Mar/102
Where is the spotlight? If it is on you, you are not selling!
I was sitting in the best burrito place in Budapest one afternoon. At a table near me, I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation in English, My Hungarian is still pretty weak, so the familiar language caught my attention.
In this conversation, an older guy in a business suit was sitting with a young, fresh faced 20-something guy in jeans and a t-shirt. The older guy was peppering with younger one with questions:
- So how long have you known her?
- Where did you guys meet?
- Do you speak any Slovakian?
- What is your current status?
- What does she do for a living?
- Etc.
The kid didn’t seem to mind, but it was eminently clear that the older guy was COMPLETELY controlling the conversation. I am not making any value judgement here, just an observation.
It reminded me of a talk show. Where Johnny or Jay or Connan or Larry fires off well informed questions, directing the celebrity of the moment through the interview until the key moment when the hot issue is approached, exposed and explored – with or without the consent and/or comfort of the interviewee .
What does this have to do with sales and selling? The key concept here is all about what we can call “the spotlight”.
Some non-salespeople (and some salespeople) have the misguided idea that salespeople love the spotlight. They believe that selling is an opportunity to get up on a kind of stage and present the wonders of a product or service in such a dazzling way that prospective customers can’t help but throw money at them, like bras at a Beatles concert in days of old.
These people have it all wrong. If these people are salespeople, then it is probably a hard job for them. The image of the snake oil salesman on his wagon in the old west town is an old story, and it no longer plays in Peoria or anywhere else.
If you aspire to be an effective professional salesperson, then you should remember the concept of “the spotlight”. To help you remember it, perhaps I should tell you what it is:
When you are in a sales conversation, imagine that you and your prospect are on a stage with two chairs. You sit in one, the prospect in the other. The stage is dark, except for a single spotlight. The spotlight shines not on the person talking, but on the person who is the subject of the conversation.
You are selling most effectively when the spotlight is on the other person – the prospect.
How can this be? Don’t you need to tell the prospect all about your great stuff so that they know that they need to buy it? Not necessarily.
In the sales process that I map out in blow-by-blow detail in my book Mastering Your Sales Process, the first four steps (leads, prospecting, qualifying and needs analysis) are designed to allow the salesperson to demonstrate professionalism which generates trust and to gather client information interactively, in such a way that what feels to the client like the gathering of information (spotlight on them) simultaneously and proactively addresses potential objections and informs parameters for the solution option.
In this way, the second half of the sales process (solution, objections and close) can be brief, spot-on, and totally effective without the need for presentations, lengthy proposals, extended negotiation sessions, or any of those other “spotlight on the salespeople” activities that usually do more damage to the opportunity to close than they do help it.
Proposals and presentations have their place, but if you want to be effective, the skills you need to focus on revolve around understanding the compelling reasons that the prospect has for wanting your product or service, and fleshing them out in a dialogue that highlights your understanding of the issue, your ability to fix it, and your character as the kind of person the prospect wants to partner with towards a solution.
Keeping the spotlight on the prospect with great questions, trial solutions, thorough needs analysis, properly timed and complete proposals will help. A lot. When you do it all right, your closing technique can be as simple as something like “well OK then”. It is true that to close, you do need to say or do something, By keeping the spotlight on the prospect the right way as you work towards the close, you can keep it short, and help make it more effective than your best uninformed, spotlight-on-you monologue or power point presentation ever will.
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Jan/104
How the competition can make you hurt yourself
I was recently involved in a negotiation on behalf of the holder of intellectual property and a small (relative to industry average) potential contract manufacturing partner.
After only a very short set of preliminary meetings, the contract manufacturer sent us an unsolicited, highly detailed proposal for a partnership. This was the smallest mistake they made, and it was no small mistake. As a note on this point alone, a professional salesperson (or negotiator) should certainly work to learn as much as possible about the needs of all parties and the feasibility of various solutions before formally proposing a solution.
But it got worse.
During the course of the preliminary meetings, our side made it clear that we would require the sourcing of a highly complicated, capital intensive and critical component of our product from a well-known and well-respected component manufacturer. The component manufacturer that we specified was considered one of the best in the world, and was used (with positive results) by almost every major manufacturer in our field.
In the proposal from our prospective contract manufacturing partner, it was suggested that this industry leading, highly acclaimed component manufacturer was grossly overcharging us, and that the small contract manufacturer should also produce the (very complicated, very expensive) machines that make the specialized component – an extremely ambitions suggestion. They further suggested that they could make the machines for less than half the cost of the world famous component manufacturer, with twice the capacity, and in less time.
It sounded too good to be true, and that is just how we interpreted it. This unrealistically ambitious suggestion came at a time when we had just begun exploring our relationship, and well before we had explored many of the much more basic issues related to our potential partnership.
This did not bode well for our perceptions of this prospective contract manufacturing partner!
As a general proposition, it is important to show prospective partners that we are competent and capable potential business partners for them. However, making unrealistic claims early in the process is not the way to do it. Especially if this happens before needs are fully understood, and true capabilities are established. The situation is made even worse if these claims are packaged in the context of an obvious attempt to undermine an existing relationship, and even worse than that when attacking the existing relationship is not necessary. In all of these cases, it just appears desperate (and probably is).
This kind of poor execution usually just winds up hurting the efforts of the needless aggressor. Attacking the competition rather than working to learn what problems exist that can be solved together is not the correct behavior of a professional salesperson, and certainly not the most productive.
A small child may be able to brag to his friends that his fathers new car can go 1000 miles per hour, but when you make a similar gesture to your prospective client in hopes of having them reconsider a more realistic offer from one of your competitors, you are hurting yourself far more than you are helping your efforts to secure the business.
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