Chapter 7
IN THIS CHAPTER
Making customers feel comfortable
Coming up with straightforward propositions
Finding out the key issues
Getting rid of risk
Winning new business is all about getting your prospects to accept your offer in the quickest and easiest way possible. In other words, your task is to get your prospects to say yes, and you need to make this as easy as possible for them. The easier you can make this, the quicker you can close the deal. Although that may sound simple, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. But don’t worry. In this chapter, I cover tried and tested strategies that help make your task of getting to a yes both quicker and easier.
Some people say that you should ask only “yes” questions — questions that make it more difficult to say no to you later. Others focus on positive body language, such as nodding your head a lot to get your customer into a positive frame of mind. These two examples may well be true and may assist in setting a positive tone, but in any serious winning-new-business situation, you need a lot more to help you.
Before getting into how to make your customers say yes, consider the customer’s point of view. First of all, you’re asking your customers to make a commitment to buy something they may not know much about from someone they may not know very well. You’re asking them to take a leap of faith, which may not be a comfortable or natural response for them.
One of your first objectives in winning new business has to be to make your customers comfortable with you and your product or service. If you win this battle for heart and mind with your customers, get them on your side, and show them that your objective is to help them reach their objectives, winning new business will be a lot easier. On the other hand, if you alienate your customer, you’ll have a near-impossible job of getting to that yes decision.
Note the difference between selling and order taking. If customers often come to you knowing exactly what they want and waving an order or payment at you, then you’re an order taker, and much of this advice won’t necessarily apply to you. For the majority of people involved in winning new business, that’s a pipe dream!
Often the initial sale to new customers opens all sorts of potential added features or services you can offer them. You want to avoid the temptation to load the first deal with extras and options, preferring instead to make it a nice and straightforward proposition to sign them up as your customers. You do so by keeping the sale uncomplicated and using the prospect’s terminology, as I explain in the following sections. You need to be mindful of the lifetime value of new customers, but don’t try to get them to commit to everything at the same time because then you risk both delaying the decision and complicating the initial sale. Remember that your task is to make it easy for your prospects to say yes to your offer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your customers will likely tell you about all the problems they’re seeking to address, but don’t assume that you know better than they do. Early in the sales cycle, you need to discuss with your customers exactly what issues they expect to resolve with the solution they’re going to purchase. Addressing the needs early in your discussions is vital in getting a sale to close. You also want to make sure that whatever you’re proposing does indeed cover all those stated needs or that you show why the customer doesn’t need to address any specific needs at this stage.
The last thing you want to happen is having a customer ask about something that you either don’t expect or haven’t satisfactorily addressed right before closing the deal. Your objective is to get to a yes as quickly as possible while making sure you address all the customer’s considerations. In the following sections, I go into detail on avoiding the introduction of additional elements and focusing on the customer’s needs.
Here’s an example: Years ago, I was about to close an order for PR services with a new client (a software company selling database solutions to a niche sector). I thought I had covered all the bases, but literally, as the customer’s pen was poised over the order form, he asked, “You can guarantee press coverage, can’t you?” Thankfully, I was quick on my feet with a truthful answer that also demonstrated that I knew what I was taking about, without putting him down in any way. What I told him was, “Yes, I can guarantee you press coverage as long as you do exactly as I ask, but you won’t necessarily thank me for it.” Puzzled, he asked what I meant. I told him, “If I ask you to streak across the Centre Court at the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament, I can guarantee that you will be front-page tabloid news, but that won’t help your business!” He got the point I was making about guaranteed coverage versus relevant coverage, but with hindsight I should have covered this during the sales cycle. He signed the order, though!
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.
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.)
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.
In Chapter 18, I go into detail about risk and ways of mitigating against it. Here, I cover the perceived risk to customers. When trying to make it easy for customers to say yes, you need to remember that one of your main duties is to make customers feel comfortable with buying your solution. They may feel like they’re taking a risk in doing something, or anything for that matter, and they need to feel confident in both your proposed solution and your integrity in selling the right thing.
Presenting your solution in as straightforward a way as possible, using the customer’s terminology and focusing just on his core needs (as I describe earlier in this chapter), will go a long way to making your customer comfortable with his purchase decision and steer him away from worries about taking a risk.
Put the customer at the center of your solution, and you won’t go far wrong. Consider how the solution looks from his perspective. Have you covered the perception of risk and removed it as far as possible? If your solution calls for a leap of faith from the customer, then you’re likely to be in trouble, so remain customer-centric in considering the risk factor. In the following sections, I discuss getting your customer’s objections out in the open, building on your customer’s trust, and thinking about performance-related payment.
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.
Objections in a typical sales situation include the following:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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