Step Two: Benchmarks. Connect features to measurable benefits and verify that they satisfy conditional commitment using a connecting value sheet.
Step Three: Oops! Be ready to offset any missed measurable benefits of goals or requirements of conditional commitments.
Use the Does Your Proposal Pass the Pulled-Through Test? to determine if you are ready to continue to MP 3 or must return to MP 1 or MP 2.
At the meeting:
Step Four: Purpose and Summary. Confirm that the meeting is to explain how your proposal achieves their goals and satisfies conditional commitment.
Step Five: Connect the Dots. Start with goals and measurable benefits and explain how your products achieve them. Do not start with your products’ features first.
Step Six: Conditions Met. Recap how the proposal satisfies the conditional commitment.
MPC 3: Solution Confirmed. Customers agree your products achieve their goals, but it is still too early to ask for an order.
Explaining is illustrating how your features connect to their measurable benefits.
A good explanation uses simple, vivid, analogies, no return, power words, and avoids using the words never or always.
Speak in your customers’ terms.
Use your technical knowledge to support points, not to make them.
Start at the same technical level as the customers’ attainment measurements.
The verbal structure of explaining always starts with the customers’ goals, then the benefits of the goals, and finally your product’s features and benefits.
Customers might have two or more goals, one goal might have two or more benefits, and one benefit might connect with two or more of your product’s features.
MP 4: Implement Agreement consists of:
Step One: Deal. Verify customer is ready to start.
Step Two: Logistics. Explain what customers need to do to start.
MPC 4: Agreement Confirmed. Customers confirm they will proceed with your solutions.
A scope of work provides different decision makers with the opportunity to review a preliminary proposal and make one last check before you make your final presentation.
Chapter 8: When the World Isn’t Perfect
Overview
The famous Scottish poet Robert Burns is credited with the old adage: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.” While it is hard to vouch for the mice, this passage definitely applies to salespeople. Often, customers’ less-than-ideal comments or actions derail your plans and wreck sales opportunities.
Traditional selling methods refer to these potential sale wreckers as obstacles or objections. Yet, these terms create a negative perception for something that can be a positive event. Therefore, a more appropriate term is hinges. The outcome of a sales opportunity hinges on how you resolve obstacles.
This chapter provides you with the strategies and tactics to turn these so-called negative situations into orders by explaining:
How hinges form
How to handle hinges
Nip Them in the Bud
Hinges prevent your sales plans from moving forward. Your sales plan is simple: Obtain the four Measurable Phase Changes (MPCs) in the proper order to earn high-value orders. Proof that MPCs have occurred comes when customers confirm Interest (MPC 1), Potential (MPC 2), Solution (MPC 3), and Agreement (MPC 4). They agree to your calls for actions (meetings, surveys, presentations, or purchase orders) that move you to the next Measurable Phase (MP). Therefore, to wreak havoc on your sales plans, hinges must prevent you from:
Conducting the four MPs and MPCs in sequence
Obtaining the MPCs and their respective calls for action
If either one of the above happens, it stops the forward motion of the sale. Your ability to sell value is in jeopardy. As you will see, when it comes to hinges, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Good salespeople know how to handle hinges to stay on plan; great ones know how to prevent them from occurring.
The Three General Categories of Hinges
If you know the MP in which the hinges occur, you will know what strategies and tactics to use to remedy them. The three general categories of hinges tell you where they occur and how they form. They are natural, leveraged, or hidden hinges.
Natural Hinges
If you must contend with hinges, natural hinges are the most desirable. They arise in MP 2: Measure Potential. Although they might have an adverse effect on your selling efforts, customers are unaware of any potential problems. They do not view these hinges as problems because they surface during the natural flow of MP 2. They occur before you attempt to obtain MPC 2: Potential Confirmed—and before you mention specific products. Customers consider them to be nothing more than details about their goals, measurable benefits, filters, and systems of evaluation. While you might deem these details to be potential problems, customers do not because they are without any specific products to reference them to.
You weigh the effects of natural hinges and determine how they affect customers or you from achieving their goals. You think about how to handle them on a proactive and strategic basis at your office, rather than on a reactive and tactical one in front of customers. While not a problem yet to customers, any potential inability to achieve their goals that surfaces can jeopardize your ability to provide value if ignored or mishandled.
Example
One of Olivia Ontime’s other goals is to increase productivity by 15 percent. She tells Steven Smartsell during MP 2: Measure Potential that any purchase must not exceed her $50,000 budget (funding filter). Steven knows his products typically cost $75,000. At this time, Olivia does not consider the budget constraint an issue because Steven has not yet mentioned any specific products that exceed her $50,000 limit. However, Steven knows that he must solve the potential problem that Olivia’s budget figure is less than his products’ price range to earn a sale.
Steven also knows better than to address Olivia’s budget issue without first reviewing the specifics of his Quick-Entry Sales Management (Q) sheet. Therefore, he returns to his office to review his Q sheet. Either by himself or by using the resources of his sales team, the details from the Q sheet will help him plan how he will handle a hinge that has arisen during MP 2.
Leveraged Hinge
When customers use details of your products to leverage their concerns, you have a leveraged hinge. Therefore, a leveraged hinge occurs when you mention specific products and services as solutions in MP 1 and MP 2 before you know the details of goals, measurable benefits, filters, and SOEs. Customers block your attempts to obtain MPCs and do not agree to your calls for action. Sales opportunities start to regress into the brinkmanship selling mode. You must defend your product selections while discussions about undesirable features, prices, delivery dates, and budgets dominate the sales calls.
Example
In sharp contrast to the previous example, Steven now pursues the first product-positioning opportunity that surfaces when Olivia mentions her 15 percent productivity goal. He tells her that one of his specific services, ProdoGain, deals with increasing productivity. He mentions this service before he quantifies her productivity increase in dollar terms or knows the details of her filters. Buyers and sellers beware.
After Steven explains its features, Olivia asks Steven what the service costs. He states about $75,000. Olivia tells him that she cannot spend more than $50,000. Olivia now leverages her budget hinge against the price of his service. Now Steven must defend his price—without knowing any measurable benefits. The focus shifts from productivity goals to price. Olivia probably views any additional information Steven requests as an attempt to justify his budget-busting price. Steven cannot obtain MPC 2: Potential Confirmed.
Note As the “Handling Hinges” section illustrates, the most effective way to deal with hinges is to make Column 2 benefits measurable to offset concerns that arise in Column 1 over price, delivery, relationships, and costs of changing suppliers.
The good news is that salespeople create leveraged hinges, not customers. The better news is that more often than not, you can prevent them from occurring. You can make them surface as the more innocuous natural hinges, if you conduct MP 1: Spark Interest and MP 2: Measure Potential more thoroughly—and avoid mentioning specific products. For instance, in the previous example, all Steven had to do in MP 2 to make the budget hinge natural instead of leveraged would have been either of the following two things:
Not mention specific products or services.
Keep asking questions that gathered details about Olivia’s goals, measurable benefits, filters, and SOEs. (If you review the MP 2 dialogue between Steven and Olivia in Chapter 6, you will see how many times Steven needed patience and discipline not to interject product discussions.)
In MP 1 and MP 2, if you encourage more measurable customer input and less product output, you can avoid most leveraged hinges.
Hidden Hinge
Hidden hinges are either leveraged or natural hinges that customers do not want to disclose. They believe that disclosure creates negative impressions of them or their company, or your products or company. Hidden hinges are typically caused by customers’ reluctance to admit the following for this sales opportunity: