client about their “problem,” then immediately tried to sell them a “solution.” The client, however, has not done anything about their problem. What prevents a person or a group of people from making change is a complicated mix of factors, most of which come from lacking information, alignment, or the ability to build consensus.
Starting our conversations by showing how external forces and trends are the root cause of the client's problems is one way to help increase their sense of urgency (more on that in Chapter 9). The reason we provide our client our One-Up vantage point is so we can help them build that guiding team earlier in the process. While Kotter's third step has the guiding team developing the vision, that vision will benefit from you guiding the guiding team. The reason salespeople lose deals or watch them stall is often because they don't understand how to help their clients change. The One-Down salesperson doesn't believe it is their role to tell the client what they need to do (something that makes them anti-consultative).
How Can I Be Certain of Success?
There is never a reason to lie to your clients. The reason some clients believe all salespeople lie to them is that many salespeople lie by omission, an age-old problem built on information disparity. In a large sales call with my team, a senior leader expressed concern about our ability to produce the results he needed. My team was stunned when I replied, “We normally get things right on the fourth or fifth try. There is always a steep learning curve in projects like this.” The senior leader looked at me, smiled, and said, “How good are you guys? It takes us at least eleven or twelve tries.” We both knew I was telling the truth.
One way to stay One-Down is to stay quiet about the problems and challenges you and your client are sure to encounter in any significant change initiative. In fact, addressing those challenges helps create a sense of certainty for your client. The fact that you know what is likely to go wrong means you know how to avoid it, and how to deal with it should it crop up anyway. To lie about the challenges that come with change is to be perpetually One-Down, due to your fear of losing.
One of the reasons clients don't buy from salespeople is because they lack the certainty that they can succeed. By showing your stakeholders the steps you will take together, especially in a written and illustrated form, you provide a sense of certainty that discourages them from crawling back to the cold comfort of the status quo. Your experience shows you the common concerns your clients may have, providing you the opportunity to address their uncertainty by sharing your plan to ensure their success.
The Value of Being One-Up and Information Disparity
As I've said before, one reason I am critical of the legacy approaches to sales is that they advise salespeople against doing any “free consulting.” This is an attempt to maintain information disparity unless and until your client buys your product. This approach puts a salesperson in a deep One-Down position, one in which they are afraid that their prospect is going to steal their idea and share it with other salespeople, who in turn will pass it off as their own. Occasionally that does happen, but keep a couple of things in mind. First, any competitor desperate enough to steal your idea clearly doesn't have any better ideas of their own. Second, they almost certainly don't know how to execute the idea. You may want to help the client by exposing their poor decision-making, gently reminding them that they were—and still are—One Down:
I am concerned about your future results. If the partner you chose was not already aware of this strategy, it's certain they have no experience and no idea about the four risks that you are taking or how to address each one. Make sure you have them explain those risks before you let them start. Also make sure they explain the two follow-up projects you're going to need to maximize your results. Depending on what happens or how bad it is, we may or may not be able to help you. Why would you try something like this with anyone who hasn't already done it, and what are people going to think when the train comes off the tracks?
Being One-Up allows you to use information disparity in a more powerful and more ethical way, one that serves the client by helping them change. The approach of being One-Up leaves no room for fear of your client stealing your “free consulting.” After all, we live in a dynamic time, so what works today will be a nonstarter tomorrow (or perhaps the day after, but not much further into the future than that). You are not going to run out of ideas and insights because the world is going to continue to provide disruptive events, new trends, and forces that are going to require you and your clients to change.
More practically, the One-Up approach saves you from showing up and giving your client the same conversation they have had with every salesbot, er, salesperson who ever booked a meeting with them. Salespeople often complain about not wanting to be treated like a commodity, only to provide a conversation that has been irredeemably commoditized. The problem-pain-solution approach has lost its efficacy and is being replaced by newer, more effective strategies and tactics. By being One-Up, you create value beyond your solution. The value you create supports change management, enables well-informed decisions, and provides the advice and recommendations that lead to better results. That's what makes up a truly consultative sales approach.
Learning from Yourself
In Chapter 7, we are going to take a deeper dive into building your external insights, focusing on sources outside your company and your experience. But you should also recognize the many internal insights you already possess; they come from your training and experience.
Maintaining your One-Upness is both your obligation and your best tool for professional development. It's important that your clients can count on you to know the things they need to know, making you a source of knowledge and insights. Without a commitment to maintaining that information disparity, you risk being a one-hit wonder. You might dazzle your client with insights in your first meeting, but if you can't consistently repeat your performance, they'll look to some other motivated knows-quite-a-lot to step into your role. There are several areas you can explore to keep your insights fresh and relevant to your clients' decisions and results, so you always have something new and useful to share.
- Inside Your Four Walls. Before you go searching outside your four walls, start by recognizing what you—and, perhaps, your One-Up team members—have learned through your individual and collective experience. You want to start by documenting what your experience already provides in the way of useful insights.
- The Value of Your Client's Experiences and Challenges. Every day, you interact with clients and prospective clients. Your conversations provide you with insights that can be helpful to both parties if you are willing to recognize and capture them. For example, when your clients explain the new challenges confronting their business, it's a good bet that other companies in their industry are either already feeling those same challenges or soon will be. What you learn working with one client is almost certain to be useful to another.
Here is a prompt to help you get started: What did you learn working with your clients over the last twelve months? A list of “ten things we learned last year” will provide enough insight to use in an executive briefing or as a conversation starter. Your experience is only useful if you share the lessons, and it is sometimes as powerful as data.
- What's Working, What's Not, and Why. Because you and your peers (hopefully, a bunch of fellow One-Up sales folks) are working to help your clients improve their results, you get to experience what works and why. The “why” here is incredibly important, because it helps you to understand where and when one approach might be the best choice. Improving your clients' results is not a one-size-fits-all process. Here's a brainstorming prompt: What works for one client but fails for another, and what factors seem to explain the difference?
- Your Experience of What Is Necessary to Produce Results. Chapter 11 (in this book, not the bankruptcy law) is about helping your client change, going well beyond picking a new supplier and a new “solution.” Your ability to be truly consultative means knowing exactly what your client needs to change to be able to produce the better results they need. Believing that this isn't your responsibility will demote you to the One-Down position.
Start by asking this: What do your clients need to change to improve their results, or what do they do that prevents them from being able to generate better outcomes?
- How to Make Change. In Chapter 6, we'll look more deeply into “buying insights,” the conversations your clients will need to commit to having to successfully transform their results. One obstacle to solving your client's problems is a poor approach to making changes at all. You can start to organize your “change-related” information and insights by recognizing the conversations your clients skip and the commitments they would prefer not to make or keep.
As One-Up sales professionals, the reason we maintain information disparity is to continually refresh our insights, so we can share our ideas, knowledge, and experience to help all our clients improve their futures.