Which salesperson do you think Barry or any other customer will consider more of an expert? Which one do you think is more of an expert?
Fortunately, you can easily break the product feature habit. Just concentrate on questioning customers about their goals. Announce to the customers your focus on understanding their goals. Make it the stated purpose of your first in-person meetings. Customers find it refreshing to discuss their goals, because it does not happen that often.
Note For good measure, leave your glossy product literature in the car. Save your brochures for a time when you understand your customer’s goals and filters. Do not use them before then. (General capabilities brochures and industry-specific case studies are acceptable and useful.)
Customers trust salespeople who are customer experts. They know customer experts build solutions from their goals down, not from your products’ features up. Your questions about their goals and filters let customers know that you put their interests first. When you make customers’ goals and filters measurable, you sell on value, not price, and exceed customers’ expectations. Everyone wins—if you use active listening and questioning skills. (See Exhibit 5-1.)
Exhibit 5-1: Become a customer expert.
Active Listening
Great questioners know how to be active listeners. You and your customers should be completely engaged in what each other is saying, with no distractions. You let each other know you received and understood one another’s messages. How relevant your responses are to customers’ previous comments show how much active listening has occurred. This approach reinforces your interest in their thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. When customers are reassured that you want to understand exactly what they mean by obtaining measurable details, they keep talking.
Sometimes, salespeople keep talking even when no one is listening. They and customers never reach any quantifiable conclusions. Uninterested parties become more restless by the minute. “Active annoyance” best describes this situation. Salespeople who are guilty of this offense usually start their product pitches immediately after saying hello. If you let customers discuss their goals and filters first, it serves everyone’s best interests.
Active listening also takes advantage of nature. While the average speaker only transmits 150 to 200 words per minute, an attentive and active listener receives words at twice that rate, in the range of 300 to 400 words per minute. This is why you become impatient and want a ten-minute speech to end in five minutes. You have twice as much time as you need to listen. This extra time provides you and customers with three choices: advocating, assuming, or anticipating. Only one of these choices produces benefits.
Advocating
Salespeople anxiously wait to pounce on the first opportunity that will give them a chance to advocate why their products are the perfect fit for the customer. They are listening only for details concerning pain, deadlines, budgets, and decision makers. If an opportunity does not present itself, they will force product discussions into the conversations. Out of nowhere comes questions such as “So, John, are you familiar with our products?” These questions usually have nothing to do with what the customer was saying. The salesperson needs not be overly concerned because John is not listening either. He too gave up trying to figure out the business value to him of the salesperson’s questions.
When discussions finally arise that might uncover goals, measurable benefits, and SOEs, these salespeople have trouble delving into them. They do not have enough business knowledge to formulate questions to expand on the customer’s comments. Therefore, they avoid the awkward position of asking a question they cannot answer either. For instance, it would be difficult for a salesperson to ask a customer, “In what ways are you evaluating the return on improving security?” Without knowledge of SOEs, such as dollar per break-in or the costs of false alarms, salespeople can find themselves scrambling if the customer asks, “What do you mean?”
These salespeople squander their extra listening time by formulating product-focused questions rather than customer-focused ones. Yet, they have only their questions to blame. Their questions set the agenda for what topics customers discuss or do not discuss. The drawbacks to this choice are obvious. Everyone takes a huge risk (unfilled expectations or lost sales) when salespeople offer products without knowing how to achieve the measurable benefits of the customer’s goals within their filters. Advocating forces salespeople into their second choice, which is assuming.
Assuming
In selling, as in everyday life, assumptions can create problems for those who are not psychic. Assuming works on a simple principle that salespeople know how customers plan on completing their sentences better than they do. Therefore, to save them time and effort, salespeople complete their customers sentences for them on the slightest pause or breath. As product-trained salespeople, they naturally assume their products interest customers. So naturally, they end customers’ sentences with references to products—a sure-fire way to tick off customers.
While listening to product monologues, customers also use bonus time to realize their assumptions were correct. Many salespeople only want to discuss their products to gauge the customer’s interest in buying them. Therefore, customers keep their answers vague. Fortunately, it is easy for salespeople to give assuming the boot. You just replace assuming with the most powerful tool of active listening, which is anticipating. You replace a product focus with a customer focus.
Anticipating
Anticipating takes advantage of your faster listening capabilities. During half the time when customers are speaking, you can be thinking strategically. Take this bonus time to think about how measurable the information customers are supplying is. Measurable information concerning what? You answered correctly; it is their Goals, Filters, Measurable benefits, and Systems of evaluations (GFMS).
When you anticipate, you listen for verbal clues to what GFMS customers will discuss next. Use these clues to formulate your follow-up questions. Clues usually involve different aspects of goals and filters. They can range from financial matters to the roles of individuals to various time frames to their sense of urgency to the validity of their goals. These clues help you and customers measure each other’s potential to achieve their goals.
For instance, if your customers consistently refer to finances in their comments, terms such as budgets, operating expenses, and paybacks pop up. These clues suggest your next question should seek out details about the filter of funding or cost justifications. Often customers imply that a sense of urgency exists. Terms such as tight schedules, delivery dates, order processing requirements, and immediate attention will surface. These clues indicate that your next question should seek out details about the filters of budget, start, decision, or completion dates.
Active Questioning
Your questions can lead you down only one of two paths. The first is a high-return, fast-paced path. It uncovers unknowns of customers’ goals, filters, measurable benefits, and SOEs. The second is a low-return, slow-motion path. It seeks answers to how much customers know about the features and benefits of your products. The principles behind active questioning help you to stay on the first path and avoid the second. (See Exhibit 5-2.)
Exhibit 5-2: You choose where your questions lead you.
The Strategy Behind Active Questioning
Active questioning is really an old saying in disguise. Seek to understand before you seek to be understood. Make sure you understand how customers’ specific comments affect their ability to achieve their goals before responding to them. Often, you and customers find out they do not. The fundamental strategy behind active questioning is the Safety Zone concept. It empowers you to Go For Measurable Specifics (goals, filters, measurable benefits, and systems of evaluations) so customers view you as an industry expert.
Safety Zone
Customers want to share information because it makes good business sense to do so. When you ask questions that customers would want to ask themselves, it decreases uncertainty and the risks of wasted efforts and unfulfilled goals for them, too. However, for customers, disclosing information must be risk-free and not weaken their negotiating position while strengthening yours. As Chapter 3 demonstrated, only one place exists where customers know they are risk free and in control—their measurable goals. Customers know that without their consent, their well-defined destinations are not easily changed. They relax because they are in control. Therefore, relate your questions to their goals. The more measurable the goals, the bigger you make the Safety Zones. Like heat-seeking missiles, let your goal-seeking questions fire away. No one will get hurt— other than competitors and time robbers.
Note You must make a decision before you conduct a sales call. You must decide whether you are there to gather measurable details or product posture at the first opportunity. If you try to do both, you lose credibility as being customer focused rather than product focused. Once that happens, customers will no longer share details about their goals and filters for the reasons stated above.
The Power of How’s Zat?
The Safety Zone strategy revolves around the most powerful words in your sales vocabulary: How’s Zat? You use them to understand “How does that customer’s response affect his or her goals?” The phonetic term How’s Zat? also includes how, why, and all the other forms of the open-ended questions discussed later in this chapter. Use them as the first words to start a follow-up question to reference customers’ responses on how they think their comments affect their ability to achieve goals.