Are you passionate about what you sell? If so, I’m sure you like talking about your company and what it has to offer. Unfortunately, this can turn into a problem if you’re not careful.
When it comes to prospecting, I’ve seen this mistake made hundreds of times – Talking too much about YOU.
When you’re talking to a prospective customer and you’re going on and on about YOUR company, YOUR products, YOUR track record, they get the distinct feeling that they are not the center of the conversation. They have goals they want to achieve and challenges they want to overcome, and when you turn the conversation away from them and more about you, they will most likely start to tune you out.
Another problem is when you give them too much information at once. The human brain is looking for clarity, and when you drown it in information, it tunes out. That’s because the old brain, in charge of fight, flight or freeze responses, is all about survival. When you throw a bunch of information at your prospect, their old brain will quickly determine that it will take too much energy and expend too many calories to process the conversation.
So what does your client care about? Themselves! If you could read their mind at this point in a sales conversation you might see a little bubble pop up with the question, “What’s in it for ME?”
How do you overcome these bad behaviors and deliver a conversation (not a monologue) that’s designed to help their brain understand your unique value in the marketplace and make it easy for them to make a decision?
Here are 5 things you can do to immediately start improving your sales conversations.
1. Check Your Intent
Before you ever engage a prospect, either over the phone on a Discovery call or in person in an expanded conversation, ask yourself this question:
“How will my prospect be better off as a result of doing business with me?”
Asking and answering that question has the dramatic effect of centering the conversation around the world of your prospect.
If you’re in the insurance industry, you minimize risk which results in peace of mind. Maybe you’ve been in the industry for a long time and can quickly advise your clients on the right product. Because of the trust they have with you, they don’t need to spend a bunch of time analyzing the right policy. In this case, you’re giving them the gift of time.
When your INTENT is clarified around your prospect’s goals, you are communicating empathetically and will stand out above 90% of your competition.
2. Know Your Prospect’s Goals & Challenges
Executives are tired of playing 20 questions. If your prospect is interviewing 2-3 other companies who do what you do (and they are… and they can!), imagine the frustration of answering the SAME questions over and over and over.
Leading questions like, “What keeps you up at night” or “What pain points are you experiencing” causes your prospect to give voice to their frustrations over and over again. When they do this, a hormone called cortisol is dripping on their brain, they feel bad and the result is that it makes them closed to possibilities, not open to new experiences.
Before the conversation, you should already know both the high level goals of the person you’re talking to and the challenges they face.
Here is another example from the insurance industry on how to differentiate your service in a mostly commoditized market.
In having worked with a carrier that provides workers compensation, it’s obvious that the executives they sell to are concerned about their employee’s welfare. But they also have to consider the financial implications of injuries on the job. Most carriers base the rate of the workers comp policy on historical injury data. The more injuries, the more you pay for the policy.
This carrier did something different. They were more proactive in creating a culture in their client’s business that increases awareness around safety, leading to lower claims. They effectively partner with their clients, which is reflected in the lower policy rate that isn’t based on history but on a mutual partnership of education and accountability.
The conversation from the marketing reps for this carrier might sound something like this: “In speaking with other CEO’s in manufacturing, we hear that they are looking for ways to lower injury rates. But they are challenged with high turnover, inconsistent safety training and a lack of accountability.”
Instead of playing 20 questions, lead with INSIGHT.
3. Articulate What it Means To Them
Now that you’ve led the conversation with insight into their challenges and goals, make it conversational. Ask them, “I’m curious, what does this look like in your world?” If you’ve done your homework, you’ve likely hit the nail on the head and they will validate and expound on their challenges.”
At this point, you want to make an emotional connection with your prospect, letting them feel the impact of their challenge by asking questions like, “What does it mean to your company if you can’t overcome these challenges?” Even more pointed, “What does it mean to your team or you personally if you can’t get past this? To get more insight, you could ask, “What have you tried to overcome these challenges on your own?”
Now, your prospect will actually hear themselves detailing how serious the problem is. They experience the emotion connected to their problem when you ask impact questions. There’s a formula we use in our instruction that goes like this:
EMOTION = MEMORY
When you experience an emotion, hormones are released that cement that emotion into your memory. It’s the old brain’s way of saying, “Remember this situation” be it positive or negative. This is important because humans are roughly 2-3 times as likely to run FROM a threat/danger as they are to run TO a solution. This will make the idea of sticking with the status quo at the end of your conversation (the biggest threat to your sales success is the status quo, NOT your competition) a virtual impossibility.
4. Show Them What They Can Do Differently
Notice at this point of the conversation that you’ve said NOTHING about you, your product or your service. The entire conversation has been about your prospect, THEIR goals, THEIR challenges and what it MEANS to them.
It will be difficult to stop yourself from providing relief to your prospect as they detail (sometimes emotionally) how difficult their challenges are, but you need to hold back from the “we can help you” comments. Daniel Kahneman, in his groundbreaking research (detailed in his book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”) discovered exactly HOW the human brain perceives value. It’s in a contrasting worldview.
By detailing your prospect’s challenges and expounding on what it MEANS to them, you’ve given them an accurate understanding of their Present State (PS) and by showing them what they can do differently as a result of using your product or service, you are going to paint a picture of a Future State (FS) they could have by engaging your company. The greater the distance between their PS and their potential FS, the greater the value they perceive.
We call these statements, Value Positions. NOT Value Propositions. Why? Because when you are proposing something, it’s a suggestion. You should be confident enough of the value you provide to take a POSITION in the marketplace of the unique value you, your company and its products and services provide.
Back to the insurance industry. An example of a Value Position Statement would be: “What if you could increase the safety of your work environment while reducing the financial impact and policy rate of your workers compensation?”.
5. Prove It!
But that’s not enough. You need to tell them how you’ve accomplished this before. You need to “land” the “What if” statements with a concrete example of how you’ve successfully implemented your solution with other clients. The best way to do that is with a SUCCINCT customer testimonial. It might sound something like this:
“That’s how one of the largest chicken manufacturers in Georgia was able to decrease injuries by 20% in 18 months while paying a lower policy rate for their workers comp.”
If you follow this model, you will immediately start to produce high value sales conversations. If you’re looking for help in implementing these and other techniques, get in touch with us today for a free consultation!
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We understand it can be difficult to know where to start when building a framework for sales conversations, so we’ve developed a Sales Conversation “Cheat Sheet” you can download HERE.
