Example
Customer: I want to reduce the number of defects to improve productivity.
Salesperson: What do defect costs run annually? (Clarifying question to make the costs of defects measurable)
Customer: Defects cost us about $250,000 a year.
Salesperson: What sort of savings are you looking to achieve? (Second clarifying question to make their savings measurable)
Verifying
Verifying is the questioning process that uses yes-or-no questions. If you qualified and clarified properly, you should end up with yes answers. Chapter 8 explains how to handle “no” answers. Verifying confirms there are full agreements on the specifics of goals and filters. Verifying requires the use of yes-or-no questions that confirm you and the customers both understand their measurable points the same way. (See Exhibit 5-3.)
Exhibit 5-3: Verify customers’ responses.
Example
Customer: We feel we can reduce $250,000 of defects by 30 percent.
Salesperson: So, your goal is to decrease defect costs by $75,000? (Verifies the cost savings target)
Customer: That’s right.
Tuned In
Constantly ask yourself, “Do your questions clarify customers’ and your ability to achieve their goals?” Anything but a yes answer serves no business purpose. Your listening and questioning skills are invaluable tools in making sure you get to yes answers. The next two chapters explain how they make sure you conduct every step of the four selling phases in the most productive manner that fits your style. Most important, they will help you exceed the measurable expectations of customers.
Satisfied customers, high-value sales, and long-term relationships—all because you question how you listen and you listen to how you question.
Summary
The difference between success and failure is usually only a matter of one or two questions that you did not ask or that you asked incorrectly.
Your active listening encourages customers to disclose information; your follow-up responses tell them that you are receiving their messages.
Use your extra listening time to look for visual and verbal clues to anticipate (not assume or advocate a product) a customer’s response.
Your questions will take you down only one of two paths. You either find out unknowns about customers’ goals, filters, measurable benefits, and systems of evaluations (Go For Measurable Specifics) or confirm what you already know about your products, their features, and their benefits. Customer experts do the former; product experts do the latter.
The Safety Zone strategy references all questions concerning filters back to the customers’ goals. Customers understand why you ask questions when you reference their goals or filters. Other topics you might explore have only limited business value.
Any question that starts with a version of How’s Zat? to understand how the customer’s comment affects his or her ability to achieve goals means you are using the Safety Zone strategy.
How’s Zat? tactics include the following:
Follow the Customers’ Lead. Relate all clarifying questions to customers’ last responses on how they affect their goals and filters.
Ask Specific but Open-Ended Questions. Do not use yes-or-no questions unless you need to verify a point.
No Loose Ends. Verify that a goal or filter is measurable before pursuing another.
Don’t Shoot Yourself. Never confirm a negative statement.
Think Positively. Never make a negative assumption.
No Echoes. Rephrase the customers’ responses; do not merely repeat them.
Customers’ responses are usually three-tiered: vague, clearer, and measurable. When it comes to selling compensated value, only the last one counts.
The questioning process involves qualifying, clarifying, or verifying to transform customers’ vague responses into measurable terms of time and money.
Only verifying questions should seek yes-or-no answers.
Chapter 6: Leave the Brochures Behind
Overview
The time has come to take all the concepts, strategies, and tactics from the previous chapters, tie them together, and apply them to your sales calls. It is time to outvalue the competition and receive higher profits as your reward.
This chapter empowers you to evaluate every sales opportunity using cast-in-stone reference points to ensure that the efforts of you and your customers are worth the returns. It explains the following:
How the framework of the MeasureMax (“Measure to Maximize”) selling system works
How you use its measuring tools to influence sales in progress
How your sales orders become planned events, not random occurrences
How you sell value in business environments that are constantly tempted by low prices
How to conduct the first two selling phases—MP 1: Spark Interest and MP 2: Measure Potential—without mentioning specific products
How MeasureMax Works
The MeasureMax selling system is 90 percent planning and 10 percent doing. Therefore, it starts with your Product and Market Profile sheets. These sheets highlight which groups of customers share goals that connect to your unique strengths or strongest features. You then plan where you want to invest your selling efforts. The ability to sell value and to receive compensation for doing so depends on whom you contact.
MeasureMax is also about measurability. Like you, customers know they can only manage what they can measure. They eagerly wait for you to help them quantify their goals and filters. You motivate customers to rethink their purchasing decisions in terms of the quality and value of their goals, not just the quantity and price of products’ features. It is difficult to dispute that it makes good business sense to measure twice, cut once, before you decide what to buy or sell. MeasureMax’s format ensures that you are ready to evaluate sales opportunities as a marketing manager, competitor, sales manager, salesperson, and most important, customer.
Now, it is just a question of how you do it.
The four selling phases called Measurable Phases (MPs) (see pages 7 and 8 in the Introduction) are the how-to part. They break sales opportunities into four minisales in which customers give you a kind of “purchase order” to end each phase. These are not your typical purchase orders (except for the last one). Instead, they are measurable commitments, or Measurable Phase Changes (MPCs), you receive from customers that confirm it still makes sense to continue trying to achieve their goals. Each MPC brings you closer to receiving the fourth MPC (Agreement Confirmed), which is your typical purchase order. Receiving MPCs renders the purchase order as nothing more than the logical conclusion to a series of customer commitments.
You also use MPCs to gauge your progress. These sales mile-stones denote that you have completed one MP and are ready to start the next one. The faster you obtain MPCs in the right sequence, the faster you receive orders. Needing fewer in-person sales calls to get more orders is how you make productivity boom.
You will also see how the sequence of the MPCs affects your ability to sell value. If you receive MPC 1 to 4 in order you build value; if you go out of order, you diminish value. In addition, a failure to obtain an MPC means customers are not ready to go to the next MP. Chapter 8 explains how to handle these situations.
Note Two case studies spanning this chapter and Chapters 7 and 8 demonstrate how MPs and MPCs work with new prospects. Chapter 9 explains how to use them with existing customers. The first case study (which continues with Steven Smartsell) examines the steps conceptually in a business-to-business sale. At the end of these chapters, another case study takes a business-to-consumer sale from inception to conclusion. It details the steps and logistics of the four phases. (See Exhibit 6-1.)
Exhibit 6-1: The four selling steps.
Note There are no submissive roles in this sales process. (Leave those for the needs-satisfaction type of salespeople). You and customers are equal partners who take turns leading in the four selling phases. In the first two, customers lead with their goals, filters, measurable benefits, and systems of evaluations (SOEs). In the last two, you lead with your unique strengths, features, and measurable benefits. In Chapter 7, you will see how the common measurable benefits connect goals to features.
Let the Best Sales Method Win
Throughout these four selling phases, you follow strategies and steps in a prescribed order. This recommended sequence emerged after years of fine-tuning which order of steps achieved the best results. Yet, the strength of the selling system is that it is goal oriented, not task oriented. While it is important how you conduct the steps, it is more important that you achieve the objectives of each MP, which is obtaining an MPC. You can choose to follow these steps or modify them to better fit your style and personality.
Fortunately, you do not need to memorize logic-driven steps. You only need to remember to keep your focus on the customers’ goals and filters. Applying the MeasureMax process and achieving success is all it takes to fine-tune the steps to the specifics of your selling situations.
If you choose to use a sales method with different steps or sequences, however, challenge their effectiveness. Also, make sure you know Chapter 8 inside out so you can handle the obstacles that arise from going out of sequence. MeasureMax’s framework of MPs and MPCs allows you to measure the productivity of any sales method on a per-sales-call basis. You want to measure your progress by how many in-person sales calls it takes for you to obtain each MPC. Remember, sales calls are your limited resources that must provide an adequate return.