Sandler colleague Antonio Garrido made that statement at his talk at the Sandler Summit this year in Orlando, and it has stuck with me ever since.
What struck me was the simplicity of the message. Being different is better. The simplicity, however, hides a complexity that is key to the statement’s success.
I have been hammering this metaphorical nail home in my training classes, working to ensure that my clients understand that I want them to be different.
Allow me to share how I see different being better than better, in the areas of prospecting, objections, and decision making.
Most salespeople dread prospecting because of their own thoughts around it. “No one likes to be sold” is the belief they have in their own mind, and it seeps into the way they interact with a prospect.
The prospect, like an animal smelling fear, senses the uncertainty in their conviction and promptly shuts the conversation down. Who in their right mind wants to go through that experience repeatedly? That’s no way to grow your business.
Different would be to realign your thought process. Look for suspects and see if they might be interested in being prospects. Don’t we all have a great product or service? Doesn’t that product or service help solve problems for our current clients and could for our prospects? Then, why aren’t we out there sharing our “good news” with people who might benefit? If we know we have a great product, doesn’t it make it easier to share knowing that we might be able to help others?
The other shift in the thought process is understanding our obligations. We have an obligation to ourselves, to our family, and to our company to tell our stories. That obligation means that I must do the behaviors I committed to doing in order to be successful.
Personally, I’m obligated to do 130 interactions a week. That’s what I determined was the number of behaviors that would allow me to make the money I wanted to make. The key for me is to just do it. I don’t focus on the results, I focus on having sincere, compelling, and clear conversations with people. I know, in my heart of hearts that if I do my behaviors, I will be successful.
Different is better than better……
Secondly, in dealing with objections, most salespeople react to the pushback. They defend, justify and rationalize their position as if it is the “right” way. The prospect becomes defensive and then there is an uphill climb to restore the emotional balance of the conversation.
Different would be to look at the objection as the prospect’s opinion. Everybody has opinion and rarely in those conversations with others where opinions differ, does the conversation lose its emotional balance. You and I can disagree about how cool the Marvel movies are without getting bent out of shape.
Why don’t we handle the sales call that way? Because there is money at stake. Yeah, I get that. You can’t lose what you don’t have and if you overreact to their objections, you’ll rarely get to the point where you will get their money.
Objections are about exposing the truth. If I acknowledge their objection (valuing their opinion as important), I have an opportunity to uncover the truth about their interest and need in my product/service. Getting the truth about yes or no is my only goal.
Different is better than better….
Lastly, decision making is the area that gets the least amount of attention. Its ironic, of course, because hearing the prospect disclose “yes” or “no” should be a more important step. Like in prospecting, we allow our own decision-making process to cloud how our prospects make decisions. If we take our time making decisions, we will let our prospects do the same. How does delaying the decision to solve the problem help them fix it?
We need to be better decision makers in order to help our clients and prospects be better decision makers. We do that by setting clear next steps and holding the client/prospect accountable to that next step. Letting them “break” the agreement on next steps is our fault as salespeople. How will we ever get people to buy if we “let them off the hook”?
Stop fearing the answer. You are looking for the truth (the “yes” or the “no”), and if you get that you’re golden. So as graciously as you can, hold people to their word.
Different is better than better……
Here’s the thing. Everybody has competition and few of us own our marketplaces. We are all competing, talking to the same prospects, trying to solve the same problems.
Helping your prospect discover (for themselves) that your solution to their problem is better than their current solution is different. And that difference makes you better that your competition, because they aren’t doing this!
So, if you didn’t know, now you do. Different is better than better.
