You Can't Differentiate When Everything Looks the Same

On a rainy Friday morning a week later, the team gathered in the executive conference room. On the table, I'd placed sales collateral along with hard copies of websites and landing pages from their three biggest competitors. We even had tablets with the explainer videos from each competitor loaded and ready to play. Alongside them we placed copies of my client's marketing material and messaging.

At first the folks on the project team were like kids in a candy store, fascinated by having so much of their competitors' marketing materials right at their fingertips. I was intrigued that they hadn't taken the time to do this already.

I left them to it for a few minutes before instructing, “Everyone, please take a step back from the table and look at all of the messages as a whole. Tell me what patterns you see.” The large conference room became instantly silent while they took it all in. No one said a thing. Then a marketing manager murmured, “They're all the same.”

This ignited an intense conversation that became a pivot point to much-needed deep introspection. They'd been so inwardly focused and such ardent believers of their own press clippings that they were blind to the truth. Rather than looking at all the facts, they'd conveniently cherry-picked only the data that proved their point.

It was a classic example of the human confirmation bias at work. The marketers sought out data that supported their conclusion that the salespeople were unable to differentiate while ignoring evidence that pointed to alternate explanations.

It was a rude awakening to an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth. To stakeholders, they and every competitor in their industry were indistinguishable.

How could my client differentiate when their salespeople, messaging, collateral, advertising, website, and even images and videos looked, sounded, and felt the same as those of their competitors?

It was no wonder that most sales conversations quickly degenerated into price negotiations. Talking more would not solve their differentiation problem.

The Age of Transparency

We live in the age of transparency where anyone can get information about anything with a few clicks and swipes on a screen. Information is ubiquitous. It's also confusing.

Consider what a person who is researching potential vendors for the software my client, from the previous story, sells. What will they find?

• Four companies offering what appear to be identical products
• Four companies making the same promises
• Four websites that are strikingly similar
• Four blogs with carbon copy articles and themes
• Four free guides on four indistinguishable landing pages
• Four look-alike “me too” explainer videos

Often, research confuses more than it informs. The stakeholder, no better off than they were before they did their research, requests meetings with account executives from each company.

The account executives recite messaging and regurgitate stock presentations developed by the MBAs in their marketing department. Each AE making a convincing pitch that their software is far superior.

• Four meetings with account executives—all essentially the same

How does the stakeholder choose?

Many companies and salespeople delude themselves into believing their product or service is so unique or different that it sells itself. If you are in this camp, it is time for a reality check. To stakeholders you and all your competitors look, sound, and act exactly the same. If your product is so good it sells itself, I suggest warming up your résumé because your company is going to quickly figure out that they don't need you.

Here's the brutal truth: To differentiate, YOU must be different.

If you strip all the complexity away from sales, you will find that sales is, at the core, just one person solving another person's problem. Stakeholders become emotionally attached and extremely loyal to salespeople who demonstrate that they get the stakeholder and their unique problems and bring custom-crafted solutions to the table that solve those problems.

Problem solvers are the champions of the business world.

Do You Get Me?

Close your eyes for just a moment and picture a person in your life who really gets you—a person who understands who you are and what you are about. Think about that relationship. What's it like? How does it feel? Is it:

• Nonjudgmental?
• Comfortable?
• Accepting?
• Open and transparent?
• All of the above?

When you are with someone who gets you, you share a unique language. You laugh at jokes no one else gets. You exchange ideas and thoughts with just an expression. You each know what the other person is thinking—almost like you have ESP. You have the same ideas at the same time and finish each other's sentences.

There is something special that happens when other people understand us. Of all relationships, the ones where the other person gets you are the most cherished.

Clearly, it is nearly impossible to duplicate the level of get that you have with a sister, parent, lover, or best friend in a commercial relationship with a stakeholder. However, the same emotions and influence dynamics are at play. All human beings, at their core, want to be understood.

In B2B sales, stakeholders are using someone else's money to solve their problems. Those problems are personal and real. Each stakeholder believes that their situation is unique. Even if you've seen the same problem a dozen times before, if they sense that you are treating their belief that they are different with indifference, they'll disconnect emotionally.

The generic kitchen-sink data dump pitch that makes you sound like a walking, talking marketing brochure tells them loud and clear that you don't and haven't taken the time to understand them. That you are too lazy or self-centered to care enough to see them as unique.

In commercial relationships, the way you demonstrate that you get your stakeholders is through personalized recommendations to solve their problems, remove pain, or capture opportunity. These recommendations must be delivered using their language and be relevant to what is most important to them.

When you speak their language, you look, feel, and sound different from your competitors and you gain influence over buying behaviors.

People Buy for Their Reasons, Not Yours

During a top-to-top meeting with a prospect's executive team, Penske's COO, Art Vallely, and the enterprise account manager who was running the deal were offered a tour of the prospect's facility. Art and his EAM spent four hours with the prospect's stakeholders walking through the massive facility, asking questions, learning about their operations, and getting acquainted with the company's history and values.

“It was fascinating,” said Art. “We left with a much better understanding of their culture, how they treated their customers, their goals as an organization, and roadblocks that were holding them back from reaching their goals.”

Using the information gathered on the tour, the Penske sales team crafted a plan to help their prospect reach those goals. The Penske team focused on helping their prospect improve customer service—improvements that would have a significant impact on both customer retention and the bottom line.

Six months later Penske won the deal. After the celebration, Art called the new customer's executive vice president to thank him. On the call, Art asked him what swayed him and his team to choose Penske. The EVP's explanation revealed again why Sales EQ matters.

“We also invited your competitor to take a tour of our facility. They spent less than 30 minutes with us and didn't ask a single question. Their executives spent most of the tour looking at their phone screens checking e-mail. We got the impression that they weren't that interested in getting to know us. They were more focused on pitching us on how big and great they were and how foolish we'd be to do business with anyone but them.

“You and your team spent half a day walking through our operation. You asked great questions. Everyone on our team felt that you and your people were genuinely interested in us. We felt like you cared.

“When you delivered your proposal, it was all about us. With your competitor, it was all about them. That's why we're doing business with you.”

Millions of dollars changed hands in this deal. When the stakeholders at this prospect weighed the decision between Penske and its competition, they chose Penske, because the people on Penske's sales team showed interest, invested time to learn and gain understanding, made the stakeholders feel important, delivered personalized recommendations based on the prospect's unique situation, and cared more.

Penske's competitor talked at the stakeholders about trucks. They pitched their reasons the stakeholders should buy—features, benefits, truck specs, competitive differences. All rational, logical reasons, but not the stakeholder's reasons.

It was not about trucks. The stakeholders at this prospect didn't care about trucks. They cared about problems that were impacting their ability to deliver best-in-class customer service.

People buy for their reasons, not yours. To differentiate in the age of transparency, you must step into your stakeholders' shoes. You must invest time and be curious enough to learn about their business and problems. You must learn and speak their language.

The Power of Language

Since the dawn of human civilization, language has connected humans, defined boundaries, and determined who is in and who is out. Today, more than 7,000 languages are spoken across the globe.

Communities, companies, families, religions, clubs, sports teams, schools, and groups of people in every walk of life and every organizational structure share a common language that binds them together and creates commonality.

Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel calls language social technology.¹ He theorizes that one of the main reasons language evolved in humans was to make it easier to sell things,² thus accelerating commerce and eventually creating the modern-day sales profession.

Pagel asserts that language is a powerful, neural “audio technology for rewiring other people's minds” because “it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind.”³

I consider language to be the ultimate sales technology. Language is powerful. Travel anywhere in the world and even make an attempt to speak another culture's language, and people will pull you in and embrace you—just for trying. You'll notice how little it takes. Just a word here or there ingratiates and moves you from stranger to in-group.

In the context of sales conversations, the stakeholders' language is company jargon, acronyms, processes, systems, and industry terms. It includes their emotional hot buttons, challenges, issues, concerns, unique problems, situations, and opportunities. It's the way they express and emote those things. When you learn to speak their language, it has the same effect. Stakeholders pull you into their in-group.

We've explored, for example, how the similarity bias causes us to believe that people who are like us are better and more trustworthy. Language transcends differences to create similarity.

Much like a TV remote control, you can leverage language to “alter the settings inside someone else's brain.”⁴ Speaking your stakeholder's language makes your message and recommendations sound familiar, safe, comfortable, and memorable. This gives you a distinct competitive edge in the war for differentiation.

During sales training, the trainers rewire your brain to speak your company's language. You learn elevator pitches, how to dish out value propositions, and how to tell the company's story. You consume and become familiar with sales collateral and learn how to talk about products, services, specs, and features—all from your company's (and your own) perspective. It is total immersion. Over time, you begin to naturally think and speak in this language.

This is why, it is very difficult to get out of your own head and speak your stakeholder's language. In our Message Matters workshops and Sales EQ training courses, we put participants through a simple exercise in which they are required to list common stakeholder problems and pain points—from the stakeholder's standpoint.

It's excruciating to watch as participants find it almost impossible to step into the shoes of stakeholders and intuit problems from that point of view. Mostly, the lists the participants build are just product and service feature dumps rather than the real issues that are impacting their stakeholders.

It is easier to learn and speak your stakeholders' language when you are standing in their shoes. This requires an intentional effort to become empathetic to your stakeholder's motivations, concerns, interests, aspirations, and experience.

Artful questions draw out the stakeholder's story. When you listen deeply and immerse yourself in your stakeholders' stories, you gain perspective, experience their emotions, and learn their language.

Message Matters

Once you've learned your stakeholders' language, the next step is to weave it through your sales messages to demonstrate that you get them.

Whether in initial presentations, sales conversations, demos, presentations, or proposals, your message must be relevant, compelling, and memorable. It must demonstrate that you get the stakeholder's unique situation.

Relevance is the critical element. Otherwise it's just white noise, a boring pattern the stakeholder's brain ignores, and will not remember.

Message matters. An important cognitive shortcut is called the availability heuristic. The brain values information that can be more readily recalled and considers it to be more important than information that is more difficult to remember.

The availability heuristic must not be ignored when tailoring messages and communicating with stakeholders. Memorable equals differentiation. When you speak your stakeholder's language, your message is easier to recall and therefore carries more weight in decision making, therefore increasing win probability.

Sadly, average salespeople make egregious messaging mistakes. Like robots, they mindlessly regurgitate the product feature bullet points learned in sales training, regardless of relevance.

Their presentations are boring. Average salespeople fail to activate the stakeholder's brain and grab attention, because they sound like walking, talking marketing brochures. It's no wonder stakeholders routinely check out during demos and presentations.

Using your stakeholders' language has the added benefit of reducing cognitive load, making it easier for them to comprehend, assimilate, and remember the information you provide. It takes the complexity out of listening.

With sales messaging, complexity is your enemy. Complex and unfamiliar language, riddled with jargon and business-speak, is difficult to remember. When your message is hard to grasp, your stakeholder's brain stops paying attention and shifts to heuristics and biases to interpret what you are saying.

The “So What?” Smell Test

One of my early sales mentors taught me the “so what?” smell test in a tough but memorable way. Prior to big presentations, I'd role-play my message with him. On each slide and after each message he'd deadpan, “So what?”

“Our product will save you up to 30 percent over what you are spending now.”

So what?

“Our customer satisfaction rate is 96.7 percent.”

So what?

“Our implementation process is seamless and no hassle.”

So what?

He forced me to explain why each point mattered to that specific stakeholder or stakeholder group based on their unique situation. If I was unable to make the case from the prospective company's or the individual stakeholder's perspective, the slide, bullet point, and sometimes entire presentation was scrapped.

It used to infuriate me. I'd push back, argue, and try to make my case, but if it didn't pass the “so what?” smell test, my message was scrapped.

Yet, as angry and frustrated as it made me, it also made me better and turned me into a messaging machine. I learned to listen with intent to understand my stakeholders and then craft messages that were relevant to them, in their language, because I knew I'd have to eventually get past the stakeholder's “so what?” gauntlet.

The Fine Art of Bridging

When you are explaining, teaching, demoing, challenging, offering insight, or presenting, you must remain cognizant of your stakeholder's brain's two most pressing questions:

1. So what?
2. What's in it for me?

You'll recall from an earlier chapter that your stakeholder's attention is managed and controlled by the amygdala. The amygdala responds to threats and bright, shiny things. In its quest to keep your stakeholder alive, the amygdala ignores boring patterns—like scripted presentations—and responds to environmental disruptions.

Your stakeholder's amygdala is the gatekeeper. Every sales message goes through the amygdala first, which, like my sales manager, uses a harsh “so what?” smell test.

The amygdala is very selfish. When your mouth is moving and PowerPoint slides are flashing, it only wants to know, “What's in it for me?” If your message isn't new, different, or disruptive, if it doesn't solve unique problems, eliminate pain, or combat a future threat, the amygdala won't waste precious cognitive resources on it.

Instead the amygdala zones out and goes back to scanning the environment for disruptions and your message never makes it to the stakeholder's neocortex. In other words, if your message is not relevant, the stakeholder's brain is indifferent.

Solving problems, eliminating pain, and helping stakeholders take advantage of opportunities is how you earn the right to move to the next step and close deals. You may have the perfect solution, but if your stakeholders can't hear you because you are not speaking their language or the pattern is boring, you lose.

Ultra-high performers (UHPs) are pattern painters. They activate the amygdala's attention with messages and stories that are relevant, tightly focused on demonstrating that they get their stakeholder, and delivered in a language that is easy to understand.

Bridging is the process and art of building the case for doing business with you, by connecting your solutions to your stakeholder's problems, in the context of what is most important to them. In their language, not yours.

Bridging is where message meets emotion. Use words, phrases, and stories that provoke and activate your stakeholder's emotions—typically by relating to painful emotions like stress, worry, insecurity, distrust, anxiety, fear, frustration, or anger, and offering them peace of mind, security, options, hope, lower stress, or less worry.

In an earlier chapter I described a study where subjects purchased more French wine on days when the store played French music. This response is called an affect heuristic. Simply put, your mood and resulting actions are often affected by another emotional stimulus. For this reason, bridges framed in emotional language and stories carry more emotional impact and are therefore more persuasive.

The Three-Step Bridging Framework

Bridging articulates problems, recommendations, and solutions in your stakeholder's language, leveraging a three-step process (Figure 25.1) that connects current state, a personalized recommendation, and a future, aspirational state or what's in it for them.

When you tie recommendations and value statements back to the emotional hot buttons that were disclosed during discovery, your stakeholders will feel valued, important, and that you get them.

Never forget that each person (and company) views his or her problems, no matter how common, as unique. For this reason, bridges must be personalized.

Ultra-high performers make the case that they get their stakeholder and can solve their stakeholder's problems with confident, succinct, personalized bridges. UHPs transform mundane features and benefits into custom solutions developed for and built around a stakeholder's unique situation. They reframe product features that seem generic, in a way that causes the stakeholder to feel that they were crafted just for her.

Here's an example of a bridge. This example is written in informal language as you might verbally express it during a presentation. (Written documents require more formal and concise language. You'll find examples of formal bridges on the Sales EQ membership site.)

1. Problem: “Alba, when we met with your accounts payable team, they expressed frustration over the manual audit process required to manage the invoices of multiple vendors. Ruben said that it was taking up to 40 hours of labor each month just to keep up with it, and that was causing a delay in getting more important projects done. Just last week they missed a deadline on a rebate that cost you $900.”
2. Personalized recommendation: “For this reason I recommend installing our Express Invoicing module. This is a cloud-based payables platform that makes it super easy to manage invoices and payments. It also gives Ruben an easy-to-use dashboard so he can focus on anomalies rather than a complete audit each month.”
3. Planned result: “At a minimum, Express Invoicing will save a little more than $37,000 in direct payroll costs. More important, though, it will provide you and all department heads visibility into the payables that that are impacting your P&Ls. Ruben can get back to focusing on saving the company money, and you'll have the peace of mind that there will be no more embarrassing surprises at the end of the month because something was missed.”

Notice how this bridge communicates a story. It positions the current, untenable situation in stark relief, offers hope for a breakthrough, and paints a vivid picture of a better future state.

Let's break this down.