Michael Harris

Success stories are only effective as proof late in the sales cycle once a customer has decided to change. Early stage customers, on the other hand, aren’t interested in stories about how you helped another customer reduce the time to create a report from one week to one day. At this stage, they don’t think they have a problem worth solving, so they aren’t looking for proof. That’s why you can’t close a sale with a success story unless you first open it with a “change story.” Without a compelling reason to change, customers will stick with the status quo and “no decision” will continue to be your biggest competitor.

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Here’s a story about how a VP of Sales resurrects her pipeline by showing her team how to lead customers to value with insight not eyesight. As they achieve true sales wisdom, it’s like they’re using GPS while the competition is selling blind.  

Instead of asking WHEN or HOW, Sarah intuitively kept asking WHY deals were expected to close. As the new VP of Sales for ERP Corp, the superficial answers she received from her salespeople confirmed that she had not inherited a healthy pipeline. In fact, it was a sewer-line full of zombie companies with no clear rationale for change.

The problem was that her salespeople were relying too heavily on the sales engineers to do their selling, and as a result, the initial meetings were too product-centric. Instead, Sarah wanted her salespeople to first help the customer to discover WHY they should buy, before involving the sales engineers to provide proof on HOW the product works. As Sarah’s mentor said: “Sales must open the gap before they can close it.”

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Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman[i] says that 95% of our purchase decision making takes place subconsciously (aka System 1).[ii] Despite widespread agreement amongst neuroscientists that our conscious rational mind plays a minor role in decision making, why do our sales messages to buyers focus almost exclusively on facts and figures? Doesn’t all of this data flood customers with too much information, and result in paralysis for analysis? Why do we largely ignore the emotional subconscious, the real star of decision making? If we really want to reduce the number of sales opportunities lost to no decision, shouldn’t we also be directing our sales message to Mr. Intuitive, and not just Mr. Rational?

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The goal of every sales training program is to improve the bottom 80% of salespeople, but that’s not what happens. What happens is that the top 20% get better, and the rest stay the same. Why? The top 20% can apply it in the field, and the rest can’t. So if you want to improve the bottom 80%, then you must share how your star performers are able to apply what they learned. You must use your best to train the rest through peer learning.

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It’s now possible for your salespeople to articulate value like your star performers in less than three months through online video peer learning.

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It’s easier to believe a new sales methodology will be the magic bullet instead of doing the heavy lifting of follow-up training and coaching. But without follow-up, how will salespeople achieve sales mastery? How will they be able to articulate value in the heat of a sales call?

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In the 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled “The End of Solution Selling,” the Challenger Sale positioned itself as the dominant sales methodology by creating a false dichotomy:

1. Ask information-rich customers generic questions, or
2. Challenge them with insight.

But what if salespeople asked better questions than “What keeps you up at night?” Could questions rise from the ashes like a phoenix if salespeople traded generic questions for ones that are insight-directed?  

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It’s counter intuitive that a list of discovery questions will not help your salespeople lead customers to value until they first know the answers. Without the answers to illuminate the road to value, your salespeople will get lost in a sea of questions, because each customer is unique.

Imagine you’re directing someone to a destination: They’ve misinterpreted your directions, and they are now lost. How are you going to get them back on course when all you have are written directions?

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Today, most sales and marketing executives would agree that they should deliver insight to customers. But they question how can they deliver insight to an executive with decades of experience? The problem is that they’ve usually set the bar too high for themselves. To deliver insight, they believe they must teach the customer something new about how to run their business. No wonder they can’t do it! Instead of trying to out-think a c-level executive, it’s easier to find insights within the customer’s blind spots; namely, the optimism and status quo biases. Once salespeople discover how fertile blind spots are for uncovering insights, they will finally be able to find and deliver insights.  

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When sales messaging is delivered through a video role play platform, salespeople will no longer look at it once and forget it in the heat of a sales call. If they are required to video record themselves delivering the sales message, they will get the practice they need to internalize it, especially when they practice six times before hitting send. But while the video role play delivery platform will ensure that salespeople can deliver the sales message, it cannot ensure that the message will increase sales.

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The expression that “People buy on emotion and justify with logic” has always made intuitively sense to me, but rationally it seemed like BS.

You could say “so what, who cares.” But did you know that 95% of our purchase decisions, according to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, take place unconsciously? And yet, when we seek to persuade c-level executives, we sell almost exclusively to Mr. Rational, and wonder why deals get stuck in paralysis for analysis and end in no decision.

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Everyone in technology knows of Geoffrey Moore as the author of “Crossing the Chasm.” His book has sold over 1 million copies, and crossing the chasm has become a metaphor that is universally used by companies with complex products to explain why they struggle to sell to the mainstream market. But not everyone knows that he is also the godfather of Insight Selling. In March 2009, for example, the HBR published his article “In a downturn, provoke your customer.” In this article, Moore explained why salespeople must provoke their customers with insight if they expect to have their products funded in a slow economy. I sat down with Moore to talk about the inside secrets for Insight Selling:

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If you work in technology, you know Geoffrey Moore is the famous author of “Crossing the Chasm.” This book has sold over 1 million copies, and crossing the chasm has become a metaphor that is universally used by companies with complex products to explain why they struggle to sell to the mainstream market. But you may not know that he also has a PhD in English literature, and this may explain why he is a proponent of narrative based selling.

Q1: Our first question for our guest is does he believe storytelling could help customers cross the chasm? “I am a huge believer in narrative. And if you think about it, particularly before the chasm, it’s 90% narrative.”

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