1: “Every Saturday, a siren goes off in Tim’s quiet suburban community, signaling that it is noontime. No one gives it much attention around town,” Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer write in their terrific book Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.
It’s just the “noon whistle,” people say.
But the same siren is also used to signal a severe weather emergency.
“As a result,” the authors note, “the same siren that is ignored on Saturdays at noon, when the weather is nice, can clear an entire park within minutes on a threatening summer Saturday with dark clouds approaching.”
The big takeaway? “The exact same siren, using the exact same sound, leads to a completely different reaction depending on the context,” Erik and Tim write.
2: The same principle applies to your sales message.
Just as context gives the siren meaning and urgency, the authors note that, with your sales message, you must establish the right context to create urgency.
“It’s not your product that makes the customer care,” they observe. “It’s the changing context that makes it meaningful and gets the customer to consider doing something different.”
Yesterday, we looked at the importance of “bringing the bad news”. The successful salesperson tells the prospect “something that they don’t already know, about a problem that they didn’t know they had,” Erik and Tim emphasize.
Why? Because “without the threat of unidentified problems and underappreciated challenges,” they write, “your products and services, and your features and benefits statements, sound like the same old generic gobbledygook.
“If you can put your solutions in a provocative context that threatens your customer’s status quo and puts them at a potential competitive disadvantage, you’ll see a completely different reaction.
What not to do? “Too many salespeople want to lead with the strengths of their product or service,” the authors note. “The customer isn’t ready to hear about them. They have no frame of reference to put those strengths of yours into a situation that he feels is uniquely theirs.”
So, to get them to care, you need to bring a little bad weather or bad news.
Most prospects do not want to change what they are doing. Many assume that all competitors are the same.
“So, you need to create a sense of urgency around your solution,” Erik and Tim explain, “and this is accomplished by establishing a context that turns a seemingly innocuous capability into something that they can’t live without.”
3: Here are the key elements of your customer conversations moving forward:
- You must be willing to push your prospect out of their comfort zone.
- You need to help your prospect see their competitive challenges in a new light.
- You have to highlight specific painful situations and make them unmistakably urgent.
- You need the guts to create constructive tension and use it to your advantage.
Being “nice” is not a winning sales strategy.
“In today’s hypercompetitive, increasingly complex selling environment,” they write, “you need to cut through the clutter of sameness and overcome rising risk aversion to get your customer to care about your message.”
Building on this, after the 2008 financial meltdown, a Harvard Business Review article coined the phrase “provocation-based selling.”
The article outlined a three-step process to provoke your customers:
- Step one: Identify a critical problem facing your customer. Find a problem that is “ominous that, even in a downturn, the customer will find the money to address it,” the authors note. “You might think you’ll never find something like this. But you can. We’ve worked with hundreds of companies, and you can always find it.”
- Step two: Formulate a provocative view of the problem. Develop a distinct point of view that frames the problem in a stark new light. “Rather than finding out how your client’s executives currently view the problem that you’ve identified,” they suggest, “determine how they should view it and deliver insight on that.”
- Step three: Lodge your provocation. Then, “convey the magnitude, difficulty, and urgency of the problem to an executive who has the power to approve the solution that you’re proposing,” the authors note.
Erik and Tim write: “Provoking or challenging your customers and prospects is not the same as being a jerk. When this is done right, the value and insight that your customer gets from being challenged will raise their opinion of you.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I relying on my product’s strengths—or am I creating the context that makes those strengths matter?
Action: Rework one key message today to first establish urgency and context before introducing my solution.
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