Yesterday, David Brock posted an article on LinkedIn about what it takes to create value for customers. Although I don’t often comment on others’ posts, I felt compelled to dash off this reply:
Dave, I mostly agree, but I would just go a step further. You say that value creation is helping them achieve their goals and realizing the improvements they anticipated. I think that’s actually value delivery.
Value creation is working with the customer is working collaboratively to go beyond their goals and expectations, thus delivering more value than they knew was possible.
In fact, since it’s collaborative, I would say that in true value creation, both sides end up being happily surprised by the results.
Although it’s not a “sales” example, I would cite the recent news about how the Ukrainian armed forces are taking delivery of Western weapons and using them creatively in ways to get results neither side knew was possible.
In this post, I want to elaborate on this idea of surprise. I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but I truly believe that the best sales calls are those that end up with a double surprise. Typically, both sides go into the sales call with a reasonably solid idea of what they want and expect. The seller generally has an idea what the buyer needs, and the buyer has probably already done a lot of research into their own problem and what solutions are available in the market. Both sides are qualifying each other, which in cognitive terms means that they are looking for evidence to confirm their views and compel agreement from the other side.
There’s nothing “wrong” with this type of call; delivering the value that customers expect is worthwhile. It would be a productive sales call if each side walked out having met their expectations. But the best sales calls, and the only ones that can truly be said to create value, are those that result in new and unexpected ideas that generate value. Let’s call it synergistic surprise.
It’s fairly common for one side or the other to get surprised during a sales call. The seller might learn about needs the buyer has and use that to deliver a better and more lucrative solution. The buyer may learn about a new feature and improve on the specs they use for their RFP. But in either case, the value was there, just waiting for both sides to discover it. Value is created when an undiscovered need meets an unexplored possibility, creating an unexpected spark of creation, enabling both sides to devise an approach that had not been thought of before. My entire body of work on Lean Communication resulted from a sales call I had with the CEO of a manufacturing company. His initial request was to help his staff communicate more concisely, which sparked the idea of lean in my mind, which led to a completely new approach that increased the overall value of communication inside the company.
The benefits of synergistic surprise are, well, unsurprising. When the customer gets unexpected value, they get better functional outcomes which can produce measurable business improvements far beyond their investment. The seller gets a more satisfied customer, possibly a higher price, and insights that they can then use to improve the value proposition they bring to their other customers.
You can’t guarantee a double surprise in every sales call, but there are things you can do to bolster the odds. Start with an attitude of curiosity, which means realizing that you don’t have all the answers. Go into the call with a helping and learning mentality, rather than a selling mentality. Ask open-ended questions and listen carefully to the answers, especially anything which indicates unexplored needs. Listen for reasons you may be wrong. Ask “why” a lot.
Isaac Asimov said that the most exciting words in science are: “That’s funny…” By the same token I believe the most important words in sales calls may be: “I never thought about it that way.”
As a successful salesperson, you already understand the value of effective listening, and may have sharpened your skills through formal training in “active listening” techniques such as mirroring, probing, and paraphrasing.
If you’re skilled at these techniques, you’re likely to rank among the better listeners that your customers regularly encounter. But you can be even better if you understand and practice the less well-known concept of listening styles.[1]
In essence, there are four possible ways of listening to another person speak:
Relational listening is concerned with how the other person feels, and the goal is to understand them emotionally and to make a connection.
Analytic listening focuses on fully understanding the other person’s content–their argument or point of view, without judging it.
Task-oriented listening is about trying to quickly grasp the other person’s point and relate it to one’s own purposes for the conversation.
Critical listening judges the validity of the other person’s content by evaluating their logic and assessing their evidence.
As you read these four descriptions, you may have had a flash of recognition about your own tendencies. People tend to have a preferred or habitual style of thinking, and this colors what they hear and understand, and at the same time may affect how they are perceived by others. But these styles are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and any individual can consciously choose which style to use.
When to vary your style
Which style is most appropriate or effective? It depends.
What are you trying to accomplish in the conversation? Sometimes the other person just wants to vent and be heard, and the relational style works best, while the critical style could easily cause a rift between speaker and listener. Other times, especially with complex ideas, the analytical style might be best. Even the task-oriented and critical styles, which might seem impatient or rude, may apply depending on the situation. In fact, each can even be useful at different points during the same conversation.
And that leads us to how to deploy these styles appropriately in a sales conversation. Depending on where you are in the sales call or sales cycle, if you know which style is most appropriate at the time, you can increase connection, understanding, and even positioning. Let’s take a look at the typical tasks you need to accomplish during a sales conversation:
When you first meet a potential customer, there is usually some brief time to establish common ground. This “non-business” part of the meeting may seem to be irrelevant to the actual purpose of the call, but that attitude ignores eons of behavioral evolution. First impressions count for a lot, and one of the most important things that people size up—rapidly and unconsciously—is similarity and warmth. You can use the relational style to listen for commonalities and establish rapport. Moving too quickly to business may turn off the other person, particularly if their own style is also relational. At the same time, you need to focus on their mood, to ensure that you don’t go on too long when they’re showing signs of impatience.
As you move into the body of the sales call, you don’t turn off the relational listening radar, but you do shift your emphasis towards task-oriented listening, minus the impatience. At this stage, you are asking questions and then listening for information that relates to your call purpose. For example, if you’re looking for needs that you may be able to address, you will be listening for indications that they may have known problems, opportunities, changes and risks. The caveat is that you can’t be so focused on specific targeted needs that you miss hints about unexpected needs.
When you’ve heard needs that you can address, you may feel the urge to listen critically, as you formulate your pitch about how you can solve their problem. But it’s better to hold off and go into the analytical listening mode, to diagnose and better understand their issues before you launch into your prescription.
As the conversation progresses, you can use both relational and task-oriented listening to pick up buying signals, such as indications that they are thinking ahead to implementation, or concerns about how to get agreement from other stakeholders.
Critical listening, with its emphasis on searching for flaws in the customer’s thinking, would seem to be least appropriate for customer conversations. But there are times when you may need to correct their perceptions or statements. Don’t forget that selling can go both ways: the customer may be trying to sell you on a particular point of view as well. If they bring up an invalid objection, you can’t let it slide. They may have incomplete information, or they may be testing you, so you must listen critically to be able to respond appropriately. And of course the negotiation stage is where you may need your critical listening the most, to be able to counter their arguments designed to undermine your negotiating position.
Listening style affects your responses
So far we’ve examined listening styles as they relate to what’s going on in our minds as the customer is talking. But how we listen also makes a visible difference to the customer, because it influences our response to what we hear. For example, if the customer says, “I just think that switching to a new system will be too complicated for our team.” Here are possible responses:
Relational: “It’s a big decision, so it’s normal to feel a bit nervous about it.”
Analytical: “What specific aspects of the implementation concern you the most?”
Task-oriented: “We have a dedicated team that specializes in ensuring a smooth transition.”
Critical: “Your concerns are unfounded. The processes you’ve seen in the past are totally different.”
It’s a skill that takes practice
You might think that listening styles are just a matter of “different strokes for different folks”, but sales conversations are like swimming the individual medley in the Olympics—you can’t win without being able to master each stroke. We all have tendencies or habitual listening styles, but ultimately style is a choice, and a skill you can work on.
Here’s a small experiment you can run: next time you speak to a customer, pay attention to your own thoughts and responses to gain an awareness of your own style. Then, gradually expand your own range by consciously switching between style. Finally, try varying your responses and paying attention to the difference it makes.
[1] See, for example, “What’s Your Listening Style?”, by Rebecca D. Minehart, Benjamin B. Symon, Laura K. Rock, Harvard Business Review, May 31, 2022.
It has been quite a while since I’ve written a book recommendation. I simply haven’t come across much recently that was worth passing on to my readers.
Until now.
In Making Numbers Count, Chip Heath and Karla Starr have produced a comprehensive set of best practices for presenting numbers for maximum effect.
We all know that it is important in business communication to be data-driven, hence the need for numbers to make our case. Yet data is not enough. It’s easy to think that numbers speak for themselves, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Why not?
Persuasive communication is about getting people to act in a certain way. In order to do so, they must first attend to your message, understand it, believe it, remember it, and then act on it. By itself, data supports only action number three. Simply providing numbers without using some of the techniques in this book will guarantee that you leave a lot of persuasive oomph on the table. With these techniques, you’ll be able to grab attention, get your intended meaning across, make it stick in their memories, and evoke emotions which drive action.
Let’s start with understanding. On the face of it, nothing should be easier to understand than a number. We know that 6 is more than 5, and 60 much greater than 6. It’s obvious 43% is bigger than 17%. We know 1/3 is larger than 1/4. (Actually, that last is not so obvious. When A&W introduced a 1/3 pound burger at the same price as McDonald’s quarter-pounder, sales declined because more than one-half of their customers thought it was smaller. Just another illustration why numbers sometimes need a little help.)
On the other hand, nothing is more meaningless than a single number. Is 5 a big number? If you drink 5 ounces of water after a hard workout, it’s not near enough. If you down five ounces of liquor before driving home, it could change your life. Numbers are meaningless except when compared with something we already know.
Exceptionally large or small numbers can be especially difficult to understand. We all know a billion is more than a million, but it really hits home when you say a million seconds is about 12 days; a billion seconds is 32 years.
If you want to manage the meaning, you must choose the comparison. When you present a number without context, your listeners or readers will interpret the number relative to their own experience, which might not prompt your intended effect. If you want your numbers to count—to serve your purpose—you need to choose the proper context. Here’s an example from the book:
59% of Americans polled said that growing trade ties between countries are “very good” or “somewhat good”. When I read that statistic, I thought that since the US has traditionally promoted free trade, it’s not too surprising that 3 out of 5 support growing ties. But, what if I had told you first that of 47 countries surveyed, the US came in dead last by far?[1] (This example also illustrates how you can grab attention with a number by setting up and then breaking an expectation.)
Understanding is a good start, but often you also need to make numbers memorable and vivid. Abstract numbers tend not to stick in minds very well, so one of the best ways to make them memorable is to make them concrete, often by relating them to something familiar, such as comparing tumor sizes in centimeters to familiar objects (1 cm = pea; 3cm = grape). There are many such techniques in the book.
If you’re going for emotional impact, you will have to make your numbers vivid, especially because even dramatic numbers may fail to make an impression because of psychological numbing. To punch through indifference, we need to think about something that evokes the requisite emotion. Imagine the horror we all feel when learning about a plane crash. What if I told you that the current daily COVID death toll is equivalent to a fully loaded 737 crashing every three hours of every single day?
This post has only given a hint of the myriad techniques you can learn in the book. I don’t want to steal their thunder, and besides, I’ll probably use a few of them in future posts! The best part of Making Numbers Count is that it’s full of before-and-after examples—77 in all. You could become a more eloquent communicator simply by becoming familiar with the examples, or better yet, follow their advice and try to improve on their efforts.
[1] That survey was taken in 2007; I don’t know comparable stats for today, but that simply underscores the need to provide proper context.
As the author of Lean Communication, I appreciate a book that delivers valuable information with few wasted words. Mike Kunkle has done just that with The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement. In less than 150 pages, he manages to be clear, concise and comprehensive—but above all, practical.
In my thirty years as a sales trainer and consultant, I have seen far too many instances of the old school sales “leader”, whose only tools are incentives and intimidation. That approach just won’t cut it anymore, as sales get more complex and competition gets more intense. It reminds me of the old saying that amateurs study tactics, armchair generals study strategy, but professionals study logistics. Just as logistics place the right people with the right equipment in the right places, sales enablement does the same for sales.
This book will show you how to get it done. Whether you are a sales leader or a sales enablement professional, you will find a lot of useful insights and actionable ideas to design and implement a system that will maximize the performance of the sales force. Depending on your own specific situation, some chapters will resonate more than others. I especially appreciated the chapters on buyer acumen, sales methodology, and training, but there is something for everyone, including hiring, compensation, coaching, analytics—fourteen building blocks in all.
So many business books are long magazine articles puffed up with “been there, done that” stories. This is the rare business how-to book that leaves you wanting more. In fact, the only quibble I have is that Kunkle could have used a few more examples and stories from his deep experience to illustrate his points. For example, he cites the importance of having exit criteria in the buying process, but the lack of real-world examples could make it unclear to someone just becoming familiar with the topic. And ironically, the building block that Kunkle says he is least expert in, sales compensation, is the only one enlivened and enlightened by a story from his own experience.
The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement is like a map that you consult once to get your bearings, and then keep at hand for a long time to consult on your sales enablement journey. Although Kunkle reminds us that the map is not the territory, you still need one to envision the destination and plan the most efficient route. This is the best one you will find.
