Inside Our Head

I have a book published by Harvard Business Review titled Business Classics: Fifteen Key Concepts for Managerial Success.  The book contains the 15 articles in HBR’s history that have sold the most reprints.  One article, published in 1964, was titled, “What Makes a Good Salesman,” by David Mayer and Herbert Greenberg.  The author’s research found that there are two qualities that make an effective salesperson: ego-drive (or personal ambition) and empathy.  Empathy is your ability to project yourself into the heart and mind of your customer to see things as our customer sees them.

 

And yet, nearly five decades after that article was published, salespeople are seldom selected for or taught empathy.  The predominance of sales training literature is still focused on the steps of the sale, the things that salespeople need to do to sell the customer: prospect, approach, question, qualify, present, handle objections, close, etc. Are we still in the 1950s or what?

In my book, “Getting Into Your Customer’s Head, I describe the “buy-learning” process customers go through when making an organizational buying decision. But don’t for a minute think that your customer is doing a good job of buying.

According to studies referenced in the leadership book, For Your Improvement: A Guide for Development and Coaching, over 90% of the problems that middle managers and above experience are ambiguous – it’s neither clear what the real problem is, nor what the solution ought to be. These are some of the same problems that you are trying to solve by selling your solutions. And the higher up your customer’s organization an executive goes the more ambiguous the issues are. As a salesperson, if you can tap into this lack of customer clarity on the underlying issues causing that problems that you solve, you will significantly improve your odds of winning the sale, because the salesperson who wins is the one who defines the customer’s true problem. Why is it that the most experienced salespeople see the customer’s need before the customer does? Why do salespeople come across as the “expert”, talk too quickly about their solution, and ruin the best chance they have to build mega-credibility at the beginning of the customer’s buying process?  

All experienced salespeople are skilled at communicating care for the customer during the sales cycle.  It is still true that for some (and indeed, far too many) salespeople, customer care is a hypocrisy: they pretend to care about the customers' needs when in fact they do not.  They have become extremely effective at creating the illusion of customer care -- so much so that from the customer's perspective, it is no longer possible to choose one option over another because of the perceived level of care.  Sales people who think they are differentiating themselves by caring about the customer are deluding themselves.

In my seminars, we have an exercise that asks salespeople to consider the next three appointments they have set, and answer the questions, "What is your objective for that sales call?" The answers I received at a recent seminar fell into the following categtories:

• Create a need
• Discuss their marketing objectives
• Overview our capabilities
• Build trust with a new contact
• Identify decision-makers
• Get commitment to buy