Some people are natural-born salespeople. Not me. I may not have been the world’s worst salesperson when I started out, but I’m sure I was close. In this video, I tell the story of the mistake I made that taught me the only lesson I needed to turn that around.
Last week, I was privileged to be asked to speak to a group of aspiring entrepreneurs embarking on a 10-week course called StartUp Quest. Each team in the course is assigned an actual patented technology supplied by a Florida university and prepares a business plan to pitch to an investor panel.
The course is well-designed and very detailed, so my goal was simply to provide a way to keep everything they will learn in the proper perspective. I told them I would destroy a harmful myth, suggest the right mindset for success, and equip them with a mantra to discipline their approach.
The myth
The myth that entices and destroys most entrepreneurs is the one that says if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.
Thousands of would-be millionaires have taken this literally: mousetraps are the single most-patented devices in history. The first important patent for mousetraps was granted to William Hooker in 1894, and then it was slightly improved by John Mast in 1903. Since then, the US Patent office has granted over 5,000 patents for new mousetraps, of which about 20 have made any money—and the original version still outsells all others combined by 2 to 1!
This may be because not one of those 5,000 designs made any improvement that customers would pay for, or because not one of the 5,000 inventors figured out a way to sell the value of their innovation. Either way, it is a failure of selling, not of technology. I reminded them what Peter Thiel said: “If you’ve invented something new but haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”[1]
If you want to be an effective entrepreneur, you must eradicate the myth that the product is the main thing. Don’t get me wrong: you still need a better mousetrap, but that’s only half the battle. Life is not like a Kevin Costner movie: if you build it, they won’t come—unless you sell the hell out of it.
The mindset
Destroying the myth is not enough; even if I convinced every one of the 90 people in the room that they had to put just as much thought into the selling process as into the technology, selling is not something you learn overnight. Those of us who make a living selling professionally know that it takes more than “natural talent” and that there is a wide range of skills needed to be consistently successful. That said, the quickest way to learn to sell is to first adopt an outside-in mindset.
As they strive to build their businesses, they must keep in mind that the most important asset they need to acquire and grow is not technology or people—it’s customers. Rather than starting from the technology and projecting forward, they have to start from the customer and work backward. They have to ask: Does the customer have a mouse problem?
That means they have to learn to think like their customers. Customers don’t care what their product does; they care what the product does for them. The best way to answer that question is to approach their strategy, their marketing and design from the point of view of what will make their customers’ lives better: solve a problem, take advantage of an opportunity, adapt to change, or contain a risk.
The mantra
An outside-in perspective is a great place to start from, because it’s essential to understanding the needs of the only people who count: those who will be willing to pay money to fill those needs. But understanding is useless until you can effectively communicate how you will do that.
As they carefully craft their business plans and put together the presentation for their investor pitch, it’s easy to get carried away with unnecessary detail that clouds their central message. They have only one shot where they have the full attention of the people that matter, so they’ll need ruthless discipline to make every word count.
The critical filter that strips away clutter is the essential mantra of persuasive communication:
SO WHAT?
By applying SO WHAT? to every slide, every visual, and every word that they put in their investor pitches, they answer the single most important question in the minds of every single listener. When the panel has to sit through nine pitches of varying quality, the one who best addresses what matters most to them will shine through—I’ve seen it in every one of the previous competitions.
When I had finished speaking, one of the participants asked a question that exposed the fundamental flaw in my whole talk. She asked, if everyone in the room was going to apply the principles I had talked about, how could her team be sure of winning? My simple answer to that question is the topic of my next post.
[1] Peter Thiel, Zero to One, p. 130.
In my work, I train a lot of engineer “doer-sellers” to think more like salespeople. By doing so, they become better at actively identifying opportunities for additional business within their existing clients, and become more businesslike in their approach with potential new clients. Most of them are initially skeptical that they can learn anything from mere salespeople, but they almost always come to accept it.
Before you begin to smirk about those clueless engineers, ask yourself if it works in reverse: can salespeople benefit from learning to think more like engineers? I think they can.
I came across an interesting article in the Farnam Street blog[1], entitled, “The Three Essential Properties of the Engineering Mindset”. It cites a thinking template for engineers created by George Heilmeier, a former director of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA):
- What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
- How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
- What’s new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
- Who cares? If you’re successful, what difference will it make?
- What are the risks and the payoffs?
- How much will it cost? How long will it take?
- What are the midterm and final “exams” to check for success?
What struck me is how closely those questions parallel the types of questions I ask in my own opportunity planning template. Every one of these questions is valuable for a salesperson to think about when approaching a complex B2B selling opportunity. Asking and answering these questions during the sales process will cover almost everything you need to know about the customer’s need, your solution fit, and the stakeholders who will be affected. Asking and answering these questions with your customer will put real meaning into (solution, consultative, insight, challenger, etc.) selling.
How many of these questions can you answer about your top sales opportunities? How many of these topics have you actively discussed with your current customers?
Want to be a better salesperson? Think more like an engineer.
[1] If you’re not reading this every day, you are missing an excellent resource.
Here’s a news flash: we sales professionals don’t actually know everything! Sometimes it’s helpful to infuse new ideas or different perspectives from outside the sales literature and blogosphere, and in that spirit, I would like to share a framework that clinical psychologists use to encourage their clients’ readiness to change.
Motivational Interviewing is a method that clinical psychologists use in their conversations with clients dealing with such problems as alcoholism and other destructive habits. The premise is that clients are ambivalent about changing their behaviors, and trying to get them to change before they are ready only increases their resistance. So, the idea is to ask questions and manage the conversation so that the client talks about their own reasons for changing and arrives at their own commitment to change.
It’s no great leap to see how this applies to sales, and this acronym devised by Stephen Rollnick, one of the developers of the approach, is a useful reminder of how we should apply similar principles in a sales conversation:
R—Resist the righting influence
U—Understand your client’s motivation
L—Listen to your client
E—Empower your client
Let’s elaborate a bit on each, as it applies to a sales conversation.
Resist: Have you ever had the feeling of feeling a tantalizing nibble on the line while fishing? It’s so hard to resist the temptation to immediately jerk the rod. It’s the same feeling we get when the client brings up a problem that we just know fits right in our sweet spot—it’s tough to resist interjecting a solution on the spot. That’s wrong for several reasons, but the most important is that the client may immediately go on the defensive, because the dynamic of the conversation has shifted from exploring and diagnosing to “selling”.
Understand: Clients buy for their reasons, not yours. If you don’t spend enough time in the sales conversation gaining an understanding of their motivations, you run the risk of prescribing an incomplete or wrong solution. Even if it’s the right solution, you may underestimate the value it delivers, which can definitely hurt you in the price negotiations to come.
Listen: No rocket science here, of course, but it’s still probably the most-ignored rule in all sales conversations. Paradoxically, it’s often your good qualities that can hurt your listening—you’re enthusiastic about your product; you’re avidly following the list of questions you prepared; you’re eager to show how well-informed and smart you are. Always remember that it’s easy to talk yourself out of a sale, but pretty hard to listen yourself out of one.
Empower: Pushing, or even just suggesting a solution can seem to be an efficient way of closing on the need, but how many times have you had an “agreement” that led to no sale? By guiding the conversation properly, you can make your solution the client’s idea, which is a great way to turn agreement into commitment. That’s why the most effective sales conversations are those in which the client tells you what you want them to hear.
In summary, don’t try to dominate the sales conversation; RULE it instead!
