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Lean Communication for Sales: Reducing Waste

By Jack Malcolm / 3.24.2016 / No Comment

Famed retailer John Wanamaker once said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Bad as that may have seemed to him, he actually had it pretty good, compared to salespeople. I contend that much more than half of sales communication consists of waste. Anyone who has ever listened to a “spray and pray” sales presentation knows intuitively how much clutter and waste there can be in a sales conversation. I would estimate that 80% of the words in a sales call or presentation are unnecessary; even worse, they may detract from the message you’re trying to get across.

Why is this important? The obvious first answer is that it wastes time, but it also obscures the value you bring the customer. There is a study that showed that one week after a ten-minute presentation, the audience remembered 10% of what was said. Assuming that your customer is going to make their decision in the week after your presentation, how sure are you that the 10% they will remember is the most important 10%? If they remember your interesting anecdote which had nothing to do with your main point, then 100% of that meeting was a complete waste.

So many forms of waste

It would be impossible—not to mention wasteful—to list all the ways that salespeople can waste their customers’ time. Here are just a few examples:

Talking too much about yourself
Trying too hard to establish your credentials; if you’re in the meeting, the credentials have already been accepted
Talking too much about how the product works and not connecting it to what it does for the customer
Presentations that take too long to get to the point
Asking questions about things you should have found out on your own
Off the shelf slide decks that do not directly target this specific customer’s needs
Missing concerns or opportunities
Trying to answer objections without understanding the real objection
Trying to close too soon
Closing too late: missing buying signals

What are some reasons for waste?

There are many reasons that we talk far more during sales conversations than we should; psychology, our planning (or lack thereof), and our skill set.

Psychology

Enthusiasm: we love talking about our kids, but don’t like hearing others talk about theirs
It feels good to talk about ourselves
Fear: we think as long as we’re talking, they can’t say no

Planning and Preparation

Lack of planning: no clear call purpose, not having stuff you need, not being ready to answer questions
Being so focused on your purpose that you miss unplanned opportunities
Lack of customer knowledge

Skill set

Level/language mismatch, e.g. speaking technical specs to C-Level
Trying too hard to manipulate without taking time to truly understand
Not qualifying properly
Poor listening

How do you reduce waste in sales conversations?

But here’s the problem: even if you know that 80% of your words are waste, how do you know which 80%? Fortunately, lean communication provides us a tool for discerning what is waste. Remember our simple definition of waste: anything that does not directly contribute to value. So, having defined what value is in our previous posts, we can use that as a guide to see if the words coming out of our mouths support our key message: what the customer needs to do and why they should do it. With a clear conception of value in mind, you should also cultivate these powerful habits:

Research: Do the work to know as much as possible about what they will care about, and what they need and want to hear. That will help you before you go into the meeting, and during the meeting you can begin by asking questions or validating your view of the situation before launching into your closing pitch.

Have a plan but don’t fall in love with it: Have a focused plan for what you expect to accomplish, what value you will provide to the customer, and how you will accomplish it through agenda and questions. But remember that the customer always has a vote, so be prepared to deviate when you’re going off-track or an unexpected opportunity pops up.

Share the map: Using your agenda, as discussed in the previous post, will go a long way to establishing right up front what they want to hear and what you can skip.

Apply the So What test: Before you say something, apply the so what filter: what does this mean to the listener? How will it help them? This will help eliminate the irrelevant and merely interesting, while ensuring that what is integral or important to your message is not lost in the clutter. It will be integral or important if it’s customer-focused, if it brings new insights, and if it’s unique to you.

Focus on the critical few: You may have a ton of appealing features or seven good reasons to buy, but they won’t remember all seven. Some of the weaker reasons may dilute the effect of the stronger. For example, you might have a lot of satisfied customers, but you can make that point by simply listing the one that that particular customer will find the most impressive or relevant. As Churchill said, “Facts are like cigars: pick only the strongest and the finest.”

Listen: Apply the pull concept, which will be covered in more detail in a future article. Listen to their words and pay attention to nonverbal cues. If you ask good questions and listen carefully to their answers, they will give you plenty of clues about what’s important to them. While talking, if you see them get distracted, you need to ask a question to find out where you went off track and to reengage their attention.

Don’t just save time, give some back

As a salesperson, reducing clutter is one of the best ways to add value to your customers. Yes, they have oceans of information at their fingertips, but that creates its own problems—they have trouble finding the pony in the pile of manure. If all you do is bring more information, it just adds to the pile. But if you can home in on precisely what they need to know to improve their own situation, if you can strip out the irrelevant and merely interesting, there’s a good chance you will give them back time. How welcome do you think you will be if, instead of seeing their time with you as a cost, they see it as a net saving of time?

Lean Communication for Sales: Talk Less, Sell More?

Lean Communication for Sales: Value

Lean Communication for Sales: Top-Down Communication

Lean Communication

Lean Communication for Sales: Top-Down Communication

By Jack Malcolm / 3.14.2016 / 2 Comments

The purpose of this third article in the Lean Communication for Sales series is to show you a way to make your sales conversations much more effective, pleasant and efficient, and my hope is that after reading this, you will adopt a top-down approach in all your sales communications. I will first explain what it sounds like in a sales call, and then discuss why a top down approach provides more value with less waste in all your sales meetings.

How to use top-down communication in sales calls and presentations

Lean communicators get to the point immediately. They don’t begin with a lot of background to provide “context” or set the stage. They answer the question on every listener’s mind: what do you want me to do and why do you want me to do it? What this means to you is that you deliver your message from the top-down: state your main point and then support it as necessary. In lean communication, we call it Bottom Line Up Front, or BLUF.

In a sales call, here’s what top-down organization goes in this order: why, what, how. Tell them why you’re there (value proposition), what you hope to gain from the meeting (action statement), and how you hope to proceed (agenda). It might sound like this:

“I’m here to explore an idea that can take costs out of your design process while improving product performance; (pause) my expectation is that if it makes sense, you will recommend a presentation to your Product Council (pause) To make sure I’ve covered everything, I’ve put together an agenda that will keep us on track, but please let me know if there is anything you would like to add.”

There are a few important considerations and caveats to keep in mind. First, your action statement is a statement, not a question. In other words, you don’t say, “if it makes sense, will you recommend a presentation to…” Why? Because you haven’t earned the right to ask yet. They don’t have enough information so their default answer will be no. Plus, it makes you sound like you’re selling a used car.

Second, be flexible; realize that despite your best preparation, you can be off track. Maybe your value proposition is not what’s important to the buyer, or your action is the wrong one, or your agenda does not address some issues they consider important. After you’ve delivered your BLUF, pay close attention to what the buyer says and does, and be prepared to ask questions and/or offer to modify your approach. But that’s the beauty of making your intentions plain: your buyer is much more likely to make their own intentions plain, so you can get things out on the table and then work together to produce more value, more pleasantly, and with less time and effort.

How top-down helps

BLUF works for three reasons:

It produces more value,
In a more pleasant atmosphere,
With less time and effort

It produces more value

A top-down approach works because it gets both parties working toward a common goal. In complex sales, two heads are always better than one because neither you nor the buyer has all the answers, but together you have the highest chance of producing the best solution. It’s like each side has a half of a treasure map; when you’re open about what your destination is, both halves of the map can come together, smoothing the path to the payoff.

It makes a more pleasant atmosphere

Top-down organization improves the atmosphere in two ways: it dispels suspicion and puts you on an equal footing. Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes for a minute. When someone comes into your office and starts telling you how much value they can bring you or how great they are, what’s going through your mind? You know they’re going to ask for something, but every minute they don’t get to the point, the more your suspicions grow, and the less likely you are to listen to what they have to say. On the other hand, when someone is completely transparent about their motives, you relax. You may not necessarily agree with them, but when their intentions are out in the open, it’s easier to have a real conversation about the issues.

It also puts you on an equal footing with the buyer. You are telling them confidently that you bring value to the conversation, and you expect value in return. If you truly have something of value to bring to them (and if you don’t why are you there?), then you have the right to expect something from them in return. In the very rare case that someone would take offense to that, that’s probably a losing cause anyway, and it’s best to find that out early in the call.

It shortens the conversation

Top-down can significantly shorten the conversation as well. If the buyer agrees with your intentions, it becomes a pretty smooth path to the goal. If they don’t agree, they will let you know and you can probe to understand their reasoning and if necessary, pivot and change your goal for the call, or you might decide to lose early, but either way, you won’t be charging blindly into a dead end.

Your agenda also helps to identify what does not need to be covered. When they see how you plan to proceed, they may be able to tell you what parts they already know or agree with. They can ask questions to fill in their own gaps or to tell you what they consider important.

What I’ve described in this post is just one way to use top-down communication to deliver more of what customers want, without wasting their time or yours. There are several other ways to use the concept in sales, including the structure of your presentations, the design of your slides, how you answer questions, which you can figure out on your own. In this age of shrinking attention spans, it may soon be the only way to communicate!

Previous posts in this series:

Lean Communication for Sales: Talk Less, Sell More?

Lean Communication for Sales: Value

Uncategorized

Why Politics is Nothing Like Sales

By Jack Malcolm / 3.9.2016 / No Comment

If you like entertainment, drama and excitement, the current political circus is for you. I’d like to say we’ve seen everything, but every time I think that, something even more outlandish pops up. I’m still pretty confident about one thing, though: if you’re a professional salesperson, DO NOT try this at work!

Let’s look at it from the outside-in: Imagine you were a buyer dealing with a potential vendor for an important decision, one that would determine the direction of your company for the next four years, and possibly the next four after that. What would you think about a salesperson who:

Clearly overpromises by making grandiose claims about what the product will do for you,
Refuses to provide detailed product literature when you ask for it,
Disparages the competition constantly,
Talks about himself all the time,
Has no experience providing the solutions you’re looking for?

You would have to be very unhappy with your current provider to even let that person in your door, let alone keep yourself from throwing him out of your office within two minutes!

P.S. While I obviously I have one particular candidate in mind when I write this, the sad truth is that they all seem to be doing some or all of these.

Lean Communication - Sales

Lean Communication for Sales: Value

By Jack Malcolm / 3.8.2016 / 2 Comments

In the first post of this series, we learned that buyers avoid talking to salespeople as long as they can, because most of them provide too little value and waste too much of their time. While we will address both sides of that equation in the next few posts, the first and most critical task is to provide value.

Lean communication starts—and ends—with value because if you don’t have something useful to say, it does not matter how concise or clear you are. The same idea clearly applies to selling: if you’re a salesperson, you must be useful to the customer—or they are totally justified in avoiding the sight or sound of you.

Years ago, when I used to train the business sales reps for a wireless carrier, we would role-play sales calls, in which the rep would spend the first few minutes telling me all their great features and what they could do for me, and I would usually counter each one by telling them their competitor could do the same thing. Usually, they would then say something like, “You get me in the deal.” I would then ask, “So What?” Rarely did I hear a convincing answer to that question.

If the customer asks you what value you add to their decision process, would you be able to answer the question convincingly? It’s tough, but if you pay attention to these five ways of generating and communicating customer value, you probably won’t even get the question:

Focus first on the why: You need to boost the why/what ratio in your sales conversations. Salespeople typically focus too much on the what, which is what they want the customer to do, what they want them to buy, what their product does, etc. They don’t spend enough time on the why, which is why the customer needs to make a change, why this is the best choice for them to make that change, and why now. By focusing first on the why, both parties can unpack the necessary elements of value so that they can then figure out the best what. (If this is starting to sound like an Abbott and Costello routine, I apologize.)

That’s why your plan for every sales call should begin, not with your call purpose, (which is what you hope to get from the call) but the value proposition for that particular meeting. Why should the prospect or customer take time out of their life that day to listen to what you have to say?

If you want to be even stricter, ask yourself honestly if the customer would pay to meet with you. It’s probably not to find out about the latest bell or whistle you’ve added to the product, or to check out the new white paper your marketing folks wrote. The only reason a customer would conceivably meet with you is if you have a plausible case that you—and only you—can improve their outcomes in some way.

One more hint: if you can’t think of the value the customer will receive in return for their time—don’t go.

Improve outcomes: This is a detailed and more specific look at the why. To focus on the right outcomes, you research, analyze, and question these four possible areas that might indicate a need:

Problems: Known issues that are bothering them and/or costing money.
Opportunities: Improvements in products, technologies, or ways of doing things
Changes: Ongoing or imminent changes in their current environment they will have to adapt to
Risks: Anything that could potentially hurt them or prevent the outcomes they want

Answer the question: the main question is “What do you want me to do and why should I do it?”, which is covered in the first two points above. But ATQ also applies when the buyer asks you a question. The whole reason they are talking to you is because despite all that reading of stuff on websites, they still have questions. And when they do have a question, they want someone to answer it honestly, completely, and quickly. The salesperson who is the most responsive in answering their questions will add the most value.

Outside-in thinking: We naturally view the world from the inside-out. We have our own thoughts, desires, needs and aspirations, and we view the world through the lens of how we can get what we want through other people. Outside-in thinking flips that around. It’s about seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, and then working backward to figure out how they can get what they want through us. OIT means that you talk far more about the customer than you do about yourself.

Preserving the relationship: Lean communicators value relationships as much as the next person, but they perhaps define the foundation of relationships differently. It is less about liking that it is about trust. Lean communication is not about “schmoozing” and telling great jokes. Of course relationships are important in sales, but the best relationships are nurtured by the salesperson’s sincere and transparent desire to put the customer’s needs first. If you follow the first four practices, the relationships will take care of themselves, even in those occasional situations when you tell the customer something they might not want to hear. You know the old saying, “Friends don’t let friends (fill in the blank)”, sometimes a relationship calls for one party to say something that the other person does not want to hear. This does not always make for the most amicable or pleasant relationship, but in the long run it’s what builds the most trust and the greatest value.

If you focus first on communicating value, your customers will gladly pay to have “you” as an added feature in every sale!