How to sell anything.
Edition 28 of Forward+
1 big idea worth considering.
Sales is notoriously overly complicated. (Hemingway would hate that sentence.)
MEDDIC.
MEDDPICC.
BANT.
We like acronyms I guess. But acronyms don’t help you sell. And in fact they can become a crutch that makes you worse at selling. A box to be checked. A formula to be followed.
Here’s a better way.
The foundation of great selling is asking great questions.
There is a non-obvious trait that I look for in sales reps, above all others.
Curiosity.
One of the best sellers I’ve ever been around had no sales experience. He was 22.
Another of the best sellers I’ve been around also had no sales experience. He was in his mid-30s and had spent his career in product.
Two very different people with very different backgrounds. Yet they had one thing in common:
An endless curiosity to understand the person they were talking to and the problems they were trying to solve.
When sales reps lose a deal, they almost always lose the deal because of a few different reasons:
They don’t fully understand the problem, so they’re trying to solve the wrong problem.
They don’t fully understand the buyer, so they’re trying to sell to someone who can’t or won’t actually buy.
They don’t fully understand their own product and the value it can provide.
Problems. People. Product.
The 22 year old didn’t know how to sell, but he was deeply curious about the problems he was helping buyers solve, which led to him quickly becoming an expert in the product.
The mid-30s product guy didn’t know how to sell, but he was deeply empathetic to the buyer’s pain points and an expert in the product.
For both of them, the selling part came easy, because it was never about selling in the first place.
The natural endpoint of curiosity is questions.
Curiosity leads to asking great questions. If I were to lay out a framework of sorts for how great selling actually happens it’d be this:
Get clarity on the current state. You have to know what the baseline is. Why are they talking to you in the first place? What’s working for them? What isn’t working for them? What are the very real pain points that result from what isn’t working?
Get clarity on the ideal future state. If you understand what the baseline is, you can move the conversation to the future. How do they describe their ideal future state? What pains would be resolved? What benefits would they experience for themselves or their business? Why is this ideal future state important to them?
Map the path between the two. If you deeply understand someone’s current state and the future state they’re trying to drive toward, the only thing left to do is show the explicit path for how they get from one to the other. What would need to change? What are the steps between the two? How are you better at executing these steps than anyone else?
That’s it. That’s selling.
The details vary from sales rep to sales rep and product to product. Enterprise selling looks much different from selling to small businesses or consumers. Selling to an existing customer looks much different from selling to new customers. Selling software looks much different from selling insurance.
But just like the 2 sales reps noted above looked very different on paper, the underlying logic of what made them great didn’t vary.
When I started leading sales teams (checks watch…) 12 years ago, the very first thing I would teach new reps is this:
You should know so much about the prospect and their problems that you know with a high degree of confidence whether or not you’re going to win the deal…before you ever talk about yourself or your product.
And that last bit is the kicker. It’s what separates great sellers from mediocre sellers.
If you’re selling, and you feel the urge to jump in and talk about how great your product or company is, it means you don’t know enough about their problem, their people, or your product.
It’s a mask.
We don’t feel comfortable with the problem we’re solving, the person we’re solving it for, or the product behind the price tag, so we hide behind the features and benefits that we’ve been trained on.
To be a great seller, you don’t need more acronyms. You don’t need more competitor kill sheets or one-pagers. You don’t need more case studies.
You need more curiosity. You need to ask better questions. You need to sell from a place of service and stewardship, not sleaze.
Successfully selling to the wrong buyer or the wrong problem is a net negative. Selling the dream and servicing the nightmare is very real.
And it’s resolved by being the most curious person in the conversation.
2 Kindle highlights worth considering.
The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part.
Every moment of the day you relate to reality through all kinds of filters that are uniquely your own. A person you love is disliked by someone else. A color you find beautiful is ugly to another person. A job interview that sends you into an immediate stress response poses no threat to a job applicant who happens to be more self-confident. The real question isn’t whether you are creating reality—all of us are—but how deeply your interventions go. Is there anything that is real “out there” independent of us?
3 links worth exploring.
🎧 How to be happy and the 4 false idols. (Arthur Brooks on the Tim Ferriss Show)
📖 The 5 competitive forces that shape strategy. (Harvard Business Review)
📖 Imposter syndrome: why you may feel like a fraud. (Verywell Mind)
That’s a wrap for this week’s edition of Forward+.
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