Unique Opportunity to Hear Charles Green, Bestselling Author, on October 9
Virtual Learning Lab Sponsored by St. Meyer & Hubbard (It’s FREE!)
Rebuilding Customer Confidence…Three Strategies to Becoming Trustworthy
Charles Green is the co-author of the bestselling book The Trusted Advisor. He speaks around the world on something we need to think about in our own backyard: trust. Charlie takes time out from his intense travel schedule on October 9 to share his knowledge at our first Virtual Learning Lab. To register click the link below.
Register Now!
The Raise Your Hand if Your Would Bank with You Rant
By The Rantmaster (aka Jack Hubbard)
Don’t you hate it when an instructor says “raise your hand if…”? I refuse to do it in a classroom because it seems manipulative to me. An inquiry was recently posed to me by a good friend however. Knowing we work in banking and being an avid reader of the newsletter, this service professional asked me to raise the issue as to whether a banker would do business with themselves. What a great question! I’ve been waiting for the right time to insert this into my rant. Now that we are close to year-end, looking forward to leaving 2009 behind and planning for the phoenix that is 2010 (so many bankers have hunkered down for so long perhaps we’ll all finally rise from the ashes) it is time to think about this insightful inquiry.
On the surface the answer is an easy “yes, I would bank with me.” Upon further review some doubts may begin to surface. If you were a customer, for example, and you approached the teller line would you want you, the teller, to blurt out some memorized elevator speech about the bank, spew about the current campaign product, or push a generic brochure at the you, the customer, containing information about a product you would never use but one that would get your branch to increase the number of products sold per customer per day. The likely answer from you is a resounding NO. Then why do you do it when the situation is reversed?
Of course referrals are important—one of our clients with 25 branches recently reported receiving more than 16,400 referrals. They did it by removing all brochures from the teller line, understanding that elevator speeches should only be employed inside hydraulic, lift-oriented devices in tall buildings, and that pushing a product meant getting pushed back on. They simply decided to help the tellers have a conversation and provided questions on 3X5 cards to help that dialogue along. How would you like to be a customer of yours at that bank?
On the personal banker side, how would you like to be relaxing after a nice dinner and be called by you to “talk about” the latest and greatest rates, free stuff, or other products that you had no idea you needed? The industry has dubbed this waste of human air a “call night.” One of our clients decided that wouldn’t work if they were on the receiving end of the call so they turned it around and now title it a “customer night.” Yep, they still make calls in the evening but now the focus IS the customer. The goal of the evening is to better understand how to improve the experience with the bank and to learn if the customer has any needs going forward. The most sales-related question asked is: “talk to me about some issues and initiatives on your personal plate over the next six months and how [name of bank] can be of help to you with that situation.” This bank uses a well respected company that measures customer satisfaction and the scores have gone up dramatically in two areas: loyalty and would refer business. If you were the customer would you rather bank with the call-night-you or the customer-night-you?
In business banking, planning is a non-starter for many. Either the banker has “done this since the stalagmite era when I became a banker” or “I don’t have time with all the other things on my plate” or some other fine whine.
How would you feel if you were a customer or a prospect of yours and you knew that you, the banker, had not prepared for this call? How would customer-you feel about banker-you? Yep, time is our greatest ally and enemy and some bankers have been making sales calls since there was black and white television. I can’t for the life of me understand though why bankers don’t invest more time in planning. What if you started your call on you by suggesting, “I didn’t do any preparation for this call but don’t worry, I’ve been a banker for 18 years and I’ve made tons of these calls on companies like yours. You businesses are all pretty much the same. The fact is it comes down to whether you want a loan or if you need to make a deposit. I’ve done those many times before so you are in good hands with me. So let’s get started and I’ll ask you the same unprepared, generic questions I’ve been asking business owners for nearly two decades.”
One bank I know does one hour of planning each week on a Monday. It happens right after the Pipeline Meeting. Bankers go to their offices and prepare for their calls for the week using First Research, etc. Every banker does it—top performers, 30-year veterans, and raw rookies. At the end of the hour, each banker takes turns going to the manager to strategize on their calls for the week. How would you feel if you were the prospect or customer and you knew that you were going that extra mile to prepare for a good call on you?
Now, talk amongst yourselves and raise your hand if you are committed to being better if you were your customer.
How Does Our Listening Affect Our Prospecting
By Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it
I bet you’re wondering why I am putting “listening” and “prospecting” in the same article.
In fact, they are inexorably entwined.
One of the “dirty little secrets” about sales is that it only manages the solution-placement end of the buyer’s buying decision. Oh, sure, we gather data about the “needs”—but only in relation to what our solution can support. We actually ignore all of the off-line, behind-the-scenes issues that buyers must manage before they are able to buy anything.
Let me discuss this for a moment. You see a great car you want to buy: two-seater, very sporty, fast, cool, expensive. Do you stop at the store the moment you see it and go in and plunk down a check? Probably not. Your spouse might have something to say about the expenditure or appropriateness given the size of your family or the fact that you already have two cars, etc. It’s not about the car.
What about your weight or physical shape? Do you work out as often as you might? Or do you still have those extra five pounds? It’s about how you see yourself, how far you’re willing to go to change your eating habits, or how much time you’re willing to devote to the gym.
Change
Behind every change (and making a purchase is some sort of changeto the system that holds it daily—even if there is massive dysfunction that your solution can alleviate) is a system that holds the status quo in place and has done so for a period of time. In fact, systems don’t differentiate function from dysfunction, as you can see from the gym or weight discussion above. Systems just are. And their primary concern is to stay in balance; your buyer would have found a way around the dysfunction before you showed up if he/she found something wrong that could be fixed without major disruption.
Hence, when we enter our buyer’s environment, the status quo is intact, the system he/she lives in is functioning…well, functioning the way it’s functioning, and the buyer is doing work-arounds that maintain this dysfunction daily.
Indeed, the need that your product can resolve is already being handled in some way, either by another vendor, some work-around, or just by dogged acceptance. Whatever is handling it is “fine” or it would have been fixed already.
Do not think that entering with your delightful personality and great solution (ok, it’s branded, brilliant, needed, competitive, etc.), you’ll be able to waltz in and sell it. Your track record for doing it this way—regardless of the buyer’s need—isn’t so good anyway.
Here is what is happening. You enter with rapport. You ask questions. You gather data. You see the problem. You have a solution that will manage the “need” that you see. You offer a pitch that matches the need or get an appointment to present your solution. You are professional. The buyer likes you.
You wait.
90% of them don’t come back.
It’s not about your product. It’s not about the need. It’s not about the buyer’s pain. Unfortunately, the sales model doesn’t give you the tools you need to really help you make a difference and sell your product.
What is Missing from Sales?
Sales only manages the solution-placement end of the buyer’s buying decision. It would be the equivalent of me “selling” you a gym membership, the new car, or a diet before you had managed the internal decisions you’d need to make to get internal agreement to change.
For the car, you’d need to get a loan, sell one of your cars, build a garage, or get your spouse to agree. It’s not about the car. For the personal stuff, you’d need to resign yourself to eat differently, put aside time for the gym, have your spouse be willing to eat or cook differently, wake up earlier to get to the gym, etc.
It’s all a system. Sales does not manage the system’s decisions necessary for change to happen. We end up sitting and waiting for buyers to do this on their own. But make no mistake:
Until or unless buyers manage the off-line, behind-the-scenes issues they need to address that they are holding the status quo in place, they will do nothing. And the time it takes them to manage that is the length of the sales cycle.
No sales strategy will help a buyer do this. That’s why you wait. And that’s why the sales cycle is as long as it is. But the sales cycle doesn’t have to be that long. One of the dirty little secrets in my new book discusses the fact that buyers don’t know what they will run into as they approach change (just like you don’t know what your “trip” through the purchase of a new car will be or discussions with your spouse or building a new garage, etc.). They must root around until they figure it out—and because they are on unfamiliar territory, they end up taking forever.
That’s where you come in. But not with sales.
What Should We Be Listening For?
We understand our buyer’s problem and the area immediately around the need. Unfortunately, we don’t live there and cannot affect change in that environment. We can’t be there to discuss with a spouse the need to get a new vendor. We can’t be there with a colleague to choose a different product. We can’t reconfigure an initiative or manage a business partner.
Sales, of course, doesn’t handle that. But we aren’t listening for that either—we continually listen for how to get in, how to position our product in relation to a need that seems obvious to us.
Imagine if we were merely listening for the system behind the need—the historic issues that created and maintain it, the people, policies, beliefs, and rules that hold it in place—and then help the buyer manage these issues to get alignment and agreement for change. The buyer needs to do this anyway and we sit and wait for it to happen (which it does only 10% of the time). We might as well be a part of the process.
Once we do this (with no product bias and not with the sales model) and the buyer knows how to manage each element of the buying decision process, then the buyer will be in a position to buy…from us.
Buyers need to do this anyway; they are going to do this with you or without you. It might as well be with you. But you’ll need a new set of skills because you can’t do this with sales skills.
But you will have a much, much quicker buying decision cycle, you’ll close at least 200% more sales, and you’ll be positioned as part of the Buying Decision Team—without much competition.
Aren’t you tired of sitting and waiting? And wasting so much time on buyers who end up not buying?
Editor’s Note
Bob St. Meyer and I met Sharon Drew Morgen on the telephone the first week we started SM&H in December 2000. She took our call and we’ve stayed in touch often since then; talking sales and client-focused philosophies. Her first book (she has now written eight), Selling with Integrity, outlines her unique Buying Facilitation® model that remakes a traditional adversarial relationship into one marked by genuine collaboration and honest consideration. Sharon Drew is both a brilliant writer and one of the straightest shooters one will ever meet.
On October 15, her newest book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, hits the shelves. We’ll be reviewing it in the October Signposts. You can pre-order it now by going to www.sharondrewmorgen.com and we urge you to do it.
Dirty Little Secrets is not a sales book, but it will help you sell, close quicker, and find more clients. Indeed, the dirty little secrets of the title refer to the problems that the sales model itself creates and how to overcome them. Because sales focuses on placing solutions and buyers won’t buy until their off-line issues get addressed, sales fails close to 90% of the time. Indeed, sales has not offered skills to successfully manage those behind-the-scenes decisions that happen without us—until now.
Dirty Little Secrets offers skills to coach buyers through their off-line decisions. It explains the buying decision process in detail—the steps buyers follow to garner the appropriate behind-the-scenes buy-in—and includes a very insightful Case Study that takes us through every aspect of a sale. This sophisticated book is filled with real world examples and gives readers the tools to help buyers discover the route through to their buying decisions. Here’s what one, well known consultant said about it:
"This book is disturbing. It pulls back the veil: we’ll never be able to go back to the old way of just selling a solution. This book teaches us what has been missing from the industry for so long—how buyers decide. The ideas in this book are too big to push under the rug: it's sophisticated, but necessary for any serious sales professional."
- Jeff Blackwell, SalesPractice.com
For a deeper view into the mind of Sharon Drew Morgen register for her blog at www.sharondrewmorgen.com.
Ditch Your Preconceived Notions
By Jason Tarr, Vice President, Citizens Bank
It’s a little known fact that I was asked to audition for the second season of Donald Trump’s show, The Apprentice. The initial round of casting was a “cattle call” in which they took 15 to 20 of us into a room with a casting director who proposed to the group several discussion format questions and then concluded by asking each one of us: “Why should we pick you for The Apprentice?” Each person responded to this question by rattling off an impressive list of his/her qualifications, traits, accomplishments, and education. When the casting director came to me, I responded with just two words: unpredictable excitement. The other hopefuls in the room looked at me with smirks, as if I had blown my shot. When the casting director asked me to elaborate, I explained that they should pick me because I would bring “unpredictable excitement” to the show and that was the bottom line.
NBC and Mark Burnett Productions were not interested in finding an apprentice for Donald Trump. They were interested in ratings. That’s what television is all about. All the other candidates in the room had gone into the casting with preconceived notions, thinking in terms of themselves and what qualifications they have to be Trump’s apprentice. Because of this, they did not effectively hear the question that was asked. The casting director had said: “Why should we pick you for The Apprentice?” NOT “Why should you be the next apprentice?”
We often go into meetings with prospects with preconceived notions based on past experiences and arrogance, thinking we know what’s best for them and the organization or, even worse, thinking in terms of what’s best for us, our banks, and maybe even our wallets. This blinds our judgment and inhibits us from asking effective questions and, even more importantly, actively listening to their answers. The result? We often end up product-dumping or pitching a service that the prospect is not interested in and inevitably having the meeting end with the prospect saying something like, “Just leave some information and I’ll think about it.” In the end, the only one who will think about it is you—perhaps even blaming the prospect for a lack of intelligence, the economy, or maybe even the product or your rates.
Instead, clear your mind and focus your efforts first on conducting pre-call planning. Effective pre-call planning allows you to think in terms of the prospect by understanding the company, where it’s been, where it is now, where it’s going, and what’s getting in the way. This can be accomplished often by reviewing the company website, using First Research, Googling the company and decision-makers, talking to stakeholders, and even just taking the time to think logically about the industry.
The fact is, returning to my audition example, NBC couldn’t care less about my resume, they were interested in ratings and market share. Similarly, you need to go in prepared with ideas on how to help in these areas. Think in terms of the company you are planning on visiting. Will they have accounts receivable? If so, what issues could be surrounding them? For example, physician offices typically have high receivables as payments from insurers may not be received for several weeks after treatment. Furthermore, disputes with insurers are common and insurers often deny or reduce reimbursement requests. Knowing this, you can formulate specific high-impact questions around accounts receivable management:
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How are reimbursement rates affecting the office’s profitability?
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What percentage of claims is sent back for questions?
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How much longer does that delay receivable payment?
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What percentage of claims is eventually denied?
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What impact does that have on the practice?
Expand this thinking to other categories: accounts payable, inventory, seasonality. Think in terms of the prospect:
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Where is the prospect in terms of the life cycle of the business?
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How close is the prospect to retirement and succession planning issues?
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Which is more critical: time or money?
Then, you can tailor your questions around these thoughts.
Conducting this pre-call planning will allow you to find your “unpredictable excitement” with your prospects. Being prepared with high-impact questions will have you not only looking professional and confident in the prospect’s eyes, but also allows you to tailor a proposal to meet more than the basic checking and savings needs.
And for the curious: I was the only one chosen that day from my initial group and I made it through all three casting call levels to the final cut of 40 for the season. While I was not chosen for the “aired” version, the fact that I ditched my preconceived notions did help me get pretty far in the process which is more than many unprepared salespeople can say.
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