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Why Plan, when It’s Just Going to Go Off-Track Anyway?

By Jack Malcolm / 11.26.2013 / 1 Comment

Sure wish I had brought a map

Your plan will go off-track. It was a German general, von Moltke, who first said that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy. I doubt von Moltke ever carried a bag, but the same idea applies to sales call plans. You can establish a clear purpose, have excellent questions prepared to guide the conversation, anticipate the worst possible objections you could encounter, and the customer will still find a way to say or do something unexpected.

So why even plan? Why not go in and wing it? You’re a pro, after all. You’ve been in sales long enough to have heard everything. You have a quick mind, deep reserves of experience, and the ability to bluff your way out of the odd inconvenient moment.

Sure.

I’ve noticed an interesting dynamic in my sales training through the years. The attitude towards sales call planning roughly corresponds to the salesperson’s experience level, but the relationship is not linear. Newbies tend to embrace the idea of planning for sales calls. Those with a medium level of experience tend to think they don’t need to plan because they have had some success in sales up to that point, and as a result have enormous self-confidence. But interestingly enough, it’s the ones with the most experience who most embrace the idea of planning, and in fact most of them have devised their own ad-hoc systems for it.

There are two main reasons salespeople give to explain their aversion to planning. The first is that it takes time, and the second is that it limits their flexibility.

Before tackling these two objections, let me first stress that when I refer to sales call planning I don’t mean force-fitting every call into some predetermined sales process that requires you to move systematically through stages in the buying process, or mechanically filling out a sales call plan template. The template helps, of course, but the key is to use it to really think about the upcoming meeting with the customer.

Of course plans take time. So do unsuccessful sales calls, except now you’re not only taking up more of your own time, you’re also taking up the customer’s. How many times have you had to schedule another meeting to answer questions you were unprepared to answer in the first, or have left a meeting only to suddenly remember that you forgot to talk about something very important?

Besides, as you get in the habit of writing sales call plans, you’ll find that it gets easier and faster, since most calls tend to fall into one of several regular patterns.

Plans don’t limit you, they liberate you. Alfred North Whitehead said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them”, and the same could be said for sales call planning. Your goal, when you enter into a serious sales conversation, is to devote your full attention to the buyer. That’s hard to do when a portion of your working memory is taken up trying to keep track of where you are in the conversation and what you want to ask next. If you’ve planned it, you can ask your first question, and then focus your full attention on the answer. If the customer says something that goes off the intended track, you can follow the new thread without worrying about whether you will forget your other questions. You always know they are there if you want to come back to them.

Plans can also boost your situational awareness, which is the best defense against the unexpected. The big picture that the plan gives you helps you spot quicker when things are going off track and to make sense of them. The map may not be the territory, but when the territory is different than what you expected, it definitely helps to orient you.

Finally, the process of planning forces you to think deeper about the customer, the situation, and the value you bring. Depth of thought results in better analysis and greater creativity, but that’s an idea I will develop in another article.

Listening skills

The Listening Mindset: 3 Positive Qualities You Need to Dial Down

By Jack Malcolm / 11.25.2013 / No Comment

Even positive qualities can be overdone

Three of the best qualities a persuasive communicator can have are passion, goal focus and a problem-solving orientation. But these positive qualities can actually get in the way of effective listening if they’re overdone.

Passion: Passion is great; it can be contagious and we can be more believable when we let the listener see how much we care about the topic. But everything carries a cost, and passion for your idea can easily turn into arrogance and missed opportunity. The reality is that no one else is passionate about your pet project as you are, and they will ultimately agree for their own reasons—not yours.

The other problem with passion is that you just don’t shut up. You have to tone down the passion long enough to listen to the other’s point of view. You will have plenty of time to dial the passion back up when you go into transmit mode, so squelch it while you’re in receiving mode.

Dial down the passion and dial up the empathy.

Problem-solving: We love to solve problems for others; and that’s a good thing. But we have to tone it down during the listening phase. Rushing in too early with a solution can create problems for you. First, you may be wrong; you may solve the wrong problem, or provide an incomplete solution because you don’t have enough information to understand it completely. Second, even if the answer is exactly right, your credibility may suffer if the other person gets the sense that that’s what you were going to say no matter what.

If you want your solution to land on willing ears, slow down, ask a few more questions to either dig deeper into causes or to bring out the costs of not solving, and–best of all—to let the other person arrive at the solution and make it their own.

Dial down the rush to solve and dial up the patience.

Goal focus: It’s great to have a specific goal in mind for a presentation, sales call, or conversation. But being too focused on your goal is like driving down a busy highway only looking at what’s in the lane in front of you. It’s called inattentional blindness, and it’s illustrated by the now-famous “invisible gorilla” video and Richard Wiseman’s research into what makes some people luckier than others. Similarly, we want to ask excellent questions, but sometimes we’re so focused on the answer we’re looking for that we miss other important information.

By all means, keep your goals and your questions, but use them as a safety net rather than a straitjacket. By getting them out of your head and putting them on paper, you can focus your full attention on your counterpart, knowing that your written goals and questions will be there if and when you need them.

Dial down the searchlight and dial up the floodlight.

Persuasive communication

How to Use Goldilocks Framing to Make Your Idea Just Right

By Jack Malcolm / 11.22.2013 / 2 Comments

Amos Tversky said that we don’t choose between options; we choose between descriptions of options. So, just because you’ve done the critical thinking to figure out the best option to recommend to someone does not mean you’re done. You then have to figure out the best way to frame it so that it is likely to be chosen.

One of the most effective ways to frame your recommended option is to sandwich it between two other plausible choices.

There’s something about a happy medium that is attractive to our minds. It’s even seen in infants as young as 7 or 8 months old, who tend to prefer stimuli that are not too simple or too complex. Just like Goldilocks, we don’t want too much or too little, we want it to be “just right”.

Or maybe (with the exception of our present political scene) it’s that we tend to shy away from extremes. It’s possible that our natural risk aversion makes the middle seem the safer choice: if the choice goes wrong it’s harder to justify the more extreme option.

In addition, making decisions can be hard work, so our minds tend to seek the path of least resistance. We like easy decisions, and the outside choices act as guardrails funneling us into the fast lane.

There is no logical reason that the middle choice is the best bet every time. Sometimes, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, extremism is no vice and moderation is no virtue, especially when the definition of “extreme” can be so easily manipulated. In a perfectly rational world, each choice would be evaluated on its own merits, carefully balancing costs, tradeoffs and rewards.

But decisions are never perfectly rational, and even if they were, we never have perfect information, so we look for clues to help us judge and the reference points we use to evaluate a choice exert a strong gravitational pull on the decision.

That’s why a smart persuader puts just as much thought into the reference points as to the recommended option itself.

Here are some examples of how Goldilocks framing is used in persuasion:

Pricing: Marketers apply the idea all the time with pricing, especially by retailers. Williams-Sonoma once offered a breadmaker at $279, which sold OK. They introduced a bigger model at $429, and few sold…but sales of the $279 model nearly doubled. It’s also why restaurants will have an expensive bottle of wine at the top of the list, to make the next-highest priced seem more acceptable. The highest priced seems extravagant, and the lowest makes you wonder what you’re giving up.

Presentation of options: Henry Kissinger said he always presented Nixon with three alternatives; his favored one was always in the middle and was invariably the one selected. It’s also becoming much more common in presenting options online.

Negotiations: One example is when two sides in a negotiation reach an impasse. Often the stalemate is resolved by offering to split the difference. It “feels” fair, even though either side can determine the middle ground by making their own offer more extreme.

Goldilocks framing can be so powerful that it works even when one or both of the endpoints is highly implausible, such as when a restaurant puts a $100 hamburger on the menu. However, if you’re recommending a course of action, I think it’s important for your personal credibility that the presented options are at least plausible; otherwise the framing will seem like a transparent ploy.

Listening skills - Sales

Listen with Your Brain, Not Your Ears

By Jack Malcolm / 11.21.2013 / 3 Comments

It’s what goes on in between that counts

One of the most common sayings in sales is that God gave you two ears and one mouth, so you should use them in that proportion. That’s true, but it does not go far enough.

We hear with our ears, but we listen with our brains. There is a big difference between hearing and listening. It’s like the difference between seeing and reading. One is passive, and goes on without having to think; the other is active.

Your ears can only pick up the sounds of language, not its physical expressions. Your brain simultaneously processes and synthesizes signals from the eyes and the ears, picking up “micro-expressions” and other cues, often much faster than conscious thought.

Your ears can only hear what is being said; they faithfully pass on the signal to the brain. Hearing what is not said only takes place in the brain itself.

It may seem strange that something we’ve done naturally for our entire lives could stand improvement, but when you analyze what’s actually happening as your brain is listening, you realize that there is a lot of complicated processing going on. Let’s take a look at what happens when someone is listening. There is a model called SIESR[1], which stands for:

Sensing: We receive the incoming signals, including expressions, body language and tone of voice.

Interpreting: We figure out the sender’s intent.

Evaluating: We evaluate what it means to us, in this particular context.

Storing: We keep incoming information in working memory so that we can respond properly.

Responding: We do or say something in response.

Out of the five steps above, the first involves the ears, and the last involves the mouth. But the real meat of the sandwich is the three steps in the middle. That’s where the quality and effectiveness of the dialogue takes place.

Interpreting: Have you accurately interpreted what the other person said? Is their meaning clear? Have they told you the entire truth and nothing but? Do their other signals match the words that are coming out of their mouths? What have they left out? Why did they say this and not that? Are we so focused on getting what we want to hear that we miss something important but unexpected?

Evaluating: Is this what we expected them to say? Does it fit with what we already know? If not, how does it change what we thought we knew? What’s the quality of their evidence? How do we know it’s true? If we don’t think it’s true, what are they missing or hiding? How does it fit with our intentions for the conversation?

Storing: Some variations of the model leave out this step, maybe because they take it for granted. But as we become more scatterbrained and attention-deficient, it becomes more and more important to reinforce this step. Are we getting everything they are saying? If they are going on for a while, have our minds wandered in the middle of their soliloquy? Are we taking effective notes?

Keep in mind that these mental operations are going on while the other person is speaking, which is only possible because our minds can process words about four times as fast as the other person can speak them. This means that we have plenty of bandwidth to run these operations while the other person is speaking. Unfortunately that can also be a big disadvantage, because or attention can flit in and out; what often happens is that we either let our minds wander to something else, or we think we know how they’re going to finish the sentence so we either sneak a quick peek at our email or we begin formulating our response. Anytime these things happen, it’s easy to lose the thread of the conversation, and can be difficult to get it back.

How to improve listening with your brain?

Prepare for the conversation. If it’s a sales call, of course you want to have a call plan. But even for personal conversations, you can review your notes or refresh your memory for previous conversations, and have an intent for the dialogue. Put away whatever was on your mind up to that point and remind yourself to listen actively.

Get physically involved. Sometimes the mind takes cues from what the body is doing. Face the other person squarely if you’re face to face. If it’s on the phone, make sure you’re not positioned with a screen in front of your face. Use following skills. While this is not “thinking”, it will keep your focus locked onto the conversation.

Use your faster thinking time to your advantage. If the person is talking at length, use the extra processing bandwidth to summarize and repeat the message. Use that time to monitor your own listening behavior. Focus fully on what they’re saying, not what your response is going to be—you will have plenty of time for that when they’re done.

[1] Lyman Steil, Larry L. Barker, and Kittie W. Watson, Effective Listening: Key to Your Success. In their book they call it the SIER model, but I believe the Storing component is just as important.