There’s a hierarchy of needs that isn’t being acknowledged by a lot of sales people. Your sales team might be making this mistake, and it could be costing you sales.
As sales teams rightly attempt to differentiate their offerings and to challenge the buyer with modern B2B sales strategies they miss out on a biological truth. We can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. And if your audience is pre-occupied by a burning issue, all your vision building, differentiation, and challenger selling will not be heard.
One of my clients had a marketing automation system that was not working for them. They were getting bad results from every campaign, so I decided to run a more targeted campaign. That’s when I realized their marketing automation system didn’t let them grade different prospects differently. For example, whether the prospect was from the finance industry or the legal industry, they both got graded the same way. Whether they were a CFO or an IT professional, they got graded the same way.
We called one of the biggest marketing automation vendors in the world (half of you probably use them) and invited them in to replace the old tool. I told them:
Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.
They assured me they could do that. They flew an account rep and a customer success person in to the meeting at my client’s office. I told them:
Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.
And do you know what they did? They spent the next hour talking about their company’s philosophy of the world, probably describing in great detail their integrated view of how a modern B2B business needs to run, their vision of how marketing and sales will be revolutionized by their technology, and how we were perfectly positioned to be the beneficiaries of all of this progress!
They probably said all those things. But I didn’t hear a single word they said.
Why? Because I was hung up on this:
Here’s the number one thing I’m looking for. I want you to show me how you deal with grading different prospects differently.
They eventually got around to showing us how to do the number one thing I had asked to see. But by then it was too late. I was distracted, annoyed, and frankly thought less of their professional ability to hear our problems and provide good solutions.
Should I have been so hung up on that one feature? Wasn’t it in my best interest to see the broader picture? Weren’t they doing me a favour by helping me see all this? It doesn’t matter. I was surprised that the existing tool didn’t do this, and given the cost of doing a migration, the table stakes for me were to not have a similar surprise with the new tool. I also wanted to show the client team how that one feature could transform the way they ran campaigns. Of course I cared about more than just that one feature. We had a long list of requirements at strategic and tactical levels. But at that moment, I was preoccupied by just one thing. And everything else was a distraction.
Here’s my advice in 3 steps:
- Find out what the number one thing is that your prospect wants to hear about.
- Talk about the number one thing that your prospect wants to hear about.
- Once you have confirmed that their number one thing has been addressed, re-contextualize that number one thing into your grand vision, and move to your vision from there.
Here’s that same advice in 3 words:
Connect, then redirect
Yes, you have to identify the stakeholders, get in front of them, connect them to one another, and help them arrive at a solution that helps them take their organization into a future whose arrival they all support.
But you have to remember that in their busy, attention-fragmented world, you first have to deal with what they think is their biggest burning issue. You might do this by providing a solution for it, or you might do it by showing them that they actually have much bigger problems than the one they’re thinking of. But you have to deal with it. This doesn’t contradict the research findings about the difficulties involved in sequential sales to multiple influencers. It’s just that when you’re talking to someone about one thing and they have something else on their mind, they won’t hear you.
You have to connect with them on that one issue so they can free up their attention to really hear what you’re saying about the bigger issues. Otherwise they’ll think you’re just trying to lead them to your pitch. That you’re a bad listener, or a bad problem solver. That you’re pushy. That you just don’t get it.
Instead, first connect, then redirect. Try it out in your next prospecting call and see what happens.
