20

When you want to make a sale

If you work in sales, I imagine:

1. You have stretching targets.
2. You’re short of time.

So I wanted to create a short chapter to address both of these, by explaining my five steps to winning a sale. To keep this chapter as punchy as possible:

  • Some of the steps are expanded on elsewhere in the book. If you want to read more, I’ve added the chapter references for you; and
  • The next chapter shows how to incorporate these steps into your proposals and sales presentations.

Before running through the steps, here are my three Golden Rules of Sales:

Rule #1: The customer is the most important person, so give her the information she needs to make the best decision.
Rule #2: The customer will buy when she knows you’re the one best placed to improve her future.
Rule #3: When the customer says “Yes”, shut up.

These rules mean we no longer use some traditional sales messages. After all, when you say:

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Customers see:

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ABCDE: The Simplest Way to Sell More

My five steps of selling are:

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Looking at each in turn:

AFTERs – Find the customer’s desired future

Since selling is all about helping the customer achieve their desired future (Rule #2), start by finding what this future is. In other words, why they’ll be better off AFTER working with you. (Chapter 31 has much more detail on AFTERs.)

The two best ways to uncover their AFTERs are by asking and guiding them:

Asking means using Future-Based Questions (FBQs) to uncover their desired AFTERs, like:

  • What are you looking to achieve?
  • What are your goals/objectives?
  • How will you know our work has been a success?

FBQs work well, as long as the customer knows the answers. Sometimes, a better approach is:

Guiding, where you help shape their thinking, either by:

  • Splitting their future into manageable bits, to help them focus. For example, I could say to a sales director: “There are three elements to ‘selling’: having the right mindset; seeing the right buyers; and saying the right words when in front of them. Which of these do your people need most guidance with?” Or,
  • Using your research/insights to open their eyes to new possibilities: “The Sales Executive Council found that 91% of buyers don’t think value-to-price is the biggest driver of customer loyalty. This means your current focus on reducing price probably isn’t the best approach. Let’s discuss a couple of alternatives to see what we can help you achieve.”

Once you’ve uncovered the AFTERs:

  • Repeat them back to the customer, ensuring they agree; and
  • Ask the customer to prioritize them. This tells you their #1 AFTER, which is very important information for the rest of the sale. See the next chapter on proposals/presentations for more on this.
Worked example – step 1

Let’s assume that you uncover they only have one AFTER: to successfully export into Belgium.

Be certain – State you can help them

Customers want to feel certain you can help them. So when you’re certain you can deliver their AFTERs, say so: “We can definitely help you with that” or “I’m completely confident we can help you achieve those objectives.”

Whereas the A of ABCDE – uncovering AFTERs – takes a while, step B takes 10 seconds max. It’s just one sentence. But it’s important: it starts to build their feelings of certainty.

Worked example – step 2

“We can definitely help you export into Belgium.”

Convince – Prove you can help them

If you’re very lucky, when you say step B’s “We can definitely help you”, the customer will say “Great. Let’s start”. If this happens, remember Golden Rule #3 – the customer’s said “Yes”, so shut up! Get the order book out and crack on.

In all my life, this has only happened to me once. (It was great when it did!) But in practice your next step will be to convince them that you can definitely help them.

There are lots of ways to do this – chapter 19 discussed lots of them. In our example though, some could be:

Worked example – step 3
  • The case study of company X who you helped expand into Belgium.
  • A testimonial: “Your Company helped us build our market share in Belgium from 0% to 12% in two years”. Mrs. X, job title Y, company Z.
  • A list of all the customers you’ve helped with Belgium and/or exports.
  • Your process for entering Belgium, and why it’s different/better than everybody else’s.
  • Free advice about Belgium, to show you know things that they don’t.

Deal with objections – Remove their concerns

Customers will probably have some concerns about buying from you – your price, your experience, your impressive competition, they might feel it’s easier to do nothing, and so on.

You must address these. If you don’t, they might never get dealt with. This means they won’t buy.

There are two ways to uncover, and then remove, their concerns:

  • Ask them what they are: “So, we know that we can help. But it’s what you think that counts! What are your concerns about us working together on this project?”
  • Use your experience/common sense to guess, and weave these into your sales discussion: “If I was you, I might be worried about X. Is that the case?” or “Some of our best customers were originally concerned about X. Are you?”

Then, of course, you have to persuasively remove these concerns (chapter 53 has loads of techniques for doing this). After all, if someone said they were worried about cost, you wouldn’t follow that with “Yes, you’re right. It is a lot”!

Work example – step 4

“If I was you, I might be concerned that we haven’t worked together before, and that giving such an important campaign to a new partner is risky. Is that the case?”

[Yes, it does feel uncomfortable]

“Well, I totally understand that. In fact, a couple of our best customers originally thought the same thing. Do you mind if I explain how we can overcome this?”

Electives – Offer options that they can choose between

When you give someone a “Yes/No” choice (“Our proposal will cost you £120,000 – do you want it or not?”), you can’t complain if they choose “No”.

So, offer the customer 2–3 different options, and work with them to choose the one they feel is best for them. Use chapter 18’s BO approach to do this.

Also, before giving the price, remind them of the value, so the price then looks the excellent value for money that it is.

Worked example – step 5

So, we’ve agreed your projected returns from our work will be £1–2 million in the first year. There are a couple of ways we can help you achieve this: we could do X for £50,000 or Y for a total of £75,000. Which option do you prefer?

By now, you might be thinking ABCDE sounds obvious. After all, all I’m saying is that you find what the customer wants to achieve, prove you can help them get there, and ask how they want to proceed.

However, knowing the steps and doing them every time are two very different things. This quick self-test might help. How does your company stack up?

Self-test
1. How often do you know a customer’s desired AFTERs?
Every sale
Most sales
If there’s time to find out
Never
2. How many times have you gone for a sale which, in retrospect, you shouldn’t have? On these occasions, if you’d asked better questions, might you have pulled out sooner?
3. How often do you state with certainty that you can give the customer what they want? Do you say it as early as possible in the process?
4. When proving you can do the job:
How often do you talk about your process (not persuasive) compared to giving third-party evidence that you can deliver results (very persuasive)?
If you use third-party evidence, how often do you mention it early in your sales communications? (I’ve seen them first appear on page 50 of an 80-page proposal. They should be prominently placed early, including in Executive Summaries).
Are your most persuasive proofs easy to spot, or are they hidden in the middle of sections/paragraphs/slides?
5. Does every salesperson in your company always work hard to uncover the customer’s objections? Do you have a standard approach for removing them?
6. Do you always offer options?
7. Does your marketing material (website, brochures and so on) follow this approach? Or do they focus more on describing your company and services?

Unless you scored 100%, you can be even more AFTERs-y than you are now. And doing so makes a huge difference to even the best people. For instance, one of my customers – Marc Berendes – was very successful before I met him:

  • He’d reached the top of commercial finance within a global division at a young age.
  • He’d then changed career to become general manager of the fourth largest affiliate worldwide, aged just 40.
  • His three children – all still at primary school – each speaks four languages.

So, a successful guy! But he found AFTERs-based selling took him up another level: “AFTERs completely changed the way we presented offers to customers. After taking my new job and witnessing the ineffectiveness of our offer presentation, we changed everything, so it became based on the customer and their AFTERs. This has helped us to win many more deals.”

The great thing about selling is you can always improve. Which one thing can you take from this chapter to help you be more successful?

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