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by
Mahan Khalsa
Read between
July 6 - August 12, 2019
principle-centered, breakthrough way of helping sellers and buyers bridge their fears and mistrust of one another and break down the many dysfunctional practices that have arisen from this lack of trust.
focus not on quick fixes but on principles of enduring sales success. It is critical for the leadership ranks to rethink the way they approach sales and how they manage their teams.
salespeople have to follow the principle of seeking first to understand, then to be understood. This requires salespeople to talk less and listen more.
Sales skills are life skills. What makes us better at sales makes us better in life.
We use our time, and others’ time, more efficiently. We confront and overcome core human fears. We become more alert and flexible. Life is more engaging and enjoyable.
solution that exactly meets the client’s needs” to represent a solution that is not more than the client needs, nor less than what is possible.
Take what you find useful and leave what you do not need. Our goal is to augment your awareness of what is possible to accomplish in sales dialogues, and to increase your choices for succeeding in a way that benefits both you and the client.
With a good fit, both parties win. With a bad fit, both lose.
Dysfunctional buying practices have arisen to combat dysfunctional selling practices. For instance, buyers may send out Requests for Proposals (RFPs)
They put out an RFP to five or six companies; they have each one explain at length what they would do and how they would do it; they then take the best of what they heard and do it themselves. Presto—free consulting!
We can replace dysfunctional selling practices with attitudes, skills, and processes focused on helping clients succeed. We can transform dysfunctional buying practices into those that serve clients more appropriately. We can promote an environment where buyers and sellers talk honestly and openly, then jointly make intelligent decisions about whether or not it makes sense to work together.
Qualifying: Should we keep talking?
Winning: Should you do this with us?
Initiating: Should we be talking?
Consultants and clients want the same thing. 2. Intent counts more than technique (and technique is still important). Corollary: You are more successful when you concentrate on the success of others rather than on your own. 3. Solutions have no inherent value. 4. Methodology matters. 5. World-class inquiry precedes world-class advocacy.
KEY BELIEF NO. 1: Consultants and Clients Want the Same Thing
“They don’t know what they need.” “They can’t articulate what they need.” “They don’t agree on what they need.” “They won’t give us good information.” “They don’t let us talk to the right people.” “They are unrealistic about the time, money, and people needed.” “Politics and personal issues count more than business sense.” “They procrastinate.” “They won’t make decisions.”
KEY BELIEF NO. 2: Intent Counts More Than Technique (and Technique Is Still Important)
Are you asking questions to help them get what they want in a way they feel good about, or to help you get what you want in a way you feel good about?
“People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
Trust=Intent + Expertise. Clients must trust that your intent is compatible with their best interests, and that you have the expertise to design and deliver a solution that meets their needs.
When people feel they are being manipulated or led to your conclusion rather than to their own, they will often move aggressively in the opposite direction.
Conversely, when clients perceive that your intent is to help them succeed, they are more likely to share their beliefs about what that success is.
The more important it is to meet your numbers, the more important it is to stop concentrating on your numbers and start concentrating on the clients’ numbers.
solutions derive value only from the problems they solve that people care about, and/or from producing results that people highly value. Solutions must solve something. If there is nothing the client wants to solve, there is no value to the proposed solution.
Solutions have to solve problems that people care about or produce results people highly value.
When you start talking about a solution before understanding what it is supposed to solve, you decrease client confidence, lessen your credibility, and significantly reduce your ability to produce an exact solution.
Top professionals have the ability to “move off the solution.” They withhold offering a solution until they have intelligently explored the problems to be solved and/or the results to be achieved. They organize their questioning to get meaningful answers to critical assumptions. They do so in a way that is comfortable, conversational, and time-efficient. When done well, clients gain insight and understanding of their situation.
The client may put one requested solution on the table. If the consultant can resist the impulse to talk about that solution (the adult version of the marshmallow) and instead ask effective questions that investigate what the solution is meant to solve, he or she is often rewarded with multiple opportunities for success.
How comfortable do clients feel with us examining and exploring their beliefs?
Can we execute a consistent, repeatable, flexible process that works better for both clients and consultants? Can we build feedback loops into the process which allow us to continually improve?
To truly help clients succeed, both IQ and EQ are necessary. Lack of either is a fatal flaw.
It is helpful to organize these skills into a repeatable methodology (an XQ) that makes explicit our beliefs about the IQ and EQ abilities that are most effective in increasing profitable revenue.
Issues: What problems or results is the client trying to address? In what priority? Evidence: How do we define the problem? How do we measure success? Impact: What are the financial and intangible costs and benefits? Context: Who or what else is affected by the issues and the solution? Constraints: What has stopped (or might stop) the organization from resolving these issues?
What is our solution? Given the client’s situation, what are the reasons that adopting our solution makes sense? • How can we effectively advocate for our solution and enable good decisions?
In practice it is applied in an iterative way. The information that comes from ORD is often developed over many conversations, like fitting pieces into a puzzle over time.
reasons are based on a set of educated guesses about a potential Opportunity, which indicate a potential relevance of our solution(s) to the client’s situation.
Our proposed solution should be able to: • enable the Opportunity • utilize the available Resources • match the Decision Criteria/Beliefs of key stakeholders • exceed their alternatives
balance between inquiry and advocacy. Stephen Covey’s sixth habit of highly successful people, “Seek first to understand—then to be understood,” applies to highly successful business developers.
Sometimes trusted business advisors help their clients cut through fear, uncertainty, and doubt by strongly advocating what the client must do.
There may be no buy-in or ownership from the client, which could cause failure of either the sale or the initiative.
The downside of passively accepting includes: • The client could be wrong—and will still blame us—sometimes with severe consequences. • We have not demonstrated any thought leadership. • We may not understand exactly what we are solving or how to measure success. • We could leave many opportunities uncovered.
Even worse, they may try to force us to tell (“You’re the expert”), accept (“Just give us what we want”), or guess (“It’s all in the RFP”).
Mutual exploration has two imagined downsides. First, it would appear to take more time.
second imagined downside: that we may find we do not have a solution that truly meets the client’s needs, and thus “lose” a sale.
Qualification is a process of mutual exploration and, we hope, mutual understanding.
“Not a good fit” is a great conclusion, if arrived at early. It is a horrible miscalculation if arrived at late.
the flow of meaningful information between consultant and client is a powerful predictor of success and is critically related to the building of trust and value. Three factors tend to move together: value, trust, and the flow of meaningful information.
when there is little trust or exchange of meaningful information, we are forced to guess about what is actually important to the client and are therefore less likely to develop a solution that is either accepted or produces optimal value.
What we can measure is the flow of meaningful information. Over time we can develop a correlation between information received and results achieved. Little or poor-quality information indicates low probability of success.
