Accelerate sales conversations

So what’s changed?

To date, sales activity, and how we support this with marketing, has focussed on, as Dixon and McKenna refer to it ‘defeating the status quo’. Essentially, making it easy for the customer to understand how they will succeed with your solution.

Marketing campaigns and materials, for certainly as long as I’ve been in the industry (22 years!), have focussed on this and helped sales articulate this ‘better way’, improving processes and outcomes for customers.

Defeating the customers status quo, has been the backdrop to our profession and in sunnier economic climates, campaigns that have dealt with this, have performed well. In their previous book the Challenger Sale published in 2012, Dixon et al refer to ‘challenging the customer’ to proactively educate them on what they should be doing better – and demonstrated how the top performing sales reps have achieved market growth by adopting this approach. It’s been the backdrop to our sales and marketing activity for a long while now.

However, what’s expressed in the Jolt Effect, is that now, defeating the status quo and showing how the customer will succeed with your solution is still important, but not the only factor causing killing sales. The biggest enemy of sales: is not being able to overcome buyer indecision.

Dixon and McKenna’s research reveals that yes, 44% of sales are killed by customers who are happy to stick with the status quo. But even more staggeringly, 56% of sales are killed by buyer indecision.

What’s causing this indecision?

Indecision is a tricky one, unlike the status quo which is often discussed openly by the buyer, because indecision is rooted in personal fears and not feeling comfortable moving the buying process forward, it’s a hard one for sales to nail down and do anything about!

When customers become indecisive it is typically not because they prefer the status quo and what they’re currently doing, but instead, the sale is blocked because the individual doesn’t want to make an irreversible mistake. Indecision is wrapped up in a whole host of personal emotions like uncertainty, confusion, anxiety, scepticism and concern, and today this enormous silent sales killer is everywhere.

Simply regurgitating how the customer can improve their status quo will be a waste of time,

Dixon and McKenna highlight these 3 reasons for this:

1. They are worried about choosing the wrong option: they have difficulties clearly knowing what they need to buy.

2. They are concerned they don’t have enough information: The customer wants more and more demos and information for fear of missing crucial information.

3. They are worried about the likelihood of a positive outcome: This is about the believability gap between what’s being claimed and the result the customer will actually experience.

How to overcome this indecision

The solution to this inactivity is what Dixon and McKenna call the JOLT Method.

With these types of sales barriers, the best sales performers have figured out that there is a point in the sales process where their job is no longer about convincing the customer how they’ll succeed by making the purchase, but by proving to the customer that they won’t fail by making the purchase.

(image here of two stages of the sell)

The best performers in sales have adopted these behaviours:

1. They ignore the indecisive: Firstly they judge the indecision and qualify not just the ability to buy but the ability to decide.

2. They use a needs diagnosis and make recommendations: When working with customers that struggle to know what to buy, they present solutions that would be right for that customers specific circumstances.

1. They limit info and don’t overwhelm. The third behaviour is they limit exploration. The best performers provide not an overload of information but the right information for the customer. They anticipate the needs for information, and control the flow of information to address this.

2. The remove risk; the final behaviour is to take risk off the table. Top performers know this isn’t the time to resell the benefits of changing the status quo, they don’t try and scare customers into buying but instead come up with creative ways to limit the risk for example, trial periods, opt outs, additional consultancy support etc communicating how they’ve ‘mapped out the first 3 months working together’ is a brilliant example Dixon and Mckenna refer to.

Conclusion

These are the behaviours of the top performers and in marketing we can support sales with this in the way we develop our messaging, campaigns, content and CTA’s.