What’s Actually Happening

An obvious question, perhaps, but it seemed like a good one to ask, so we did. We wrote this on our whiteboard in big red letters:

What are the winners of actual sales opportunities doing differently than the sellers who come in second place?

To find the answer, in late 2012 and into early 2013 we began studying actual purchases in industries with complex sales, such as technology, consulting and professional services, financial services, industrial products, and a variety of other business-to-business (B2B) industries. The results of this study focus on more than 700 B2B purchases made by a broad sample of buyers. In aggregate, these buyers were responsible for $3.1 billion in annual purchases. Along with our survey research, we’ve now spoken to more than 150 corporate buyers about their recent purchasing experiences.

Here’s what we found:

1. Winners sell radically differently than the second-place finishers. In many ways, what sales winners do differently is both surprising and fascinating.
2. There’s a specific combination of behaviors that sales winners exhibit and outcomes they achieve that the second-place finishers don’t.
3. Several key factors that set apart the winners are rarely discussed in the world of selling. These now demand attention.
4. With all due respect to the Harvard Business Review, solution sales is definitely not dead. However, although solution sales concepts are still necessary, they’re no longer sufficient to win sales. Also, fundamental solution sales concepts need reimagination and relabeling. They need to evolve.

Before we share the specifics of what we found, it’s important to note we did not have preferences for what the results would show. Our intent was to find out what’s really going on and proceed from there. We expected the results would influence our thinking, our sales consulting, and our RAIN Selling training process and programs, requiring us to make updates and changes. Indeed, this has been the case.

Research from the Buyer’s Perspective

One of the interesting things about reading sales books and articles is that much advice seems to make sense on its face, even to us after 50 collective years living in the sales training and enablement world. Although, with a few exceptions, most selling methods sound fine, the reality is that some of them are wrong, or at least wrong for certain businesses and people. It’s not, however, easy to suss out the good advice from the bad.

There are a lot of ways to do the sussing, too. Not all of them are helpful. Sales research methods often focus on asking sellers, sales managers, and company leaders what the top performers do versus average performers. Unfortunately, people’s perceptions of what they do—and what they actually do—don’t tend to match up.

For example, Hinge Research Institute recently studied buyers and sellers across several B2B industries about the buyers’ perceptions of seller companies’ selling and marketing practices. Dr. Lee W. Frederiksen, managing partner of Hinge, told us, “Across the board, sellers and buyers think tremendously differently about what’s important. For example, sellers vastly overestimate the role of price in closing the sale. They see it as more than twice as important as the buyers view it.”^a We see the same incongruity in buyer and seller perceptions. We recently polled several hundred sellers on some of the same questions we asked the buyers in our study. What the buyers perceived about what sellers did, and what the sellers perceived what they, themselves, did, were markedly different.

The primary research on which Insight Selling is based looked at sales from the buyers’ perspective. As mentioned, our objective was to find the answer to the question, What are the winners of actual sales opportunities doing differently than the sellers who come in second place? We looked at it, however, through the eyes of the buyers. This approach allowed us to get past sellers’ perceptions of themselves and their colleagues and concentrate on the buyers’ perspective and what actually happened in the field of play. After all, buyers make purchase decisions based on their perceptions. This is what matters.

Level 1 Is Connect.

Winners connect the dots between customer needs and their company’s products and services as solutions more often than the second-place finishers. Winners also connect with people. They’re perceived to listen and connect personally with buyers more often.

Connecting with people and connecting the dots—this sounds a lot like relationship and solution selling to us. Not only is connecting still relevant (and not dead!), but it’s also critical. However, sellers used to win on level 1 alone. Now it’s the price of entry.

Level 2 Is Convince.

Winners convince buyers that they can achieve maximum return, that the risks are acceptable, and that the seller is the best choice among all options. Many sellers are not good at convincing buyers, and a large portion of sellers aren’t even willing to convince. When they can and do, they win more sales.

Level 3 Is Collaborate.

Winners collaborate through behavior—they are perceived to be responsive, proactive, and easy to buy from (i.e., collaborative in how they work). At the same time, it’s not just how sellers interact; it’s what they do. Buyers believe that the winners actually collaborate with them during their buying process, in other words, collaboration in the sense of working with the buyer to achieve a mutual goal. Buyers perceived collaborative sellers to be integral to their success.

Connect, convince, and collaborate. This is what sales winners do both more often, and better than, second-place finishers (see Figure 1.1).

Connecting the Dots and Solution Sales

Sellers who win connect. They connect with people and connect the dots between needs and solutions. This is a surprising finding—sort of. Given that the end of solution sales was announced in the Harvard Business Review and that they also published articles recently about how selling is not about relationships,² we expected to see that winners had abandoned these tried-and-true sales concepts, and that they are, indeed, dead.

Not true.

In fact, we found the opposite was the case. Solution sales is not dead—not even mostly dead. But it has changed in two important ways:

1. It’s no longer sufficient by itself for success.
2. People need to think about it differently than they might have in the past.

Although people define solution sales in a number of ways, at the core of the solution or consultative concept is connecting the pain of the buyer with the products, services, and overall capabilities of the seller as solutions. There’s typically a heavy emphasis on the seller diagnosing the needs of the buyer.

The need for diagnosis implies the buyers don’t have a thorough concept of why they find themselves in their current undesirable situation or what to do differently. Through diagnosis, the seller figures this out like a doctor might with patients who feel sick but don’t know what they have or what to do to get better.

These days, diagnosing needs isn’t nearly as important as simply demonstrating understanding of needs. Of all the factors buyers experienced with the sales winners, “deepened my understanding of my needs” fell near the bottom of the list (ranked 40 of 42 factors). Winners barely did it at all compared with the rest of the factors, yet they still won the sale.

The second-place finishers focused more often on diagnosis than the winners, yet they still lost. Situationally, diagnosis can be important. If the buyer wants to make improvements but doesn’t know what the issues are, diagnosis is necessary. But at a macro level, it’s not as important as it used to be.

However, although sellers may not have to diagnose as often or deeply anymore, they do have to demonstrate understanding of need. This is critical. The terms may seem similar, but throwing the understanding baby out with the diagnosing bathwater is not a good idea.

Looking at the differences between the winners and the second-place finishers, “understood my needs” represented the fifth-largest gap (Figure 1.2). In fact, the winners demonstrated they understood the buyer’s needs 2.5 times more often than the second-place finishers.

On top of that, of the 42 factors, “understood my needs” was the fifth most important factor buyers said the second-place finishers should change to win their business.

Diagnosing versus Demonstrating Understanding

Here’s an example. After a first sales conversation, sellers often summarize their thoughts and an action plan in a document for buyers. However, we recently saw a situation where the opposite happened. The buyers sent the seller a document outlining what they understood their challenges to be, why they thought the challenges existed, what they were planning to do, and what they wanted from a seller. The buyers had this prepared beforehand to send to sellers who passed the buyers’ sniff test in a first call.

Sometimes a buyer’s perception of what’s happening misses the mark. But, in this case, it was thoughtful and on-target. Thus, the seller didn’t need to spend much time diagnosing the needs. Rather, the seller focused on listening to the buyers and talking with them about possibilities for how to move forward. Although the seller didn’t diagnose, the eventual proposal communicated that the seller got it regarding who the buyers were, what they needed, and what they were hoping to achieve with an external provider. This turned out to be a very important decision criterion to the buyers, and the seller won the business.

This isn’t to say that buyers have it all figured out all the time. With the Internet and other sources of information readily accessible, buyers are just typically further along in the process than they used to be when they engage sellers.

As Jack Kline, president and chief operating officer, Christie Digital Systems put it:

We can find information about products and prices ourselves these days, but as our business is becoming more complicated and moving more quickly, we continuously search for ways to apply products and services the right way and in the right combinations. Vendors do their thing thousands of times. We might do it once every three years. We need their ideas, their thinking, to make sure we get the best outcomes. What we want from vendors is to see how all the various unique offerings come together so we can visualize how it’s going to change the way we do business and maybe give us a competitive lift in the marketplace.

It’s much like when people feel sick these days. They often turn first to WebMD, Wikipedia, and Google to investigate. If need be, they find themselves at a doctor’s office, but by that time people are often much further along in their understanding of what might be going on than in years past.^c

Aspirations, Afflictions, and Solutions

Another needed change in the solution sales concept is a shift away from the prevalent use of the words problem and pain in sales methods. These are the two most common terms associated with discovering a prospect’s needs. These words all too often drive sellers to employ find-out-what’s-wrong-and-fix-it thinking. Let’s say the buyer doesn’t perceive anything (or anything important enough to act on) to be wrong. Soothe-the-pain sellers find themselves at a dead end: no problems to fix, nothing to sell.

The sales winners, however, don’t focus only on the negative (afflictions); they focus on the positive (aspirations). Along with allowing for richer sales conversations, focusing on the positive opens the door to significant opportunity to increase sales. The opportunity is for sellers to drive their own demand versus only reacting to demand that comes directly from buyers.

The sellers most successful at creating opportunities focus on positives—goals, aspirations, and possibilities achievable by the buyer, even if the buyer doesn’t know it yet.

Sellers who focus on aspirations as well as afflictions are able to influence the buyers’ agenda directly by inspiring them with possibilities they hadn’t been considering but should. Indeed, opportunity creation is a core outcome of levels 2 and 3, but it starts here in level 1 with a shift in focus from afflictions only to afflictions and aspirations.

Working in conjunction with demonstrating understanding of needs is the seller’s ability to craft a compelling solution. This was the seventh-greatest difference between the winners and second-place finishers, and, according to the buyers, it was the third most important factor that the second-place finishers needed to change.

Connecting the Dots Is Necessary but Not Sufficient

Together, “understood my needs” and “crafted a compelling solution” mean the seller connected the dots, drawing clear connections between buyer needs and how the seller’s offerings solve them. Again, this is part of the gestalt of mainstream thinking in solution sales. But simply connecting the dots is in no way sufficient by itself for sellers to win (see Figure 1.3).

Imagine for a minute someone is selling to you and you perceive the seller doesn’t understand your needs and doesn’t craft a compelling solution. The seller’s chances of winning business from you are probably pretty slim.

Now consider that the seller connects the dots okay. But you perceive that the seller isn’t listening to you and hasn’t made any kind of personal connection with you. As long as any other seller meets the minimum criteria (and because buyers think many providers can deliver competent products and services), you’re likely not going to buy from the unlikeable seller who isn’t listening.

Sellers who do a good job connecting the dots and connecting with buyers haven’t yet won the sale, but they’re in the game (see Figure 1.2). If they’re in it to win it, however, they have two more levels to cover.

Fallacy of the No-Brainer Return on Investment (ROI) Case

Most every experienced seller has lost a sale to no decision, where the seller believes the buyer was crazy not to move forward because the ROI case was so compelling.

Sellers often say things to us like, “The ROI case was a no-brainer. I can’t believe they didn’t see it!”

Oh, they saw it—and they got it—they just didn’t believe it.

As Kline told us, “I’m leery of people who promise great things, such as, ‘We’re going to reduce your IT [information technology] expense by 20 percent.’ How do they know? How can they make that kind of commitment without understanding our internal situation? Vague guarantees and commitments don’t convince me. They need to prove they understand us and our situation. I need to have confidence in them and their solution.”

In these cases, the buyers typically perceive the risk of not achieving results as either too great (buyers: “This is impossible or improbable”), or they perceive the provider to be too high a risk (buyers: “This is possible, but working with this provider is a potential liability because of . . .”).

In other words, when the buyer isn’t convinced of both maximum return and minimal risk together, the buyer gets squeamish, and the seller loses to no decision.

Winners Convince They Offer Superior Value

Now assume there is a competitor. The seller not only has to maximize ROI and minimize risk perceptions but also has to convince the buyer he or she is the best choice among all alternatives. Winners were more than twice as likely to create the perception that the overall value they offered was superior.

And when second-place finishers didn’t create this perception, it was the number one most important factor they needed to improve to influence buyers to select them. “Overall value was superior” was also a key driver of buying process satisfaction, likelihood to buy again, and likelihood to refer. In fact, “overall value was superior” was the only factor that was a key driver of all three and a top 10 factor in all three winner versus second place comparative analyses.

Now, the term overall value was superior to other options is open to interpretation. That’s the point! One buyer to the next might value one thing over another, and every buying scenario is different. When sellers figure out what each individual buyer believes to be important and works toward that, they win more often.

The other two factors in the best choice category are “products and services superior” and “offerings differentiated from other options.” Do the sellers build the product? No, but they are the lens through which the product or service strengths are communicated to the buyer. It’s also up to the sellers to differentiate from the other options. When they don’t, they leave it to the buyer to interpret their advantages, leaving competitive differentiation to chance.

When sellers succeed with all three components—maximum return, minimum risk, and best choice—of level 2 (convince), they take the groundwork they laid in level 1 (connect) and turbocharge their chances of a win.

Rising Influence and Value of the Seller

Here’s something we didn’t expect: The top two things that winners did more often than the second-place finishers are (1) “educated me with new ideas or perspectives” and (2) “collaborated with me.” At first blush, they might not seem to go together, but they do. These two factors both indicate that the seller personally brought something valuable to the table.

Why unexpected? With pronouncements in the press that solution sales is dead, one would not expect collaboration to play a critical role in winning the sale. However, there it is in the top two factors that separate the winners the most from the second-place finishers. Let’s assume solution and consultative selling as conceptual frameworks are still valid (as we think they are). As they represent the conventional wisdom of what’s most important in sales success, shouldn’t factors such as diagnosing need, crafting solutions, not talking too much, and such come up right at the top?

They didn’t. Education and collaboration trumped them all.

Seller as Educator

Regarding educating with new ideas, when the buyer believes the seller brings something new to the table, then, by definition, it’s not something the buyer was previously considering. When buyers perceive sellers as providing new ideas, sellers have a huge advantage. By bringing the right new ideas, sellers can shape buyer belief systems and approaches to action. This gives the seller tremendous influence.

Although educating about new ideas is in no way a unique advantage, it’s still uncommon. In fact, only 21.5 percent of buyers strongly agreed that the winners “educated me with new ideas and perspectives.” At the same time, only 7.4 percent of buyers strongly agreed the second-place finishers “educated me with new ideas and perspectives.” So, there’s room for almost all sellers to improve in this area. Those who do will reap the rewards.

It’s important to note, however, that the gap between the groups for the factor focused on valuable ideas or perspectives (versus new ideas) was not nearly as stark. It was thirty-fifth on the list separating the winners and the second-place finishers. There’s no question that bringing insight to the table that might not be new can still be helpful, but it doesn’t stand out as a factor that leads to sales wins. It seems buyers want to be surprised and inspired. If they’ve heard something before, even if it’s applicable, it’s not as impactful as something they perceive to be new.

Seller as Collaborator

The second factor that most separated the winners from the second-place finishers was “collaborated with me.” We didn’t expect this factor to separate the winners from the also-rans more than all but one other factor, but it did. The implications for selling can’t be overstated.

Once the buyer sees the seller as an important member of the team and sees moving the sale forward as a common goal, the likelihood of buying in general, and buying from that seller in particular, increases dramatically.

When buyers see a provider as working with them as a team to achieve common goals, it’s not only a factor in winning an individual sale, but it is also extremely difficult to unseat that provider from the account. Win now, win later.

And it’s not just winning; it’s winning with insight. Often it’s during acts of collaboration that ideas are born and insights come alive. There are reasons that brainstorming is not a solo activity and that professional facilitators earn handsome sums to lead idea creation and strategy sessions. When buyers perceive sellers to be collaborators, they are more likely to work with them closely. This is an opportunity for sellers, if they have the skills to make the most of it. When sellers collaborate, they add tremendous value and set themselves apart greatly from those who don’t. As with educating with new ideas and perspectives, almost three times as many buyers strongly agreed the winners collaborated with them compared to the second-place finishers.

Level 1, connect, is the price of entry. When buyers perceive sellers don’t understand their needs and don’t have a solution that can help—and if the buyers don’t like them—sellers don’t win. Even when sellers succeed here, it’s simply table stakes. More needs to be done.

Level 2, convince, increases wins. When sellers don’t convince the buyers they’ll get a worthwhile return, the risks are acceptable, and they’re the right choice, the buyers simply might not buy at all, might buy much less than they should (or only be willing to pay less), or may select another provider.

Level 3, collaborate, is when the seller becomes a key component of buyer success. The sellers who are perceived as level 3 collaborators, bringing new ideas to the table, cocreating ideas and insights, and working with buyers as a team, will find themselves in the winner’s circle (see Figure 1.4).

Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, here is where the insight part of insight selling comes in. Educating brings insight directly to the table. Collaborating inspires new ideas and insights.” If you are, you’re right. These points, however, just scratch the surface of how the concept of insight permeates everything that sales winners do.

Information, Options, and Buyer Decision Making

Let’s switch our attention back to buyers. Although today’s buyers know more than they used to in the presales context, they still struggle with the same fundamental challenges as in decades past. They still must:

• Find new ways to improve and innovate in their businesses
• Choose the right courses of action
• Choose the right partners
• Succeed more, fail less

You’d think that because people have more information and choices than ever that they’d be more decisive and make better decisions. Not so.

In fact, the central argument in the book The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz⁴ is that more options and more information have made us more paralyzed as decision makers and have not made us better decision makers. Neither have more options and information made us happier. Although Schwartz relates these findings mostly to consumers, they’re equally true of the business decision maker.

We know the Internet gives buyers a lot more choice and information, but the information is often hyperbolic—everyone promises excellent results, massive ROI, and superior overall value. The information is also often incomplete, conflicting, and inaccurate. It’s difficult to sort out what’s what.

At the same time, one of the most cited statistics in the sales world these days is that 57 percent of the purchase process is complete before buyers have their first serious interaction with a seller⁵ as if this somehow signifies that buyers are trying to cut sellers out of the process.

But this only tells us buyers put strategies together to make improvements to their businesses. They mostly work on them internally first. They try to figure out what they want to do, what they want as outcomes, and what the options are to help them get there. They get their ducks in a row, to an extent, before talking to outsiders. Seems logical to us.

Yet the need for outside help is greater than ever.

Buyers Want to Talk to Sellers

The fact of the matter is although buyers have more information, they don’t necessarily have knowledge. They don’t have confidence. What they don’t have—and what they desperately need—is insight. Not only do they need it, but they also want it.

A more useful question to ask buyers is when they want to engage with sellers. Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) and CFO Magazine recently asked 270 technology buyers just this question. In fact, 70 percent of buyers want to engage with sales reps before they finalize a short list of potential sellers (see Figure 1.5). Even more striking, 47 percent of buyers want to engage with sellers when they are searching for insight on what to do and what’s possible for how to get something done.

Perhaps if more than 21.5 percent of the sales winners and 7.4 percent of second-place finishers were highly skilled at educating buyers with new ideas and perspectives, even more buyers would want to involve sellers earlier. But sellers are not. A recent Forrester Research study asked buyers, “Are meetings with salespeople valuable and live up to your expectations?” Only 39 percent of executives said yes.⁶ Most buyers simply don’t find sellers valuable.

The more buyers see sellers as a source of insight, however, the more they see how sellers can help them succeed. This is valuable. The more buyers see sellers as sources of insight, the more the buyers involve them earlier in the process. And the more sellers are involved early in the process, the more likely they are to win.

Buyers want to talk to sellers, but only if they bring value to the table. That value is increasingly taking the form of insight. Insight is a tremendous opportunity for sellers willing and able to take advantage of it.

Overview

• Sales winners sell radically differently than second-place finishers.
• The greatest difference between sales winners and second-place finishers is the value they provide to buyers through insight.

Key Takeaways

• There’s a specific combination of behaviors that sales winners exhibit and outcomes they achieve that the second-place finishers don’t.
• Solution or consultative sales concepts are still necessary, but they’re no longer sufficient to win sales. They need to evolve.
• Connect, convince, and collaborate. This is what sales winners do both more often, and better than, second-place finishers.
• Winners connect with people and connect the dots between needs and solutions. When you do this, buyers accept and cocreate more insight with you, and their confidence in you grows.
• Winners convince buyers of three things: The ROI is worth pursuing, the risk is acceptable, and the seller is the best choice among the available options. When you do this, your insights help buyers make the right decisions for the right business reasons.
• Winners collaborate in how they interact with buyers and by educating them with new ideas or perspectives. When you do this, buyers will seek insight and interaction with you and, you, personally, become a source of value over and above whatever it is that you sell.