Traditional Sales Skills Can Be Part of The Problem, Not The Solution

  
                                               Figure 1: By focusing on buying, not selling, your salespeople will win more business

If you are still focused on selling skills, then you are missing the bigger picture.  That is because the role of traditional selling skills in sales success has been sidelined.  A great number of them are outdated and outmoded.  Indeed if you listen to your prospects, they may be the problem, rather than the solution.

Here is a straightforward reality:  Buying has changed.   Selling on the other hand has not.  Indeed, to say that buying has changed is an understatement – this is the era of changed priorities, slashed budgets and stalled projects.  Yet, the sales techniques, or sales training has changed little to reflect these new realities.  Inevitably this has resulted in a widening gap between how buyers buy and how sellers sell.

More traditional selling is not the answer, simply because it is not enough to get buyers to buy.  More of the same in terms of cold calling, sales pitches and proposals is not the solution.  They are not what today’s more sophisticated buyers want.  That means they cannot deliver higher conversion rates, or increased sales success.

But if sales skills are not the number one issue for sales teams at this time, what is?  Well, it is to re-connect how we sell with how our customers now buy.

Selling skills are by definition useless unless they help the buyer to buy.  Sales training courses are providing sellers with the skills and techniques that don’t matter, while overlooking those that do.  That is those that are focused on facilitating the purchase order and that effectively help the buyer to buy.

The challenge for salespeople is to help the buyer to meet the requirements of his, or her internal buying process, to build a compelling business case and to get the support required to ensure that the purchase gets sanctioned.  These are the most effective of selling techniques any sales person could possibly use.  However, despite their potency they are rarely in use.  You won’t find them in sales books, or in sales training seminars.  That is because they focus on buying not selling!

Let your competitors focus on more of the same – cold calling scripts, presentation skills and closing techniques.  Leave them in the dust as you focus on the opposite.  Your sales people need skills in that focus on buying, not selling.  That is skills in 3 vital areas:

1. Helping the buyer to build a compelling business case around your solution (i.e. the costs, benefits and risks equation).
2. Ensuring that the purchase order gets signed by helping the buyer to navigate the steps of the buying process.
3. Getting buy-in for your solution higher and wider in the buying organization, by covering all those involved in making and shaping the decision, from the senior executives that must sign it off to the end users that must be consulted along the way.

By focusing on buying, not selling, your salespeople will win more business.  The first step however is awareness – a new awareness of how buying decisions are made (the steps, the people involved, the information required, and so on.  Indeed, this is a particular urgency.

Most salespeople gloriously underestimate the sophistication of today’s buyers.  That makes redrawing the map of how their customers buy an essential first step.  From there sellers are in the perfect position to re-engineer how they sell.  That is to adapt how they sell – from cold calling to closing – to how their customers now buy. It is to put the business case, before the sales proposal, the sales process, before the sales process and to sell higher, wider and deeper. 

References 

Ray Collins: Buyer Seller Insights. Traditional Sales Skills Can Be Part of The Problem, Not The Solution. Retrieved December 12, 2013 from http://buyer.sellerinsights.com/2010/11/15/traditional-sales-skills-can-be-part-of-the-problem-not-the-solution/portrait-of-a-mature-business-man-clearing-doubt-of-an-executive-at-a-seminar/

Tamara Ćetković
Consultant, Coach & Project Manager

How To Influence The Buyer’s Choices

Figure 1: Seller can use choice-making process to sway the buyer’s decision

The New Science Of Helping The Buyer To Choose

Choice within the context of any sales pitch or proposal is a good thing.  Indeed, offering the buyer a choice rather than a single product-price proposition can boost success for many reasons. 

Presenting the buyer with choices can help the him, or her to decide. That is the scientific reality based on cognitive research by experts such as Dan Ariely. It points out, for example, that most people don’t know what they want until they see it in context.

Could offering your customers more choice increase your likelihood of success?

The bottom line is that choices offered by the salesperson and how they are presented has an important bearing on the buyer’s decision.

The Theory Of Relativity In Buying

When it comes to making choices it is all relative. Our preference is not an absolute one – rather it is dictated by the range of options available, as well as how those options are presented.  Think of it as the ‘Theory Of Relativity’ in buying.

What is the context you are setting for your solution?

That is important for sellers because, it means that presenting the customer with the best option is not necessarily enough. It is equally important to put the selection in context.

6 Ways To Sway The Buyer’s Choice

The way that options are presented to the customer can be effective in nudging him, or her to select one option, over the other. Here are 6 strategies that the seller can employ to sway the buyer’s choice.

1. Frame The Decision

The seller can frame the decision by setting it in the context of other extremes.

For example:

- Option A produces 200 units per hour

- Option B produces 125 units per hour

- Option C produces 50 units per hour

We recommend Option B for you because it meets your requirements in terms of units per hour (with plenty of room for growth) and provides the best output-cost ratio of all 3 – a cost per unit of 25c compared to 70c for Option A’.

Do your quotations and proposals frame the choice in this way?

---

2. Offer 3 Choices

Research suggests that 3 options is better than two with their being an inherent tendency to go for the one in the middle  (as in the example shown below).

Too many choices can make a decision more difficult (as per the example shown at this link).  So, if the range of options offered is complex or confusing it probably won’t work.

Related to this the tendency is to focus on things that are easily comparable.  So, making the comparison straightforward is important.

Do you carefully manage (and limit) the choices that are offered?

---

3. Set A High Anchor Point For Price

The research suggests that the seller should start with the expensive option first.

The higher price can then serve as an anchor point against which the customer will gauge subsequent prices. For example:

- Our Platinum Package is $500 per month per user, which includes unlimited access, full customization, premium support and own-branding.

- We have a Silver Package which includes 20 hours of access per month, email support and a strong (but yet slightly less extensive feature set) for $120 per month.

The $120 per month fee is likely to be more favorably evaluated in the context of the initial price of $500 per month.

Do you anchor the buyer’s price expectation in this way?

---

4. Add Bells & Whistles

We can be swayed in our choice between alternatives by the addition of ‘bells and whistles’, so to speak.

Dan Ariely gives a nice example of this in an experiment regarding the choice of holiday vacations.

Consumers were offered the choice of a similarly priced and easily comparable vacation in Paris or Rome. It was only when one of the packages was amended to include ‘FREE breakfast’ that a clear winner emerged.

Offering a freebie or an extra (even it is not in reality worth much) can distract us from our rational analysis of costs and benefits.

What is the ‘FREE breakfast’ that could swing customers to option that you want them to chose?

---

5. Offer A Decoy Option

Some marketers offer the customer ‘a decoy option’.

That is a third option that serves no purpose other than to make it easier for you to choose among the other options.

The example is often given of the newspaper subscription which offered:

- Option 1: Digital Subscription – 59 per annum

- Option 2: Print Subscription – 129 per annum

- Option 3: Digital & Print Subscription – 129 per annum

Option 2 – the Print only subscription could be seen as a decoy.  It’s purpose was to create a preference for Option 3.

Do your quotes and proposals contain a decoy that nudges the customer in a particular direction?

---

6. Provide Social Comparison

There is a strong element of social comparison in terms of how we evaluate different options.

In short we are influenced by what is the most popular options chosen by others. That is the power behind the feature used by Amazon and others that says customers who bought this book also purchased these books.

Telling the customer what customers, or groups of customers chose particular options and why, can help them to make their own selection.

Do you provide your customers with a social comparison to guide their choices?

---

References 

Collis Ray: Buyer Seller Insight: Sellers: Buyer OCD: The Obsession With Lowest Price. Retrieved November 29, 2013 from http://buyer.sellerinsights.com/2013/06/25/how-to-influence-the-buyers-choices/

Blaž Mertelj
Managing Director & Senior Consultant

Why focusing on delighting your customers is a stupid strategy?

                                         Figure 1:  Are you "exceeding customer expectations" and /or "creating customer delight"?

If you read the profiles of many of the heads of customer service on LinkedIn (or the service areas of their company’s websites), you might be forgiven for concluding that they were almost all focused on the lofty goals of “exceeding customer expectations” and/or “creating customer delight”. Maybe your organisation claims to do the same.

But ground-breaking recent research by the CEB (the organisation that brought you “The Challenger Sale”) makes a strong case for all this talk of delighting customers being a misguided and - for almost every company on the planet bar a few shining stars - ultimately unprofitable strategy. 

As anyone who has had cause to phone O2’s customer service line (note: other mobile phone companies offer an equally awful experience) will recognise, I think most of us would be prepared to sacrifice the occasional opportunity to have a truly “wow” experience in return for not ever having to suffer any more of the much more common “doh!’ experiences. 

An Effortless Experience? 

The CEB’s research (spanning nearly 100,000 customers) found that there is almost no discernable increase in loyalty amongst customers whose expectations were exceeded compared to those whose expectations had simply been met - but that there was a precipitous decline in loyalty amongst those who had been disappointed by their service experience. 

The full details was revealed in “The Effortless Experience” by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi - published in September of this year. I thought it is worth whetting your appetite by sharing a few of their conclusions. 

Customers just want it to be easy 

It turns out that the overwhelming majority of customers aren’t looking to have their expectations exceeded. They simply want their service experience to be easy. Here are three findings that particularly stood out for me: 

1: A Strategy of Delight Doesn’t Pay 

Far from loyalty increasing when expectations are exceeded, the study found that loyalty pretty much flat-lines once expectations have been met. But it also found that most organisations grossly underestimate the negative loyalty generated by service experiences that fell below the customer’s expectations.

As the authors point out, for most companies (if you work for Nordstrom or Zappos, ignore this) trying to achieve delight is unprofitably expensive - but a failure to get the service basics right is punishingly unprofitable. You will lose customers, and they will share their bad experience with many others to create a vortex of negative word of mouth. 

2: Customer Service Interactions Tend to Drive Disloyalty, not Loyalty 

The study found that most customer service interactions did more harm than good - and there’s a good reason why: customers tend to call customer service when they have a problem, and because the majority of customer service interactions fail to fully, quickly and effortlessly solve the problem, they tend to make things worse - in many cases, much worse. 

They found that positive service experiences generated relatively little positive word of mouth when compared to positive product experiences - but that negative service experiences generated FAR more negative word of mouth than negative product experiences. 

There’s some simple and obvious psychology behind this: positive product experiences are a reflection of our own wisdom - and so we want to share them. But negative service experiences make us feel disrespected and angry, and we want to help our friends and colleagues avoid going through the same. 

3: The Key to Mitigating Disloyalty is Reducing Customer Effort  

Finally, the study found that disloyalty is directly related to the degree of effort the customer has to go through in order to get the problem completely resolved. This isn’t just about being able to claim “First Call Resolution” (FCR): it’s about making sure that the customer doesn’t suffer related downstream problems. 

In fact, obsessing about FCR statistics turns out to be dysfunctional, since it encourages the CSR to mark the call closed when there may still be some as-yet-undiagnosed issues that are going to manifest themselves later on. The CEB talk about “next issue avoidance”, and it's a factor that really sets good service organisations apart from the rest. 

Having to make more than one call, having to repeat information as you get passed around the organisation in a vain attempt to get to someone who can do something, and being told that an apparently sensible option “isn’t corporate policy” - these all contribute to making the customer feel frustrated, uncomfortable, unloved and ultimately disloyal.  

If you don’t yet believe the importance of this, consider the following statistic: 96% of customers who had a high-effort service experience reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% of customers who reported a low-effort experience. The message is clear - your primary goal must be to make the service experience as simple, straightforward and easy as possible for your customers and if you don’t, they will leave.

So tell me: how does this shape up against YOUR experiences as a customer? And how good a job is your customer service team doing in making it easy for your customers to have their problems resolved. Oh, and if you’ve got any “doh!’ experiences (or even any “wow!”) experiences you’d like to share, please add a comment. 

References 

Bob Apollo: Inflexion-Points: Building Scalable Businesses. Why focusing on delighting your customers is a stupid strategy. Retrieved November 28, 2013 from http://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/100074/Why-focusing-on-delighting-your-customers-is-a-stupid-strategy

Image: http://blog.15five.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/iStock_000018370766_Small.jpg 

Tamara Ćetković
Consultant, Coach & Project Manager