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!
Other posts in this series:
Lean Communication for Sales: Talk Less, Sell More?
Lean Communication for Sales: Top-Down Communication
I’ve written almost 40 articles about lean communication, and hundreds of articles about sales, but this is the first time I’ve written about lean communication as it applies to sales. Is it possible that talking less can help you sell more?
To better answer that question, let’s first look at what buyers need, and then consider how well salespeople are meeting that need.
The principal purpose of a buying process is to produce an effective decision at the lowest possible cost, and that requires a lot of information, some of which is readily available on online and some which can only come from talking to a sales rep. But buyers would prefer not to talk to salespeople if they can help it. By now it’s a well-known fact that buyers are up to 60% of the way through their decision process before they contact a salesperson, according to the CEB.
Why do buyers avoid talking to salespeople as long as they can? According to The Challenger Sale, “…the celebrated ‘solution sales rep’ can be more of an annoyance than an asset.” In lean terms, that statement simply says that salespeople are seen as providing more waste than value.
The bigger and more complex the decision, the more information needed, and the more opportunity for waste in the process of acquiring it. At every step in the buying process, there is a tremendous amount of waste, including:
- Unclear understanding of their own needs
- Time and effort to uncover the information they need for a decision
- Differing internal perceptions of needs and priorities
- Effort to clarify ambiguity—much of it deliberate
- Incorrect information
- Delays in obtaining answers to their questions
- Information that is not tailored to their unique situation
- Sitting through 43-slide presentations to get the answer to one or two crucial questions
- Risk of making the wrong decision
And it’s not just buyers. Deep in their hearts, even though they would never say it, CEOs wish they could get rid of their sales forces. They cost a lot of money and they can be difficult to manage. Yet salespeople are not going away, despite all the predictions that the easy availability of information on the internet would make the sales profession wither away. That’s because they still serve a critical function: they provide information to help buyers make decisions—decisions that improve the buyers’ business and personal outcomes.
Salespeople are still needed because they add value, by communicating useful information that improves business and personal outcomes, while preserving the relationship. The first is essential, the second highly desirable. In the long run, it’s the product that delivers value to the customer, but it can’t do that until it’s chosen and implemented. And for that, it needs a salesperson.
But salespeople still have to do better. If they want to keep adding value in the final 40%, or—even better—get brought in sooner, lean communication can be a powerful asset. Look at it this way, if you are a buyer who has to undertake the time, effort and risk to make an important decision, how would you respond to a salesperson who:
- Has a sincere desire to create value
- Thinks and communicates from your side of the desk
- Is prepared to answer your most pressing questions, and does so candidly and completely
- Is transparent about their intentions
- Gives you only what you need when you need it to make the best decision
- Keeps things simple
- Does not waste your time
- Listens and actually responds to your concerns
- Lowers your cost and risk of making the best decision
I truly believe that lean communication and sales are a perfect match, and in the next five blog posts, I will show how each of the five principles of Lean Communication can significantly boost your results and your relationships: Value, Organization, Waste, Making Work Visible, and Pull.
Who knows, maybe you will be seen as more of an asset than an annoyance!
Other posts in this series:
Lean Communication for Sales: Value
Lean Communication for Sales: Top-Down Communication
Robert Baden-Powell’s last message to Boy Scouts all over the world was: “Leave this world a little better than you found it.”
Strive to do the same thing for your audience every time you communicate, and you won’t fail to create value. In lean communication, value is defined as anything that improves business and or personal outcomes while preserving the relationship. You create value in communication by giving others information they can use for better decisions and more effective action. They will be better off, you will be better off, and the world will be better than you found it.
Note: This is the first in a new series of posts in which I impart Lean Communication philosophy and techniques in 100 words or less.
You know as well as I do that there is a lot of waste in business communication, but we should try to do better than that. Can we put a price tag on what communication costs you and your organization?
When financial advisers help people get control of their finances, the first thing they do is make them track their spending. That’s usually an eye-opener and it’s a crucial step to motivate real change.
I’d like to do the same for you as your lean communication adviser—to give you a little added push to improve your own communication, and if you’re in position to do so, to encourage changes in your own company that will take a surprising amount of waste out of daily communication.
Let’s focus on the two biggest sources of waste in business communication: meetings and email.
Between the two, they can take up about 60% of your work hours.
A study by Bain says that meetings take up 15% of an organization’s collective time. That number sounded low to me when I first came across it, and that’s because the percentage climbs as you move higher up the ladder. One study found that top executives spend approximately a third of their time in formal meetings, and that doesn’t count the time on phone meetings or business meals, so it could be up to 40% of their time.
Peter Drucker said, “One either works or meets. One cannot do both at the same time”. But let’s give meetings the benefit of the doubt and assume that the time you spend in meetings contributes to the productivity of your real job, and then subtract the percentage of time that meetings are found to be productive. In one study, respondents surveyed estimated that 50% of the time they spent in meetings was wasted. So if you spend 40% of your time in meetings and half that is wasted, that takes 20% off the organization’s productivity right there. Insert your own numbers to do the math.
But it doesn’t stop there, not when you consider the hidden ripple effect that some meetings can have across the organization. How many meetings have you gone to, just to prep for higher-level meetings?
That Bain study I just mentioned analyzed the Outlook schedules of everyone in a large company to figure out the actual impact of the company’s weekly Executive Committee Status meeting.
- To prepare for the meeting, senior-level participants spent 7,000 hours annually. Meeting with their unit heads. 7,000 hours
- Unit heads meet with their senior advisers to prepare for those meetings: 11 unit heads x 1,800 hours = 20,000
- Senior advisers get information from their teams: 21 team meetings averaging 3,000 hours = 63,000 hours
- The teams need to spend in prep meetings time synthesizing the information: 130 meetings x 1,500 hours = 200,000 hours
No wonder John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”
The next largest chunk of time taken out of your day is dealing with email, which takes up about 28% of your time according to a survey by McKinsey—let’s just say 25% to keep the math simple. What percentage of those emails are waste? One article in the HBR estimates that 80% of emails are wasted. A survey by Atos Consulting in the UK says respondents spent 25% of their total time writing emails that add no value.
Bill Jensen, the author of The Simplicity Survival Handbook, says 80% of internal communication shares information that does not require action, and there is no consequence if you ignore it.
So, if 80% of a quarter of your time is wasted, that’s another 20% of your total productivity.
With just meetings and emails, poor communication sucks 40% right off the top of your productivity.
By now it should be pretty clear that there is a huge amount of waste in business communication, but at the risk of talking past the close, let me cite just a couple more statistics that relate to real work: getting projects done on time. The computing Technology Industry Association ran a poll in 2007 in which 28% of respondents said that poor communication is the #1 cause of project failure. And the Project Management Institute in 2013 said that for every 1B spent on a project, $75 million is at risk due to ineffective communication.
When you add all this together, not to mention the cost of errors and misunderstandings, it’s clear that at least half of business communication either does not add value or actually subtracts value. If those numbers aren’t enough to motivate you, I don’t know what will.
