The meaning of your communication is the response you get

I remember when I first started using email, probably ten years ago, feeling aggrieved when senders didn’t include the formal, verbose style of a traditional letter, instead sending punchier, to-the-point communications. After time I acclimatised to it and began to send such emails myself. Then the next change happened, people began to miss off the recipient’s name at the beginning and their own name at the end. Then the emails got shorter, right down to one or two words. Now different countries, companies, groups and individuals have their own norms.

I have recently been in an email exchange with someone whose short, terse, demanding emails riled me. It took me a little time to step back and think back to my first email experiences all that time ago. Perhaps this person did not actually intend for their messages to be taken in the way that I was taking it.

Some clever dick somewhere once said, “The meaning of your communication is the response you get”. I’m sure philosophers would rip this to shreds, but as a practical rule for sales people giving outgoing messages, it useful to remember. And it’s also worth remembering that, when you receive a message, not everyone else out there considers this phrase when they communicate.

Raise your Heuristic Anchor

(Possibly my worst blog post title / picture pun ever...?)

I have been reading a fantastic book recently, that’s not at all about sales, however it brought my attention to the phenomenon of “Heuristic Anchoring” – a phrase guaranteed to make you sound either incredibly smart or pretentious, depending on which way you look at it.

This example from the Wikipedia entry on heuristic anchoring explains best: “An audience is first asked to write the last 2 digits of their social security number, and, second, to submit mock bids on items such as wine and chocolate. The half of the audience with higher two-digit numbers would submit bids that were between 60 percent and 120 percent more, far higher than a chance outcome; the simple act of thinking of the first number strongly influences the second, even though there is no logical connection between them.” I’m currently experimenting with this in a (highly unscientific) sales environment, mentioning lots of high figures before a (relatively) low number price. “The service has 1,000,000 users per month, with our highest ever monthly figures coming in at 6,000,000 user per month…. ….the approximate investment required by is £15,000.” Does it work? I’ve no idea, but it’s fascinating psychology that may contribute to the entire sales effort. If anyone has experimented in this area or knows of any material on this subject, please let me and the community know.

Do you 9-Block?

Over on the LinkedIn Solution Selling Alumni group Tim Sullivan asked "Solution Selling includes a structured dialogue model for consultative, diagnostic conversations with customers, called the 9-Block Vision Processing Model. Have you used the 9-Block, and did you find it effective?"

I couldn't wait to give "my 2 cents" on this one:

The 9-Block Vision Processing Model is excellent conceptually and I believe does lay out a nicely structured approach to sales dialogue. I would like to think that if you dissected my best sales calls (let's forget the others ;-), you could map my questions onto the model very closely. Conceptually, it does work.

I don’t use it everyday day because in the heat of a sales call (as opposed to calm planning/reading in the office), 9 of anything is too much to remember!

Instead of 9 points to remember, I started my sales career with 4. I came to Solution Selling from SPIN selling (which as a whole is less complete and definitely inferior to Solution Selling).

SPIN = (S)ituation, (P)roblem, (I)mplication and (N)eed payoff.

I would say that the top row of the 9-Block Vision Processing Model (Diagnose reasons, Explore impact, Visualize capabilities) maps very roughly onto (P)roblem, (I)mplication and (N)eed payoff (OK, there are some differences and there is some overlap, but broadly speaking I think this statement is correct enough for this conversation.)

I think these 3 are the key solution selling points to remember in the heat of a sales call. However, the 9 block adds to each of those stages three types of question. Again, these questions are the appropriate and the right things to be doing, but I think they would be better presented somehow out or separately from the diagnose, explore, visualize.

In fact I would suggest a staged approach to reps learning this : Stage one, learn to ask basic questions (any questions!) to diagnose the reasons, Stage two, learn to ask basic questions (any questions!) to explore the impact, Stage 3, learn to ask basic questions (any questions!) to get the prospect visualizing capabilities.

Once that is mastered by the rep, they should move on to refining their technique by asking the Open, Control and Confirm questions.

So, in summary, I think that the 9-block is spot-on, but a little over-ambitious for newbies to take in one chunk.

And in answer to your original question, have I used it, I would say “yes” and was it effective, I would say “yes” but only because I didn’t come at it as a rookie.

All this said, in my opinion Solution Selling is still the best sales process out there.

Sales questions : Qualifying a prospect’s seriousness

I think it’s fair to say that our jobs as sales professionals are as much about deciding who not to sell to as who to sell to. Qualifying-out the tyre kickers is a great time saver. These questions will help you do that. Crucial in this is attempting to identify whether there is a genuine pain driving their enquiry (if there is not, the opportunity is likely to drop out towards the end of the sales cycle when risk and spending money come into serous consideration)
• Why do this now? Why not next month, or next year?
• What happens if you DON’T (solve this issue)?
• If you can’t find a solution to this, what do think will happen / what will that mean for you/ the department/ company?
• Why does this need to be done?
• Why is this important? Why does it matter? Can’t you just stick with what you’ve got?
• If you get this up and running, how does that change things? What does it do for you?
• What are the key reasons that you are doing this for?
• Have you ever tried to do something similar to this in the past? What stopped you that time?
• From what we have discussed, what are the most important issues to you?
More questions for you to use in your selling coming soon. Bookmark/RSS SalesItch now…. And don’t forget to add a comment to share your favourite questions with the community!