When you find yourself preparing for your next big pitch or planning a meeting with your fearless leader for your performance review, ask yourself, ‘Why should the person I am talking with trust and buy from me and believe in what I’m saying?’
If you’re really honest, a sincere response to this question is often a slight pause, followed by a blank stare. So I will ask this question in a slightly different way, ‘other than making money, why are you in business?’ That question will invariably be greeted with another ponderous look, or it might trigger a passionate reply, such as, ‘I just love helping people!’ or ‘I really love the culture here, just look around us, you can smell the passion in the air!’
These responses, and others like them are clues to help you to understand the ‘why’ for doing what you do, or desire to do. It also helps you to start to clarify why someone will ultimately buy from you and not a competitor. In most markets differentiation is minimal, so never underestimate how important you and ‘your why’ are to the buying decision.
From here you can start to form your ‘why-frame’, which shapes the initial step of your customer engagement process. This is the moment and place where all relevant communication should start or finish i.e. proceed with confidence or kill the time waste!
At my sales development company BOOM! we use an intuitive method for breaking down how sales professionals communicate word-by-word and then we align their communication to the customer’s emotional drivers, (not the middle finger pointing kind,) I’m taking about celebrating the things that really turn your customers on and influence their behaviour. If a word, message or statement doesn’t support the customer’s ‘why’, it’s removed from the vocabulary or reframed in a more meaningful way and acutely aligned to the customer’s needs, desires or personalised benefits.
It’s also important to note, that if a potential customer contacts you, consider ‘why’ they have gone to the effort of seeking you out?
Don’t disregard this information. And don’t make the error of assuming that every customer that contacts you already has a compelling and resolved ‘why’ in their mind. It’s always up to you to help them unlock and emphasise their ‘why’ in your initial sales conversation as you set the tone, build rapport and establish the fits with the customer.
Likewise, if you conduct proactive sales and marketing activities, your success rates will dramatically improve when you demonstrate you have taken time to really think about your ‘why’ for contacting and how that moves the customer to a place of safe and purposeful action. Failure to do so will typically result in a swift and cold, ‘Goodbye!’
Trent Leyshan is the founder of BOOM! Sales and author of OUTLAW and The Naked salesman.
Trent Leyshan is the founder of sales training company BOOM! Sales and the author of Outlaw and The Naked Salesman.
