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Stop Selling! E-Zine - Issue No. 24 /July 2006

Dear Reader,

Last week I went to the Human Resources (HR) Directors Summit in Shanghai. During this two-day summit I had the chance to speak to over 30 HR directors and managers. I was impressed by their openness, curiosity and willingness to learn. I found this attitude independent of experience or the size of the companies they work for.

It reminded me of what I often experience in our seminars: Those who are most open to new concepts are usually the ones with little experience and the top performers. The experienced but somewhat mediocre participants are frequently those who are most resistant to learning. I strongly believe that the trait of continuous self-improvement is an important key to top performance.

Is mediocre performance o.k. for you or do you strive for top performance? What do you do to improve yourself and the people you lead?

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Coach and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor

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How to Shorten the Length of the Sales Cycle – Part II
Helping Buyers Buy
By Charlie Lang

For Part I - click here

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In Part I we shared some insights on the buyer's problems in making a buying decision. In Part II, we look at how we can actually assist the buyer in this decision-making process.

Buying decisions are not different from other decisions, like deciding on a strategy for your organization or on where to go for your next vacation. But it is only when you are aware of all relevant criteria and have found satisfactory answers on how to meet them that you can come to a conclusion.

So ask yourself: As a seller, how can I best assist the buyer in this process? We realized that we can help in two aspects:

•  Creating more awareness on all important criteria the buyer will need to line up

•  Assisting in finding the answers to meet these criteria

We found that the coaching approach is ideal in helping buyers get the necessary awareness.

What is "Coaching"?

There are many different definitions for this term, so let's focus on a useful definition for this specific context of creating more awareness:

Coaching a buyer is a process based on mutual trust, where the seller assists the buyer through active listening and meaningful questioning in discovering all relevant criteria to reach an optimal buying decision for the buyer.

This definition contains three key coaching skills:

1. Building Trust
2. Active Listening
3. Meaningful Questioning

It also includes an important mindset which is at the heart of the Stop Selling! approach: The decision must be optimal for the buyer, not the seller.

1. Building Trust

Through our research on how trust is established, we found that while there are many aspects to trust, we can subsume trust in three factors:

•  Care

•  Rapport

•  Competence

Only when we feel that someone truly cares about us AND when we feel fairly comfortable communicating with this person AND when we perceive that person as sufficiently competent, only then can we actually trust that person. If any of these factors is missing, true trust will not be established.

Most sales people are actually quite good in building rapport and they are usually also competent about their products, services and industry. However, when it comes to the question of what they care most about, the answer is most often sales. In other words, getting the deal.

Hmm, and what do buyers care about? Well, certainly not too much about how much the sales person sells.

That is the very reason buyers rarely trust sellers... because they feel that sellers don't really care about them, the buyers. As a consequence, buyers often hide the truth of what is going on.

Coaching is not possible without a certain level of mutual trust between the coach and the coachee or where sales is concerned, the seller and the buyer. "Stop Selling!" means that we stop caring about our sales and instead care about the best outcome for our buyers.

I know from my own experience that this is a tough call, especially if you get a lot of pressure from your boss or if your bonus or even your financial survival is at stake. But it is the only way to create true trust between the buyer and yourself.

2. Active Listening

Active listening is more than just listening. It means that you are fully present and don't let yourself get distracted by anything, be it any noise from the surroundings, any event that happens before your conversation with the buyer, or any thought about what might happen later.

But there is more to active listening.

It means that you make your best effort in trying to assure that what your buyer means is equivalent with what you understand. To do so, you will need to be observant to the non-verbal communication of the buyer and use techniques like rephrasing ("I understand that ...") or asking questions like "What exactly do you mean when you said ...?" Or "Can you elaborate a bit more on this?"

3. Meaningful Questioning

Asking the right questions is perhaps the most important skill when coaching anyone.

Using open questions are certainly more effective than using closed questions. We found that we can segment open questions into two categories:

•  When, Where, Which and Who questions

•  Why, What and How questions

When, Where, Which and Who questions can be typically answered by retrieving information from our memory. There is little or no processing necessary to come to answers to them.

Why, What and How questions, on the other hand, usually require deeper thinking. Finding answers to these questions may help buyers expand their awareness. And that's exactly how we can best support buyers in their decision-making process.

The concept of ownership

One of the most important principles in coaching is to provide ownership to the coachee or in this case the buyer. It means that when the seller coaches the buyer, the seller accepts that it is the buyer, not the seller, who needs to come to conclusions on what is the best thing to do.

Under this concept, the seller accepts the possibility that the buyer's conclusions may be different from what the seller has in mind. Of course, if the seller sees any blind spots in the answers of the buyer, the seller can help create more awareness around that.

Consider this example.

I recently talked to a potential buyer, an HR Director of a multi-national corporation, regarding our training programs. Let's call him Tom. He felt that his expatriate managers frequently had difficulties in communicating properly with their Chinese peers and that there was little trust between them.

I inquired a bit deeper and asked what he believed would be most effective to improve the situation. He suggested running a cross-cultural workshop for the expatriates where they would learn more about the way Chinese think and how to better communicate with them.

From my perspective, I could anticipate that this problem might not be solely rooted in the lack of inter-cultural skills on the side of the expats. Since communication is a two-way process, I thought it might be useful to also include the Chinese counterparts in the process.

Initially, my advise would have been to develop the inter-cultural skills on both sides. However, acting as Tom's coach, I put aside my judgment of the situation and instead asked him more questions around how the expats viewed the communication style of Chinese managers.

He actually couldn't answer these questions directly. He needed to first ask the expats. It turned out that the major problem was not so much the lack of inter-cultural skills but rather a lack of diversity tolerance on both sides. As a consequence, our workshop design completely changed in terms of content and participants, which now included both parties.

You see, my 'advise' would have been just plain wrong. But providing ownership to Tom and helping him in his discovery process on a deeper level led to a considerably better outcome for both Tom and us, since the program we then delivered was much more effective. It actually resolved the problem.

Once the decision-making criteria are truly clear, finding answers and solutions becomes a rather easy task and a decision can be made quickly.

Conclusion: Buying decisions are no different from other decisions in that they require a clear awareness of all important criteria which must be met in a satisfactory manner before a decision can be made. The seller can assist the buyer by using the coaching approach, which means supporting the discovery of these criteria and providing ownership to the buyer rather than giving advise. This will lead to better and faster results and truly trusting relationships between seller and buyer.

For more information related to Progress-U's Stop Selling! programs please click here.

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