Change Your Perspective to Succeed at Sales!

Too many sales conversations go around and around and don’t lead to a positive outcome. Most salespeople are well versed in their product or service. What they are missing is an understanding of the perspective of the client. This leads to misalignment and a disconnect that, many times, will derail a sale. It’s not about your product or service, it’s about the needs of the client. Make that connection and you win more then you lose.

Salespeople feel they need to convince, but great salespeople know how to persuade. Persuasion will be successful if you have a deeper understanding of the clients’ primary objectives. Is it economic, risk mitigation, or alignment with other influencers or decision makers. That needs to be uncovered before you even begin to talk about your product or service. To do that, you need to change your perspective about the types of information you need to gather from the client. The fact that they are interested in your product or service is one thing, but the real value is understanding why.

If the prospective client’s objective is economic, there are many different factors—low cost, increased productivity, reduced time. The more a salesperson understands specifically what factors are going to be used to judge the investment, the better they can align their response. Again, it’s not about the product or service, it’s about how it meets the objective. If the objective is increased productivity, then the conversation and solution should be built around that need. Anything else is a distraction.

Risk mitigation is becoming more and more of a key concern for clients. They are reluctant to add new products or suppliers, especially with high capital expenditure investments. Your product or service could be highly impactful, but if you cannot address the clients’ need for little or no risk, you will not get traction. Risk takes many forms; it could be return on investment, it could be adoption, or even doubt about the performance. Flushing out these pain points provides the insights needed to tailor your solution (and sales pitch) to address this critical need of the client.

The one I see most often missing in sales is alignment. Salespeople get focused on the individual requesting the information. Many times, they are not the primary decision maker, or are only one of several. Understanding everyone involved in the decision is essential. The reality is that decision makers all have their own objectives, and the ability to address every one of those objectives is the difference between winning and losing. The key is to start early and involve everyone as your ideas move forward. Waiting until later in the sales process only increases the likelihood that someone will not be onboard.

It’s not about convincing, it’s about persuasion. And many times, it’s not about persuading an individual, but an organization. The essence of your sales conversations will be much more productive if the focus is on understanding why they are interested, what they are truly trying to accomplish, and aligning your solution to those needs.