Why should they listen?

Seems to me there is nothing better to introduce this blog by introducing what I think is still the number one issue around why sales people fail to make their number and struggle to find traction for the product they are flogging. What is this faux pas that all sales people have been trained on many times but still fail to figure out? I call it the ‘speeds and feeds’ phenomenon. Or ‘bits and bytes’. Those come out of the tech industry, which is my heritage, but since we have non-tech clients as well, I know it exists with sales people that populate those organizations.

Simply put this means selling features, not benefits. The first call sounds like regurgitating a data sheet. Then typically sales person says something like ‘so that is what we do, what do you think?’ …to which the answer is usually some dead air on the phone line and the sales person wondering where they went wrong.

I recently was acting as a fly on the wall in one of our discovery calls just to see how our guys were doing on a new project. We train HEAVILY on the avoidance of this phenomenon...but to my surprise the sales manager opened with exactly that! “We build a widget that does x, y, z, blah blah blah blah”…to a VP of Service Delivery, none-the-less. The call went so sideways from there, no surprise, that I used the trick of introducing myself as “just entering the room and catching only the last 60 seconds, but let me reset the table and see if there is a fit.” I started out by saying “I don’t really know if there is a fit here or not, but so we don’t waste your time or ours, I always like to cut to the chase.” Then I gave the high level value prop…something along the general lines (details deleted to protect our client relationship) of “We help companies like yours solve {a very specific problem} with a {very specific benefit}. If we could demonstrate that to you, do you think there may be some value in us {doing business together/building a relationship/whatever the outcome of ‘yes’ would be}”?

All of a sudden the conversation turned around. The VP said “Yes, actually that is definitely a problem for us, and if you can help me out with that, we might have something here”. Now in my 60 second pitch I didn’t mention our (client’s) technology ONCE. Not ONCE. I told them what the technology could DO for them and why they might CARE. And I wasn’t invested in the answer – well I was only invested 60 seconds in the answer. If what we could do/solve for them at a high level was a fit, there would be plenty of time to talk bits and bytes. But why would I waste a bunch of time talking about some stuff they ultimately could care less about? If I was the salesperson I could be using that time to find others that might actually care instead of beating a horse that was dead from the beginning.

I mean, I get it – it is much easier to memorize some product features than it is to translate that into something someone might care about. But until SOMEONE translates the features of a product into benefits that a CFO or other decision maker is willing to pay for – you aren’t making a sale. And if your hope is that by spouting a bunch of features that the prospect will connect the lines themselves…well, think again and then go find another career after your sales career sputters to a halt.