If you are a B2B sales professional who aspires to be more than simply a product-pusher, you already know that you need to be as informed and up-to-date as possible about your customer’s business, including their financial performance, the state of their business, and their strategies and initiatives to compete and make money.
I’ve long advocated the importance of studying your customer’s annual report as an indispensable source document for a lot of this information, but at this current unprecedented stage of our world economy, there is a source that is even more timely and valuable.
This just-finished second quarter from April through June is one of the most consequential and revolutionary three months that any of your customers or prospects have ever experienced. They’ve all had to revise their expectations, reformulate new strategies to compete and survive, change their plans, and radically reconsider investments and purchases. In selling terms, they have different problems, opportunities, changes and risks.
If you’re selling to those companies, wouldn’t you want to know as much as possible about these changes, so that you can speak more intelligently and find ways to address them? Wouldn’t it be great to have an unfair advantage over competitors who are not as well informed as you are?
Fortunately, over the next few weeks there will be trove of documents published that will contain a lot of this incredibly valuable information. I’m referring, of course, to quarterly earnings reports. The most detailed document is the form 10-Q, which for larger companies must be filed within 40 days of the end of the quarter. It contains a narrative description of events that impacted financial results, as well as updated information on business conditions and risks. But most public companies also conduct an earnings conference call with investors and analysts well in advance of the release of the 10-Q, and these may contain a lot of valuable additional detail.
If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get an appointment with your dream customer, turmoil may be your friend, because they may be open to new ideas, especially if you are the first to show you know what they’re going through. If you’re working with established customers, your competitors may be trying to do the same thing to you, so it pays to stay ahead of them. Just like any treasure map, the first to get there wins.
P.S. If you only deal with private companies, you might think this article is not helpful. However, I would strongly recommend that you read at least one quarterly statement from your customers’ competitors who are public. If they’re in the same industry, most of the same information will apply.
If you’re like the overwhelming majority of salespeople, you are no longer conducting in-person sales calls. There is at least one positive from this: your overhead cost in travel time to and from your customer’s location has been slashed to zero.
What are you doing with this extra time? It’s a precious gift, and I would like to propose one use for that time that could make a meaningful difference in your sales results.
Assuming you’re not squandering it by surfing the web or playing video games, there are two ways you can use your extra time productively. You can increase the quantity of your sales calls, or you can increase the quality of your sales calls. Both are good, but I personally would like to suggest more of the latter. Here’s how:
Convert travel time into preparation time. Use the time that you would have spent, and invest it preparation and planning for the sales call. In my own experience, I have found time spent in sales call planning to be the most highly leveraged use of my time. Sales call planning has enormous benefits:
- It puts you in better control of the sales conversation.
- It shows professionalism on your part, and your customers will notice the difference.
- It primes your mind for outside-in thinking.
- It arms you with contagious confidence going in.
Use the time before the sales call to research your customer in greater depth, to ask more pointed and specific questions, to elevate the conversation from a product-pushing pitch to a business-improving, problem-solving conversation.
Think carefully through your sales call plan template (and if you don’t have a sales call plan template, let’s talk.)
Use the time after the sales call that you would have spent returning to your office or traveling to the next call, and conduct a brief after action review. What went as expected? Differently than expected? Why? What did you learn form this? What will you improve or do differently next time?
The extra time you’re getting from not traveling to customer locations is found money. Whether you waste it or invest it is up to you.
Imagine this situation: you’re choosing a wedding present for two close friends. You’ve visited their registry to get ideas, but you also have an idea for an excellent and unique gift that you are sure they will like. Which would you choose?
If you opted for the unique gift, you’re not alone; after all, it’s more thoughtful, isn’t it? You’re also probably wrong. According to one study, recipients of gifts that they had chosen beforehand reported “significantly greater appreciation of the registry gifts than the unique gifts.”[1]
The explanation given is that the gift-givers imagined how they would feel if they received those gifts, but they didn’t do a very good job of figuring out how the recipients would feel. To use a term coined by writer Tony Alessandra, they were operating on the Golden Rule when they should have been using the Platinum Rule: “Do Unto Others as They Would Be Done Unto.”
To cite a personal example, I post a lot of blog articles and videos and I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to predict how many views I will get for each. I may love a video and think it’s a fascinating topic, and I’ll get very little reaction, or vice-versa. It’s a constant reminder that people do things for their own reasons, not for yours.
The first rule of lean communication—actually any type of communication—is that you must add value to the recipient, but only the recipient of the message gets to decide whether they received value, or how much. This makes it crucial to take their perspective to understand how they view, think, and feel about the situation. It’s easier said than done, because it requires nothing less than a reversal in our normal habits of thought.
By default, all of us think inside-out: how can we get our point across, or get our needs met through this conversation or presentation? Even the thoughtful act of choosing a gift we think someone else will like can go wrong because it’s slanted by our own perspective about what we would enjoy. Default thinking is natural and easy, but if we want to up our persuasive game, we must cultivate the habit and skill of outside-in thinking: doing our best to figure out how they will be better off as a result of having heard our message.
The paradox of outside-in thinking is that, the more we focus on making the other person better off, the better off we will be. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
[1] Adam Grant, Give and Take, p. 89.
I am looking forward to the Super Bowl this weekend. As a football fan, I am eagerly anticipating the clash between the Kansas City Chiefs’ dynamic offense and the San Francisco 49ers’ suffocating defense. But as a student of persuasive communication, what I am really looking forward to is the commercials.
The ability to tell a compelling and concise story is a huge and versatile asset in persuasive communication. Stories can grab attention, make a personal connection, dramatize a need, and make your point unforgettable. The best TV commercials can squeeze a complete and powerful story into a 30-60 second time slot, and the Super Bowl attracts the best the industry can provide.
Most of the ads are worth watching just for the entertainment value, but you can also learn some useful lessons from them, if you know what to look for. Here are just a few:
- Most products and services are not that exciting, so a good story can capture your imagination and cast its glow on the product. For example, running out of beer is not that huge a problem, but Heineken and Brad Pitt teamed up in 2005 to turn that mundane problem into an epic quest.
- Most big decisions are going to be made some time after you make your pitch, so it’s important that the decision maker remember the story when the time comes. The best illustration of a story’s staying power was Apple’s 1984 ad, which ran only one time but is still remembered today.
- One of the most effective forms of persuasive story is the crossroads story, which shows the moment of choice and depicts the consequences of a wrong or right choice. This ad about a young Jimi Hendrix from Pepsi is probably the best example I’ve seen. (It’s even called “Crossroads”)
- Surprise is a great way to maintain attention and make the story stick in memory. Since I’ve mentioned Pepsi, here’s one from Coke that uses Mean Joe Green to provide a twist.
- It usually considered bad form to denigrate competitors directly, but you can get away with it if you use a story to gently and humorously poke fun at them. But just because it’s funny does not mean the message is unclear, as Wendy’s showed in this famous ad.
- You don’t have to say anything about your competitors to dramatize the consequences of a wrong choice, as FedEx showed in 1999.
- There’s often a fundamental tension in selling between pointing out a problem and not wanting to be too negative. Snickers teamed up with Betty White to show how humor can bridge the gap between those two incompatible aims.
- Stories are a useful stealth way to humanize yourself and associate your image with goodness and positive associations. Babies are perfect for this, as are animals, and best of all—baby animals, as this Budweiser Clydesdale Foal commercial
- But, precisely because stories can be so compelling and memorable, it’s critical to ensure that they are relevant to the point you’re trying to make. This Office Linebacker ad is entertaining, but I still have no idea what they were selling. What a waste—not only in terms of money, but especially in terms of the listeners’ time.
This Sunday, the best of the best will square off against each other, and I can’t wait to see who wins.
The game should also be fun to watch—between the commercials!
