When I was managing salespeople, there was something I noticed again and again. A salesperson would come back from a meeting and tell me, with real satisfaction, “I explained everything to him.”
My first thought was usually: I hope you didn’t.
There is nothing wrong with knowing your product well. A salesperson should know what he is selling, understand the advantages and be able to answer difficult questions. The problem begins when all that knowledge creates an urge to use it before there is a reason to.
A customer sits down, and within a few minutes the presentation begins. The salesperson talks about the company, the product, the service, the features and perhaps the special offer available this month. Twenty minutes later, a great deal has been said, but very little may have been learned.
I have never considered that a good sales conversation.
Before I decide what to present, I need to understand why this particular person is talking to me. What is happening now? What is not working well enough? Why is the customer considering a change at all? And just as important, what would make that change worthwhile?
These are not questions I ask because somebody taught me that salespeople should ask questions. I need the answers. Without them, I am working almost blind.
Imagine that I sell a system that can save time, reduce errors and give managers better information. All three benefits may be true. But the customer in front of me may not care very much about two of them. His real problem may be that every Monday morning two employees spend half a day preparing information manually.
Now the conversation is different. I am no longer presenting a system with three benefits. I am discussing a problem that already exists in his business and whether my system can solve it well enough to justify buying it.
That difference may sound small. In practice, it changes the entire meeting.
It also changes the way I listen. I am not waiting politely for the customer to finish so I can return to my presentation. I am listening for information that may change what I planned to say.
Sometimes it does.
A customer may mention that the person who will actually use the product is worried about learning a new system. I may have arrived expecting to discuss price and efficiency, but now I know that ease of use and implementation deserve attention. If I ignore that information because I am determined to follow my prepared presentation, I am making my own job harder.
This is one reason I have always been uncomfortable with sales conversations that sound rehearsed. Preparation matters enormously, but preparation should make you more capable of responding to the customer, not less capable.
The same applies to questions. I do not believe that asking many questions automatically makes somebody a skilled salesperson. Customers can feel when they are being taken through a questionnaire.
There is a difference between asking because the next question appears on your list and asking because something the customer just said made you curious.
If someone tells me, “We tried something similar two years ago and it didn’t work,” I am unlikely to move calmly to my next prepared question. I want to know what happened. What failed? Was it the product, the implementation, the support, or something inside the organization? That answer may be more important to the sale than half of what I intended to discuss.
There is another benefit to slowing down at the beginning. It can save both sides from wasting time.
Not every customer is the right customer. There have been situations in my sales career when, after understanding what somebody really needed, it became clear that what I had to offer was not the best answer. I do not see that as a failed sales conversation. Discovering a poor fit before making promises is better than discovering it after the customer has bought.
Of course, at some point I do have to sell. I need to explain the solution, show its value, deal with concerns and ask for a decision when the time is right. I am not suggesting that a salesperson should spend the whole meeting asking questions and never make a recommendation.
I am saying that the recommendation becomes much stronger when there is a reason behind it.
“Let me show you our most advanced package” is a presentation.
“You told me that your biggest difficulty is the time your team loses every week. Let me show you the part of the system that could change that” is a sales conversation.
The difference is not a clever sentence. It is what happened before the sentence was spoken.
When I think about the salespeople I have respected most over the years, they were not necessarily the ones who could talk the longest or present the most smoothly. They could sit with a customer, understand what was really happening and then decide what was worth saying.
That is why, when I prepare for a sales conversation, I do not begin by asking myself how I am going to sell the product.
First, I want to know what I need to learn.