18
Decision Process
It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
—Tony Robbins
“Look, you guys are all the same. Why don't you just give me your best price?”
Jessica had heard the same words leave the lips of stakeholders hundreds of times over a sales career that spanned 15 years and three companies. She knew that the statement was part negotiating strategy and part truth.
To buyers she and her competitors looked the same. And, frankly, she could see why. In her industry, there were four national competitors, several dozen regional players, and local mom-and-pop enterprises dispersed here and there—all vying for a piece of the action.
The products and services were essentially the same; yet each competitor claimed to have some exclusive differentiator. These claims were mostly marketing smoke and mirrors.
To say her industry was competitive was an understatement. It was hypercompetitive. Among just the four national competitors there were more than 3,000 salespeople calling on prospects. Add in the regionals and locals, and it was not uncommon for a stakeholder to get five or more prospecting calls a week.
“I just need five minutes of your time, sir, to show you how we can save your company money.” The prospecting mantra repeated itself over and over. Weary buyers were numb to the same stale pitches and sales conversations quickly degenerated into “What's your best price?”
The pressure on reps in her industry was intense and turnover high, exceeding 100 percent in some cases. To succeed, salespeople had to be relentless. They had to make 50 to 100 prospecting touches a day just to stay above water—a price that had to be paid to survive in this industry. Just touch as many prospects as you can, throw out enough proposals, and you might make it.
As an ultra-high performer (UHP), Jessica refused to play this game. She'd been to her company's “President's Club” every year for 11 years in a row. At her previous employer, she'd achieved similar success. As new reps came and went, Jessica was one of the elite few who understood the key to differentiation.
She leaned forward and set the tablet she'd been given for presentations on the stakeholder's desk. “Sean, all I want is the opportunity to get to know you and your company. I want to learn how you do things here, your challenges, and what makes your company different. Once I have that information, I'll deliver a blueprint for how we can help you and your team achieve your business goals.”
Jessica continued, “We may find out that it doesn't make sense to work together because I can bring no additional value other than price. If that is the case, I promise to tell you. On the other hand, we may find ways to help you become more productive, drop some real savings to the bottom line, and ultimately make life easier for you.”
Jessica's competitors left Sean's office with marching orders to come back with the best price. They'd gone back to their offices, met with sales managers, put together generic PowerPoint presentations, given Sean their best offer, and moved on to the next prospect. They all looked the same.
Jessica slowed the process down and refused to throw a price on the table. She'd preserved leverage, managed her emotions, and exercised patience and poise. In doing so she disrupted and flipped Sean's buyer script. He engaged and agreed to move forward to the next step (micro-commitment).
Over the next four visits, Jessica observed Sean's processes, interviewed key managers, built trust and relationships. She uncovered several opportunities to help Sean's organization become more efficient. She won the trust of his managers and leveraged their influence on Sean to amplify the need for change. Through effective discovery she built a case for change. She earned the right to challenge the status quo and offer solutions to problems that Sean's team were unaware they even had.
When she made her presentation to Sean and his team, her recommendations carried weight. She articulated her vision in his language, bridging only to what was relevant to him. Price was important but not the deciding factor in Sean's decision. When he signed the contract, he did so because Jessica was different.
Influencing the Decision Process
Jessica had access to the same tools, information, products, and rate structure as her competitors. Each of the salespeople who met with Sean could have approached him in the same way. Yet only she created real, tangible differentiation.
The average salespeople working for her competitors were oblivious to Sean's motives, goals, and problems. They made no real attempt to develop an emotional connection or to work at bringing solutions to the table that might have a positive impact on Sean's business. Jessica delivered both value and a better emotional buying experience.
What cannot be discounted or overlooked is the undeniable fact1 that the stakeholder's emotional experience2 while interacting with a salesperson, as they progress through the sales and buying process, plays the most significant role in their propensity to purchase and continue to purchase.3
In other words, the tangible attributes of a product or solution are less important than the emotions derived on the buying journey, from dealing with you.
Aligning the Three Processes of Sales
Ultra-high sales performers understand that the decision process is the pivot point on which the sales process and buying process are leveraged.
The sales process and buying process are linear, rational steps developed at the organizational level. The decision process, on the other hand, is individual, emotional, nonlinear, and often irrational—in essence, each stakeholder's personal buying journey. The decision process is how individual stakeholders commit to vendors, products, services, next steps, and, most important, the salesperson.
Average salespeople forget that in business-to-business sales they are working with humans who are using someone else's money to solve their own problems and alleviate pain. Because of this they fail to reach below the surface and gain an understanding of the motivations, desires, needs, wants, fears, aspirations, and problems of each stakeholder involved in the buying process. They fail to step into the individual's emotional shoes.
Ultra-high performers are masters at aligning the sales process, buying process, and decision process. They never forget that they are dealing with emotional, fallible, irrational human beings. UHPs know that through emotional connections they move win probabilities into the stratosphere and create unassailable competitive differentiation.
The Five Questions That Matter Most in Sales
In every sales conversation and throughout the sales process, stakeholders are asking five questions of you:
- Do I like you?
- Do you listen to me?
- Do you make me feel important?
- Do you get me and my problems?
- Do I trust and believe you?
These are the five most important questions in sales. Ultra-high performers get this. From the first moment they engage stakeholders and until the deal is closed, they are intensely focused on answering these five questions with an affirmative yes!
The five questions are being asked and answered at both the conscious and subconscious levels. The questions are emotional. They originate from emotion and are answered with emotion.
How you answer these questions for each stakeholder will determine the outcome of your sales conversations—positive or negative—and increase or decrease win probability. When you answer the five questions in the affirmative, stakeholders are more willing to comply with your requests for micro-commitments.
Aligning Decision Making with Social Proof
As the complexity of the sale, the length of the cycle, and more importantly the risk to the organization and individual stakeholders increase, so does size of the stakeholder array. With more stakeholders in the mix, the risk to the individual stakeholders is diluted while the risk to you is increased.
With large arrays of stakeholders playing different roles (BASIC), it's easier for stakeholders to act on groupthink rather than standing up for a view that might be the right thing but be perceived as unpopular. It's also easier for a single stakeholder to derail a deal when the stakeholder group is indecisive or misaligned. It's less risky for the group to side with caution (status quo) than take a risk and be wrong.
What we know empirically about human behavior is that humans follow the crowd. We are compelled to do things that other people are doing. When something is popular, when we see other people doing it, we feel that it is safe to do the same thing.
This is the social proof heuristic. The more people who are doing a thing, have a belief in something, or share an opinion, the higher the probability that we'll be drawn toward and want to do or believe the same thing. Effectively we use the judgment of the crowd as a substitute for our own, which reduces cognitive load, making it easier to make decisions in complex environments.
In complex deals with wide stakeholder arrays, ultra-high performers leverage social proof to improve win probability and lower the risk of a stalled deal and no decision. The key is aligning stakeholder decision making and neutralizing naysayers.
Stakeholder alignment is difficult and challenging, and entails hard work. It requires:
- Disciplined effort to identify and contact all stakeholders.
- Gaining micro-commitments and collecting yeses from all stakeholders.
- Intentional effort to build relationships with even the most hostile stakeholders (it's harder for them to throw you under the bus when they like you).
- Communicating stakeholder agreement and consensus up, down, and across the stakeholder array.
You cannot leave anything to chance. You need to have a level of paranoia that there is a stakeholder you have not identified waiting in the weeds to sink your deal. You must not assume that stakeholders are talking to each other.
In complex deals with wide stakeholder arrays, ultra-high performers become a communication hub that connects the stakeholders. This provides the social proof that helps stakeholders feel comfortable making a decision in favor of the UHP's proposal.
Everything UHPs do, from developing sales strategy to managing the sales process and shaping the buying process, is all directed toward influencing the decision process. Everything.
This is where you earn your chops. Take shortcuts here, and you'll get crushed. However, when the sales and buying processes are aligned with the account stakeholders' decision process, win probabilities get close to 100 percent. It becomes almost impossible not to buy from you.