Someone calling himself “Wonderboy”posting on a forum at SalesPractice.com tossed out a question that started a sizeable chunk of the B2B sales world talking.
Under the heading, “Controlling the Conversation: Is It Ethical?” Wonderboy asked, “I’ve heard (and not just in sales) that you should control the conversation. I object to this philosophy as it doesn’t seem natural to me and it doesn’t appear to have the customer’s best interests at heart. What do you think?”
Wonderboy’s question opened the floodgates. Sales professionals (it is presumed) offered an array of answers that referenced everyone from Zig Ziglar to Mr. Miyagi from “The Karate Kid.”
“It is ethical if you redefine what you are controlling and understand why,” argued a respondent named Greg. “It’s not about controlling an individual. It’s about controlling our sales process so that it is beneficial to our customer. Try substituting the word control with direction. You are directing your sales process by asking thoughtful questions of your customer to find out how you may best serve their needs.”
“Let’s put this one to bed straight away,” proclaimed a poster named Julian. “It is a complete myth that a salesperson can ‘control’ the conversation. Buyers are always in control — they sign the checks! They may give us the illusion that we are in control, but when it comes down to it, we are just facilitators helping buyers to buy.”
Eventually, the discussion thread evolved into an examination of the meaning of “control.”
“There are some who advocate using manipulation to control a prospect,” commented someone who goes by the moniker “pmccord.” “But there is another type of controlling the conversation, which is how most sales trainers use the term. Controlling a conversation is keeping it on track — not allowing the conversation to go off into meaningless tangents and not allowing the prospect to make a decision before they have all
of the information they need to make a decision. That isn’t manipulation in any sense of the word. It is focus, it is giving the sales presentation discipline and it is putting as much information in front of the prospect as they need to make an informed decision.”
Challengers win sales
In their 2011 best-selling business book “The Challenger Sales” and the 2015 follow-up “The Challenger Customer,” Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson famously made the case that to be successful in B2B sales, reps need to challenge prospects and customers out of their comfort zones and focus on delivering value. Dixon and Adamson, managing executives at the Corporate Executive Board, relied on CEB’s survey of more than 6,000 sales representatives worldwide to make their case.
CEB research revealed that nearly 40 percent of star-performing sales reps are Challengers, the authors reported in a Forbes article after their first book was published. “Sales professionals who strive to build personal relationships and diffuse tension with their clients come in dead last, representing only 7 percent of star performers. When you contrast transactional sales with complex-solution sales, the story becomes even more dramatic, with Challengers representing 54 percent of the star players and Relationship Builders falling off the map almost entirely.”
The Challenger sales rep, Dixon and Adamson say, is defined by the unique ability to use constructive tension throughout the sale and provide value to customers through a three-pillar approach of teaching, tailoring and taking control. The latter — taking control — is vital. “When it comes to buying complex solutions, customers have become incredibly risk-averse. Challenger reps are not deterred by hesitation from customers,” Dixon and Adamson state.
Sales process vs. buyer’s journey
Steering dysfunctional buying teams in the direction of a sale is fine to a point, says Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and research officer at sales consultancy Corporate Visions. But an argument can be made that, in an era when corporate buying teams are more than 50 percent of the way through a buying decision before they even self-identify as a prospect (another CEB statistic), it is difficult, if not impossible, to force a buyer to buy the way you want to sell.
The so-called “buyer’s journey” has been around at least as long as the Internet, which birthed the era of self-educated buyers, Riesterer says.
“I think the question becomes, once you’re in an active opportunity where a salesperson is engaged and having dialogue, is that a buyer’s journey or is that a sales process? The answer could be, ‘yes.’ If, as CEB suggests, the value that a sales rep can add is to actually guide the buying process, then it’s not the buyer’s journey anymore — it’s a sales process.”
Riesterer suggests that salespeople should have the ability to deftly handle “situational fluency,” bouncing between a challenger rep who steers the direction of the sales conversation and, when appropriate, allowing a prospect to adhere to their buyer’s journey.
Plan letters and pivotal agreements
At the end of the day, the buyer can always shut something down. A salesperson, by definition of their job, is present to run a deal cycle and close a sale. “They have to attend to, and are responsible for, moving something through a process,” Riesterer says. “There has to be some markers and milestones. There has to be some verifiable outcomes so you know a deal is making progress and that there is enough give and take on both sides that this is actually going somewhere. You aren’t doing your job if you are just being led around by a customer. You have to be able to construct and guide this process.”
Two tools that Corporate Visions incorporates into its training to help salespeople straddle the line between implementing a sales process and following the buyer’s journey are plan letters and pivotal agreements.
A plan letter is means for a sales rep to document the steps that have been taken, the people that have been met and the agreements that have been made. It then outlines future steps all the way to what a close looks like.
It isn’t a document that just reflects the sales process, Riesterer says. It is determined by interacting with the customer. The customer shapes the plan letter by telling you who you have to meet with, what they have to hear and who has to approve what in order for a sale to happen. A plan letter documents the history to date, and then outlines the agreed upon steps to move it forward to close.
Pivotal agreements are customer relationship management on steroids. These are the key actions and agreements that are critical to successful execution of a sales strategy. “Every company should have enough history to know what actions have produced their most successful deals. In the past, when customers asked you for these, you used them as markers that you were making progress,” says Riesterer.
Too often, salespeople encouraged by these positive indicators, gave something of value away without getting anything in return. Pivotal agreements, which are developed ahead of time, prevent that from happening. Your reps know they cannot give X away without getting Y, with Y being something of value that will help lead to closing a deal. (Learn more about the five types of pivotal agreements on page 30.)
Pivotal agreements keep salespeople honest. “Sometimes, people don’t want to ask because they’re afraid of what they might hear,” Riesterer says. “They don’t want to take something out of the pipeline. There is a level of tension that a salesperson must be willing to accept by having to ask for these things because they know they need them. I think you have more confidence when there is an actual construct in front of you,
not a blank sheet.”
It’s not about domination
In an article written for Inside Small Business, Australian Mark Garbelotto, author of “The Business of Sales: Getting Serious About Business and Selling,” states, “In the old days, salespeople controlled the conversation by dominating it — by unleashing an impermeable stream of speech about the product, essentially inundating the prospect in information. It was about gab, smooth talk and displaying product knowledge, talking about what the product is as opposed to what it does for the customer. We don’t control conversations by dominating anymore. We control them by allowing the prospect to dominate, at least at first. In the early stages of the sales interview, the prospect should be doing 80 percent of the talking and the salesperson 20 percent.”
By listening more than talking, sales reps learn how they’re able to add value, which in turn helps avoid the topic of discounting. “If you allow price to occupy the conversation before you have demonstrated value, then the prospect is going to see your product as a mere commodity. More importantly, they are going to see you as a commodity,” Garbelotto says.
The single biggest danger for anyone in a selling situation — from the junior salesperson to the CEO — is to allow themselves to be treated like a commodity, he adds.
“If there’s one great difference between today’s salesperson and the salesperson of the past, it’s that we are no longer merely experts in our products, we are experts in fulfilling a prospect’s requirements. To the extent that we demonstrate such expertise — by listening rather than talking, by asking questions rather than spouting product specs — we avoid being a commodity in the prospect’s eyes.”
