Why Change Selling Blog

In-person selling is back after a COVID-enforced hiatus.

As salespeople, customer success and pre-sales engineers return to face-to-face meetings with prospects and customers, it presents an opportunity for your business. How can you equip your direct and channel teams to thrive in these in-person conversations while fostering growth and learning?

Introduction: The Traditional Case Study Paradigm

In the technology business, the approach to creating case studies is straightforward; it's product-centric and thus uninteresting. These narratives typically place the company and its product as the hero, solving the customer's problems while pulling a couple of quotes from the customer for social proof. While these stories do their part in showcasing product capabilities, they are often impenetrable and miss a crucial aspect of storytelling: emotional engagement and relatability.

What is a sales prologue, and why use it?

This post was first published on Linkedin on 15 January 2024

B2B Selling process is the subject of countless books, yet basic qualification of opportunities is still problematic. As a result, precious marketing, technical and sales resources are wasted on weeks and months-long evaluations for prospects who will never buy. What if your sales team was 90% accurate in qualifying prospects, what would that do for your win-rate and forecasting accuracy?

People ask me this question when they are curious about creating whiteboards, and the truth is that it depends on your purpose and your desired outcome. In this article, I discuss various whiteboard types, their purpose and a process for creating a whiteboard story.

The Four Big Objections 

This post explores the nature of objections and examines their meaning and offers an interactive game at the end of the article to test skills in unpacking the buyers objections and fluffy language.

There are hundreds of ways for buyers to say no to a salesperson, but there are really only four basic objections and all other objections are variants of there four.

The objections in Table 1. are the type of objection we are likely to see early in a sales cycle and very typically when we on the phone trying to advance the sale and set the next appointment.

Objections typically occur when the sales person is trying to advance the sale beyond the buyer's readiness to move to the next step. "I'm not interested" is a variant of I don't have time and usually occurs when cold-calling and having asked the buyer to something they are not ready to do.

What Buyers Really Mean

If we get to the end of the sales-cycle in B2B selling and we get objections like the ones in Table 2. below, we are in big trouble.

Objections are far more likely to come up in the qualification phase or during evaluation, but when salespeople don't listen and miss the buyers comments, questions and feedback, then these questions or concerns typically resurface as objections. 

Objections typically occur as a result of unanswered questions that salespeople missed earlier in the sales cycle, which is why reversing the buyers question is so important. 

I'm grateful to Stephen Allott who shared the above chart, based on his experience as president at Micromuse. Having sold B2B technology products and services around the World for more than 30 years, I have heard every one of these more than a few times.

With the above chart there are of course exceptions and when there is a trusted advisor relationship and rapport, the buyer may well be telling the truth. Only yesterday I was told by the EVP of a mid-sized technology company that they had corporate initiative under-way, (code for - we're doing an acquisition), that prevented them from focusing on our messaging and whiteboard story development until mid Q4 = a nice way to say "the timing isn't right".

Overcoming the Four Big Objections

The following excerpt is from Wiki "selling technique" "While many sales techniques offer specific advice on how to handle objections and stalls, Sandler suggests that only the objecting client is able to remove the objection"

I'm in complete agreement with David Sandler on this one and am not going to offer specific technique to overcome objections...there are hundreds of entries on Google and Youtube if you are interested.

I am offering an exercise in the use of precision language to get salespeople thinking about how to uncover the underlying reason for the objection, so that a conversation can occur around addressing the buyers concern.

Precision in Language Exercise

The following exercise is excerpted from the Selling Psychology section of our Selling in the Internet Age, Adaptive E-Learning program. It uses a number of linguistic techniques and should be both amusing as well as informative.

Take Aways

1. Objections are not neccessarily a bad thing during the sales cycle. I would prefer to have objections, that way I know there is interest. 
2. The opposite scenario is proceeding through the sales cycle and getting no objections, which often means that you are being invited along for the bake-off and they are actively engaged with another vendor...who is getting objections.
3. Language and communication skills are traits of the most successful salespeople. They can be learned and will pay a dividend for those sales people prepared to learn and deliberately practice using them.

NLP has its strong proponents and equally strong detractors in the sales training community. If it can’t be measured it must be bunkum is an oft heard rebuke of NLP.
However the scientific community occasionally publishes something that proves and supports the adoption and use of certain techniques that have long been observed and adopted as part of NLP, and when they do - I like to use it so that the skeptics in the audience have the proof they need to take on that particular belief and use the tools.

I have embedded this 2007 Sociometrics video from MIT Prof. Alex Pentland to introduce concepts being discussed in this article. Pentland and his colleagues have come a long way in their understanding of the dynamics of human communication and group interaction since this video was recorded and there are many other videos and studies published and accessible in a few keystrokes.

Consultative Selling Myths

Sales books, blog-posts and training courses that offer “consultative selling secrets” and magical closing-techniques, constantly amuse me.

Most of the ideas in these so-called secrets are common sense and have been in practice since the “Fuller-brush man” came a calling.

If there truly were secrets to success in consultative selling or any other form of selling, then nobody would know them. Another myth is "Consultative Selling is Dead", but I will deal with that one another time...clearly it is not.

The truth is that there is a growing body of knowledge around consultative selling best-practices that anyone with a Web browser and an ability to read can access.

Great sales people are great communicators with strong ego-drive and the self-discipline, to do on a daily basis the little things that average sales people do not, that lead to successful sales outcomes. 

"Why Killer Products don't Sell" is a revelation and MUST READ for technology sales and marketing leaders for a number of reasons.

1. Firstly, there is original thought in the analysis of the buying cycle and the lifecycle of every purchase in the buying organization. The authors state and I agree that every purchase follows the I-M-P-A-C-T (Identify - Mentor - Position - Assessment - Case - Transaction) process, the difference is that in a mature buying category, this can happen in a couple of minutes for acquiring a "value-offered" product (Dell Laptop), vs. months for an emerging buying category "value-created" = your discontinuous technology.

2. The second key idea is that there are four different selling cultures, depending on the maturity of the buying category. This indeed explains why so many "proven" sales-people and sales managers from well known corporations (value-added or value-offered) fail in early stage companies where the buying category is still being formed (value-created) and a consultative sales approach is required....this is worth the price of the book alone.

3. The imperative is for sales teams to understand where they are in the technology adoption life-cycle in order to more effectively facilitate the buying process; and for technology sellers to align their organizations operational cultures to match the buying cultures of their target markets.

Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts have made a valuable contribution to a growing body of work in the science of professional selling.

We have spoken with both authors and with their permission will be integrating the IMPACT concept and ideas from their book into our Consultative Selling Training courses and E-Learning programs.

Highly recommended!

In the book Why Killer Products Don't Sell, authors, Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts state there are four different and distinct buying cultures, which vary based on the buyers tolerance for risk across the technology adoption lifecycle. Understanding the difference in the four buying cultures and optimizing the supply/value chain to service customers is often an after-thought, particulary for early-stage companies transitioning from start-up to company building. Indeed many large corporations have difficulty in introducing novel products through a salesforce that is accustomed to servicing customers in a mature market.