Your Buyer Is Not The Hero…But They Should Be
- Dan Greenberg
- Aug 2, 2023
- 4 min read
There are a lot of sales resources that talk about how important it is to tell a story with your presentations. People are more engaged by images and stories. Cavemen did not write bullet points on the walls of their caves; they told stories using pictures. We are also told that people identify with stories when they can see themselves as a participant, so it makes sense to build your story with the person you are trying to influence as the protagonist. All of this makes intuitive sense to us and so it has become sales dogma.
So, we all set out to build better presentations. We limit bullet points, we shorten slides, we create dynamic stories and incorporate images. We make our presentations customer centric and develop them around the buyer. Good…right?
Sure, that part is great. But we spend all that time developing a scenario where we make the buyer the hero… and then we start closing. We body slam that buyer with a barrage of information about how, magically, our product happens to solve all of their problems, and we basically insinuate that they would have to be an idiot not to agree that our product is the perfect solution. That’s not empowering. It systematically places the buyer in the beta role instead of the hero role.
STOP IT! DON'T SELL! DON'T CLOSE! It’s way too early for that. Plus, it was never about your solution in first place. It's not even about their problem.
What we have done is taken away all agency and individual drive from the buyer. And by doing that we have taken away the incentive for them to want to collaborate with us on a decision.
We have left the buyer with two choices, the first choice the buyer has is to succumb to our barrage of information, which some may do by actually listening, but they will have no incentive to promote adoption after the meeting because they feel no ownership whatsoever. Others may succumb by shutting off their brains and tuning out so as not to waste any more mental energy. The other choice the buyer has is to recognize that they cannot add any value to the conversation in support of your solution, because you have rattled off a list of all of the benefits and positives. This causes them to start to think about reasons the product won’t work, since that is the only thought-provoking side of the conversation left. This inevitably leads to unnecessary, and emotionally entrenched objections.
Back in 2014 there was a show that aired called “Mind Games”. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding human decision psychology. My appreciation for the show was clearly a minority opinion as it was dropped after 5 episodes, so I'll forgive you if you’ve never heard of it. The show starred Steve Zahn as a behavioral psychology genius with social anxiety and other behavioral problems of his own. The co-star was Christian Slater, who played a possibly reforming former criminal, employed to help leverage his brother’s (Steve Zahn’s character) skills and keep his less helpful traits in check. Each of the episodes featured a “consulting” team who were hired to help influence an individual or group to do what a specific client wanted.
One of the episodes revolved around a client attempting to convince an insurance adjuster to cover an experimental procedure. Steve Zahn’s character recognized immediately that the adjuster did not have a lot of excitement in their life, and the opportunity to ‘make a difference’ was something that could be leveraged. He coached the client to probe and ask questions about other instances in the past where the adjuster had the opportunity to be a part of real change, or real progress, and to encourage the adjuster to talk about those instances and to describe what it would take to make this current issue a reality.
You see, the important thing is not the facts. It’s not the issue at hand, or the features of the product, or even the long-term benefits of the solution. The important thing is how an agreement will make the person on the other side of the table feel, more precisely, it is their perception of how it will make them feel. If you are discussing facts, and products, and solutions too much, you might not be bringing your client along for the emotional ride that they need to be on in order to WANT to reach an agreement. Instead of only focusing on your solution and their needs, find ways to ask about their drive and desire to push internally to make a deal happen:
When is the last time that your client was a part of a big shift in process or strategy, and was it with this company? What role did they play in it? Did they take any bold risks? What did the steps look like to achieve it? Were they proud of the outcome?
How does the client feel about their day-to-day? Do they get to be a part of big decisions? Or do they get marginalized once the real internal conversations begin?
Does your client worry about red tape at their current company, and have they worked with others to develop ways to overcome it for important matters?
Can they envision the steps in the process that would allow them to really change the company’s mindset on the problem that you solve, and what would the steps in that process look like?
Let the buyer tell you the answers to these questions, because when they do, they will be painting a picture of big change in which they are the catalyst for that change. Let them develop a blueprint of themselves as the hero of the transformation, and then nurture that blueprint throughout the process. Once they have bought into the idea that you see them as a transformational leader, they will continue to make bold decisions and do bold things. They will not want to let you down. That’s how human psychology works.
Very informative