You Are Being Judged
- Dan Greenberg
- Apr 3, 2024
- 5 min read
Providing a client with insights that help frame their thinking is a vital tool in any sales process. It helps frame your message, and it keeps the conversation focused on the buyer’s needs.
Why is this important?
Your buyer is judging you from the moment your interaction begins. It’s the only way they feel comfortable. If a person feels like they are being manipulated, they will experience a lack of control, and that is something that we, as humans, have been trained to, and have evolved to avoid at all cost. Therefore, in order to remain in control, and in order to avoid being manipulated, your buyer is judging you and placing you in a bucket with all other vendors who also need to be judged. If they weren’t judging you, then they would be taking direction from you, and that would not be acceptable to them.
They are judging your trustworthiness, your intelligence, your knowledge, your ability to add value, your likability. They are judging your company’s trustworthiness, its organization, and its values. They are also judging your product’s specs, its reliability, and its relative features and benefits. On the surface, they are doing all of this in order to help make the most informed decision possible. But, the much more dominant, albeit partially subconscious reason for all of this judging is that they are building a case against you. They are building a case against all of their potential vendors because it will help them justify their eventual decision. They will eventually have to justify their decision to themselves, to their coworkers, to their boss, and to you. Their decision will be made mostly on emotion, but the justification will have to exist. We can intuitively understand this because we all do it in our own lives. Every time we make a significant decision, we almost involuntarily begin building the justifications and arguments against the other outcomes in order to be able to explain our decision clearly if we are asked about it.
Additionally, the buyer is the hero of their own story, as we all are, so building a case explaining why all vendors are deficient allows the buyer to position themselves as the hero who makes the solution work in the end. Partially, they are setting themselves up to be the hero, and partially, they are already laying the framework to be able to explain away any accusations should the eventual decision go poorly.
Why is all of this important?
First of all it is important because, as a seller, you do need to give your client enough information that they can make a rational justification for buying. This is the simple and surface level read of the situation, and although there is more under the surface, it is still important. This is where differentiators, and outcome selling come into play. But let’s be clear; in doing this, you are not trying to sell to your buyer, you are teaching your buyer to make the case for buying your solution. This is a subtle but hugely important shift in the way you talk to your buyer. You can imagine yourself as their sales trainer. The majority of conversations they have moving forward will be without you in the room, and so it is important for you to think of yourself as preparing them for those conversations. You will do a better job accomplishing this if you think of yourself as a trainer rather than a seller, and you will naturally move the buyer into a more collaborative mindset. You are not selling to your buyer, you are training your buyer to sell.
The second reason that this is important is that it is your job to jostle the buyer out of their state of judgment. A person in a state of judgment has a closed mind. They are in charge and they are the one who knows everything and is deciding what is best. That is not a collaborative mindset, and it will not allow you to influence the buyer in any way because they are already in that closed mindset. Training the buyer to sell is helpful in changing this mindset but the best way to nudge your client out of the judgment mindset is through commercial teaching of insights.
Bringing insights to the table focuses the conversation on how to think about your client’s business. It frames the conversation in a way that allows the client to talk about what is important to them, but to do it in a context that accentuates two very important things; number one, where they would like to end up, and number two, what they need in order to get there.
It is incredibly important for the client to talk about these two things because it teaches you, the seller, where they want to go and how they want to get there, but maybe more importantly, it frames the conversation around the client’s needs and wants which leaves the power and control of the interaction in your hands. So long as the conversation centers around their needs and wants, your solution could potentially be their answer, which means they need you. As soon as the conversation shifts to your solution, they become the judge again. They start thinking about how and why your solution is likely not the answer, and in that conversation, you become the needy one, and therefore you lose control.
Teaching, and a focus on insights, are what allow you to remain on level ground with the client and keep control. As soon as you start selling your solutions, the client becomes the judge, and you, the judged. Commercial insights should be developed from your organization's understanding of the client’s industry and its needs. They should focus on ways to save money, or on ways to increase efficiency and drive more revenue, and they should leverage your organization's industry knowledge and past work with companies similar to your client. The insights should focus on the achievement of outcomes that challenge your clients status quo thinking. There are two very important ideas to keep in mind as you are presenting and teaching commercial insights.
Think very deeply about what advantages and disadvantages you have relative to your competitors, and make sure to accentuate your advantages when it comes to the process of the sale. An example of this would be price. If you are a premium product relative to your cheaper competitors, the conversations around insights should focus on long term outcomes for the buyer that revolve around all of the premium ways in which that client can eventually take advantage of your solutions. This does not mean you should be talking about solutions, but it does mean that you can frame the insight to focus on needs and wants that correspond to a premium solution, so that if the customer eventually moves to a price comparison exercise, they will have to reckon with desired outcomes, and needs that would likely be unfulfilled by a competitor.
Think very deeply about which criteria you fulfill relative to your competitors. This is a more straightforward version of the above, but it focuses on the products themselves. For example, if you are selling people recruiting software that is designed for recruiters but does not have strong onboarding features for people operations teams, your insights may focus on how talent acquisition velocity improves operational efficiency and decreases cost, rather than it being about onboarding speed and efficiency. That way, those who buy into your commercial insight will be more likely to focus on evaluating the areas where your product excels.
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