Practical Eloquence Blog

Sales

Pain or Gain: Your Sales Approach Matters

By Jack Malcolm / 6.6.2017 / No Comment

As we saw in our last post, people differ in their approach to motivation: some are more focused on prevention goals and strategies (moving away from pain), and others on promotion goals and strategies (moving towards gain). When you adapt your sales approach to fit theirs, they will be more engaged, understand your message easier, and feel better about their decision. And the best part is that once you learn how to do it, it’s not that difficult to do.

First step: Figure out their dominant mode

Since it’s so important to properly align your sales approach to the other person’s prevention or promotion focus, you have to be able to quickly size them up and figure out which approach to use. Fortunately, there are numerous clues you can glean from what they talk about, the words they use, and even their nonverbal behavior.

What are their goals? Ask them what they want to accomplish and what success will look like when they make this decision. Promoters are going to talk about taking advantage of opportunities, of their aspirations and hopes for the future, and what they want to achieve. Preventers will talk about known problems and risks, about what they’re concerned about, about what they must avoid or prevent. You can also accomplish the same thing by asking them how they made similar decisions in the past.

What alternatives are they considering? Promoters like to look at a lot of alternatives, and are open to new and different ways of doing things. Preventers are more limited, and more conventional. Also, promoters want the best, preventers want “good enough”.

What is their time horizon? Promoters move quickly and eagerly. Preventers prefer to take their time and don’t like quick deadlines.

“I” vs. “We” goals. Promoters are more concerned with individual achievement and looking good. Preventers focus on group achievement.

How prepared and organized are they? Promoters say “let’s do it”, preventers say “let’s plan it”.

Attention to detail. Promoters are more big picture and abstract. Preventers pay attention to detail and like to consider concrete features and benefits.

Promoters move quickly and get excited when they consider success. Preventers are slower and more guarded.

Just one more caveat before proceeding: Don’t forget to assess yourself, because you are probably relying on one approach regardless of who you’re selling to. You probably know yourself well enough, but just in case, here’s a questionnaire you can use.

Second step: Tailor your approach

There are three general ways you can apply prevention-promotion focus in your sales approach: you can adapt to their mode, prime them to adapt to yours, or hedge your bets by using both approaches.

Adapt your approach to suit their dominant focus.

Frame their benefits appropriately. Sales is basically about one thing: you address gaps to improve outcomes. So, the frame choice is quite simple: do you talk more about eliminating or preventing a gap, or about the outcome produced by doing so? The exact same benefit can be expressed in different ways. For example, a client of mine sells sentiment analysis software that can be used to monitor morale, which either cuts turnover or improves retention. Another example: are you lowering fuel costs, or improving fuel efficiency?

Choose which benefits to stress. Most products and services deliver multiple benefits, so you can prioritize some over others. For example, toothpaste can either give you a brighter smile or prevent tooth decay.

Emphasize some questions over others. Challenge and cost questions bring out consequences of not fixing their current situation. You can ask more of those during your sales call with a preventer; ask more resolution questions of a promoter.

Tell different stories. Inspirational tales and testimonials about your other customers who received benefit from your solutions work well with promoters, but cautionary tales about those who did not solve their problems will resonate more with preventers.

Options. Give more options to promoters; limit them for preventers.

New vs. same. When you’re summarizing your offer, emphasize what’s new and different for promoters, but stress what’s tried and true—what’s not different—for preventers.

Abstract v. concrete. For promoters, emphasize the abstract feel-good outcomes, and paint a visionary picture of what success looks like; for preventers, emphasize concrete, measurable features and outcomes. You can also vary how you present competing alternatives. Promoters like to hear all about one offer, then the next. Preventers prefer to see their specific features and benefits rated side by side.

Nonverbal behavior. Without going overboard, it helps to match the general tenor of the other person’s body language. Use more expansive and animated gestures and vocal variety with promoters; tone them down for preventers.

Prime their focus temporarily

Some products or services can only be framed in one way; they are either promotion or prevention focused by their nature. You don’t sell a Porsche by stressing safety and fuel economy, nor do you sell a Volvo by touting its sexy lines. If what you sell only makes sense to be sold one way, the good news is that you can actually “prime” the other person to adopt a prevention or promotion focus, at least for a short time by bringing to mind the appropriate examples.

One of the best ways is through asking the right kind of situation questions. If you ask about what’s important to them personally, you can either ask about their ambitions and aspirations, or you can ask about their duties and obligations. When you ask about what they want to accomplish, you can either ask about what they’re trying to achieve or improve, or you can ask about what problems and risks they’re concerned about. The old “magic wand” question works great to prime a promotion focus: “If you had magic wand and could design the perfect solution, what would it look like?” To get them into a prevention frame of mind, ask them, “On a scale of 1-10, how well is the current system working for you?”

Use both approaches – the “persuasive scissors” approach

If you’re speaking to a roomful of people, chances are good that you will have a mixture. Make sure your presentation or conversation covers both approaches. I call this the persuasive scissors approach, because both blades work together towards the same end. Many persuasive presentation structures are well designed for this. For example, the problem/solution structure begins by describing the problem and quantifying its consequences, and ends with a description of the benefits to be gained by solving it. Even Martin Luther King’s Dream speech was structured this way.

BONUS SECTION: MOTIVATING AND COACHING SALES REPS

I believe that motivating sales reps is a lot like selling: you analyze the situation, ask a lot of questions, uncover gaps, and then get buy-in for a plan to fill them. So, much of what you’ve read in this article can help you with your reps as well.

The importance of regulatory fit means that you shouldn’t coach all your subordinates the same way.[1] If you doubt the hold that one’s pre-pro focus can have, consider the results of an experiment involving professional soccer players in Germany. After being tested to determine their focus, they were given the opportunity to shoot five penalty shots during one of their practices. Some were told their task aspiration was to score at least three times. Others were told their obligation was not to miss more than twice. Even these professionals saw a 30% difference in their performance, depending on whether their instructions fit with their prevention or promotion orientation. It was especially marked for prevention-focused players, who saw almost a 100% difference[2]. As a sales manager, it should not take too much imagination to figure out how to apply this to coaching your reps.

When you give performance reviews, or conduct after-action reviews promoters respond better to hearing what’s going well, but preventers do better upon hearing what they’re falling short on. By the same token, pep talks work well for promoters but leave preventers cold.[3]

[1] It reminds me of what John Wooden said: “Fairness is giving all people the treatment they earn and deserve. It doesn’t mean treating everyone alike.”

[2] This statistic was reported in Focus: Using Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence, by Heidi Grant Halvorson, which is the best book for a general audience. I highly recommend it, especially since it contains a lot of other useful ways to apply focus to your own goals and motivations.

[3] There is some good stuff in this article by Halvorsen and Higgins in Harvard Business Review: Do You Play to Win—Or Not to Lose?

It matters which road you take

Sales

Pleasure or Pain? Using the Yin and Yang of Motivation to Sell More (Or Reduce Your Losses)

By Jack Malcolm / 6.2.2017 / No Comment

If there is just one thing I can be sure of after a quarter century of studying and teaching sales and persuasive techniques, it’s that people do things for their own reasons, not yours. What you think might be an airtight reason to buy your product might leave the other person cold, and reasons that you don’t think would carry any weight might be the most important thing in their world.

Sales is about getting people to change; that’s a given. But the question we consider in this article is: Does the direction of change matter? When someone is mulling a decision whether to buy a product or adopt a proposal, they can think of the positive benefits they’ll get, the consequences of not acting, or some combination of the two. If you’re the one on the selling side of that decision, does it matter how you frame it? Does the direction of change matter? In other words, are people more likely to act or buy when moving away from pain, or toward gain?

The short answer is: it’s complicated.

On average, as I’ve written before, there is a lot of power in stressing the negative. According to prospect theory, an idea which won Daniel Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics, potential losses outweigh gains on average, which means that people are more likely to act or take a risk to avoid a loss than to secure the equivalent gain. So it makes sense to emphasize the negative during your sales conversation, at least initially.

But it’s also possible to drown crossing a river that only averages three feet deep. Just because deciders tend to shun negatives, does not mean that they all shun negatives, or that they do so at the same rate as everyone else. In fact, other research has found that people definitely differ in the way they view risks and benefits. Some are promotion-focused, which means that they keep their eyes on the prize, while others are prevention-focused, which means that they are more concerned with avoiding risk.

In greater detail, here are a few major differences between the two orientations that are relevant to your sales challenge:

“Pros” view products holistically and respond to abstract benefits; “pres” focus on detailed features and concrete benefits.
Pros care more about individual aspirations; pres care more about team obligations.
Pros prefer “BOB”: pres prefer “MON”[1]
When pros like what they’re hearing, they get excited and act happy; when pres do, they feel relief and act calm.
Pros rely a lot on how a decision feels; pres rely on the reasons for their choice. (sizzle v. steak)
As they get closer to a decision, pros are eager, pres are vigilant.

Tory Higgins of Columbia University, who literally wrote the book on this idea (Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works), reports on an experiment in which participants were given the opportunity to choose between a mug or a pen. But before they made their choice, they were given instructions about how to make the choice. Half were told to think about what they would gain by choosing either the mug or the pen, and half were told to think about what they would lose by their choice. In addition, they had previously been assessed to identify the “pres” and the “pros”. Almost all chose the mug. Next, they were given the opportunity to buy the mug with their own money. There was no difference between the two groups in how much they offered for the mug—in other words, whether they focused on the gains or the pains did not affect how much they were willing to pay.

What did matter—a lot—was the “fit”[2] between the instructions and the orientation. Those who received instructions that lined up with their preferred mode (the pros who were told to focus on the gains and the pres who were told to focus on the losses) paid almost 70% more for the same mug than those whose instructions clashed with their preferred approach!

What this means for you is that if you know which orientation your buyers favor, you can tailor your sales approach and your messaging to be more effective for the specific individual and pump up your win rate. Or, to put it another way, not knowing the difference means that you may be leaving some money on the table.

Which of those two previous sentences did more to perk up your interest? Here’s one more test: when you read product ratings for a potential purchase, do you first read the 5-star ratings or the 1-star ratings? If you read the 5-star ratings first, you have a promotion focus; otherwise you have a prevention focus. The point is that your own orientation matters, because it affects how you sell.

How does it work?

First, it’s important to realize that adjusting your sales approach to fit with the buyer’s motivational orientation will help enhance attitudes they already have towards your solution; it’s not a magic bullet that can somehow flip their choice if they’re strongly opposed to it. But most buying decisions are not clear-cut in one direction or other (if they were, why would they need you?) and in that situation alignment or fit can help tip the scales in your favor for three reasons.

Engagement: First, the buyer gets more engaged in listening to the message. You can’t influence someone who’s not paying attention, and people are more likely not only pay attention but to engage more deeply into your message when it fits their dominant mode.

Understanding: It’s also helpful when people understand your message, and people find it easier to process information when it fits.

Feeling: Decision feels more or less “right”, and if it’s true that people decide emotionally first and then rationalize it later, that’s certainly one side of the equation you want to be on.

Just to add one more complication to the mix: people are not always consistent in their approach. For one thing, they may have different focuses in different areas of their life. For another, people can be primed to adopt a different approach temporarily. And, more relevant to sales, a lot depends on what they’re deciding on. When you’re buying a fire extinguisher you’re probably not thinking of how good it’s going to look on your wall, for example.

So, what does this all mean for your sales approach? There are two ways to get the answer. First, that’s a topic I’ll cover in my next post. Second, you can tune in to a free webinar I’m running next week on the Sales Experts Channel, Wednesday, June 7 at 5pm eastern.

[1] “Best Of Breed” vs. “Meets Our Needs” i.e. best vs good enough

[2] More technically, they call it regulatory fit.

Uncategorized

Make Them Feel Important

By Jack Malcolm / 5.30.2017 / No Comment

“When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.”

If someone asked about the impression you made on them, would they describe you as a Gladstone or a Disraeli? We all know people like Gladstone who strive to be perceived as the smartest or most important person in the room. If that’s what you care about, stop reading now. But if you care more about getting things done through others, you should instead strive to make them feel ten feet tall.

I submit that this is especially important in today’s flatter organizations that proclaim that hierarchies are dead, that ideas are judged on their merits regardless of who brings them up. Especially when markers of status are less overt, we pay close—albeit unspoken—attention to subtle signals of our relative ranking.[1] It’s hard-wired into our brains through millennia as social animals, and no amount of corporate feel-good fables will erase it. So, one of the best ways to grow your personal influence, paradoxically, is to give it up when communicating with others.

William James said, “the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” We all crave the comfortable glow of being respected and appreciated by others; when we get it, we feel good. So why not try to make others feel important? It costs us very little and means so much to them. Besides the fact that it’s the right thing to do, it makes practical sense to make others feel good about themselves when talking to us. Feeling good makes people more open-minded, more willing to listen and consider new ideas, and of course when people like us, they are much more likely to be persuaded.

The flip side of that argument, of course, is that when they feel put down, underappreciated or in a “one-down” position, they are less likely to go along. Even worse, the negative feeling can be far stronger than the corresponding positive. As in so many aspects of human nature, bad is stronger than good, and the threat to one’s self-importance is felt more intensely than the reward. According to David Rock, “the threat response is often triggered in social situations, and it tends to be more intense and longer-lasting than the reward response.” In fact, studies using functional MRIs have shown that the feeling of being excluded activates the same response in the brain as physical pain. And, when people feel threatened, their attention narrows and they are less open to new ideas. It can also feel very unfair, and people are quick to punish those they perceive as acting unfairly, even at a cost to themselves. , and Finally, if they associate you with pain, how likely are you to influence them?

Of course, most of us don’t go out of our way to alienate others, but we may do so inadvertently through inattention. And even when we don’t mess up, we may not take full advantage of ways to make the other person feel good about themselves. So it’s critical that you do everything you can to a) prevent negative feelings and b) foster positive feelings.

Prevent the bad – Don’t diminish their importance

Don’t ignore them. While this may sound obvious, it’s easy to make people feel ignored. How many times have you checked your phone while talking to someone? When meeting someone at a function, do you scan the room to see if there is someone more important to talk to? When giving a sales presentation, do you focus all your attention on the decision maker and overlook others in the room who may influence the final decision?

Don’t cross the line from confidence to cockiness, or assertiveness to aggression. This is especially important when making a first impression, because people tend to notice warmth before competence, in as little as a tenth of a sentence.[2]

Be careful about giving advice. You may think that useful advice is a gift to the other person, but keep in mind that they “pay” for the gift by granting you superior status; in other words, at that moment, they have to at least symbolically put you in a dominant position.

Foster positive feelings – Put them on a pedestal

Get to know them before you meet them. Show that you consider them important enough to prepare for.

Be present. Especially in this distracted age, full attention is the highest compliment you can pay anyone. The great thing about being present is that it’s a gift that gives back: it makes them feel important and they see you as more charismatic, according Olivia Fox Cabane in her book, The Charisma Myth.

Let others talk, and listen actively: face them squarely, don’t interrupt, encourage them to talk, and respond appropriately.

Be more interested than interesting. I got this phrase from Mark Goulston’s excellent book, Just Listen. His advice is to treat a conversation not as a tennis match in which you want to return serve with a stronger point of your own, but as a detective game in which you earn points by learning as much as you can about the other person. Follow the 51+ rule: meet them more than halfway; be curious about them…

Make them feel like an expert. Everyone knows more than you about something; find out what it is and ask them about that. Solicit their advice, and pay attention to what they say. Even when challenging their thinking by delivering new information, you can say something like, “You’re the expert in your business; how would you see this idea applying to your operations?”

One last thought: I am not advocating servile sycophancy that insincerely tells the other person only what they want to hear. The crucial point is that you must genuinely strive to find in others that which sets them apart and makes them distinctive—otherwise it can backfire on you. But when it works, it’s like a magic see-saw that elevates both sides at once.

[1] Most people tend to have an intuitive sense of this, as illustrated in research by Alison Fragale, which found that emails to peers used more deferential language than even emails to superiors.

[2] See Compelling People, by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohutt, p. 12.

Expression - Persuasive communication

When Verbal Confidence Backfires

By Jack Malcolm / 5.26.2017 / No Comment

In a previous post, I suggested ways to increase your verbal confidence to make your speech more powerful and persuasive. While I hope you benefited from it, I also hope that you did not take it too far, because like most strong medicine, it’s one of those prescriptions that should be accompanied by a warning label. It’s not appropriate in all contexts. Sometimes too much verbal confidence can hurt your persuasive power.

For example, my boss once put me in touch with a senior executive at another company, who happened to be a friend of his. I was probably a bit intimidated and anxious to make a good impression, so I used some of the techniques I wrote about last week in order to come across as more confident. He later told my boss that I was very cocky.

This may sound crazy, but would you be open to the idea that sometimes it may be better to dial down your verbal confidence—to actually have less power in your speech? As I show in this post, there are certain situations where a humbler approach can be more effective in getting you what you want.

When to dial it down

When there are clear status differences between you and the person you’re trying to influence. Relative status is very important in human relationships, and higher status people tend to guard it jealously. When you talk to them, you can come across as cocky or arrogant if you speak too confidently. Even worse, you risk being seen as a threat to their status. As David Rock says, “A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can feel like your life is in danger.”

Higher status people expect a certain level of deference to their position, and they don’t react well when they don’t get it. According to Wharton professor Adam Grant, subordinates who speak out are seen as “difficult, coercive, and self-serving.”[1] This applies not only to higher-ups, but in our market economy where the “customer is always right”, it applies to buyers as well. If you haven’t earned the right (by having specialized knowledge or expertise that they lack), they will gladly take you down a peg.

When you are already perceived as an expert. Even if you have earned the right to speak more confidently, that does not always mean you should. When your credentials are not in doubt, you may actually boost your credibility by hedging your statements a little. That’s because hedging or softening signals that you’re open minded and have considered both (or more) sides of the question. It also gives the impression that you’re well calibrated—that you know what you don’t know.

When your audience is initially skeptical. When someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, it’s natural to act like a stubborn ass and shut them out or to immediately think of a counterargument. That’s not a good place to start, so it helps to get them to lower their shield a bit and at least open their minds enough to be willing to listen. If getting agreement is more important to you than being right, you might want to consider being more hesitant in your expression.

How to tone down your verbal confidence without screwing it up

Use hedges. Words such as I think, maybe, what do you think? soften the power and directness of your speech.

Give disclaimers. “It doesn’t work every time, but I’ve found that…” A statement like this couples open-mindedness and long experience.

Ask questions. What is the best way to get agreement that will last? By making it the other person’s idea, which is why questions are among the most powerful tools you have in your persuasive toolbox, particularly when you use them to get the listener to tell you the story you want them to hear. The other benefit of using questions is that people would rather listen to themselves than to you.

Lead with your weaknesses. Adam Grant calls it the Sarick Effect, and it’s effective for two reasons. First, it can steal the thunder of someone who is just waiting to pounce on your idea, and it can increase trust by making you seem more intellectually honest.

Start with the opposing point of view. The best way to get skeptical people to listen is to begin by telling them something they already agree with; you’ll have their attention and even a modicum of respect.

Express your initial reluctance to think this way. “I found it hard to believe at first, but when I learned more about it…” It will signal that you were once one of them, and make them curious about what changed your mind.

Avoid “hot” words. Certain words trigger unhelpful emotions, which is one reason that euphemisms—despite their potential for misunderstanding—can help. For example, I make a living teaching rhetoric to businesspeople, but I rarely use the word because unfortunately it has come to mean “manipulation”.

In summary, good communicators tend to have an adequate intuitive feel for just how much confidence to put into their speech. But for especially important or challenging conversations, it pays to choose your words wisely. You may not remember the specific situations described in this post, but as long as you make a sincere effort to think outside-in, and practice a little self-awareness, I’m confident that you will become a much more effective communicator.

[1] Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, p. 65.

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