It's Not Luck (26 page)

“Sure,” he smiles at me. “At the very bottom of the drawer. I know.”

22

I’m preparing my presentation for Granby when Don enters my office.

“Congratulations,” I greet him. “Pete just called, praising you to the sky. What have you done to him? Put him under some type of spell, or just used your natural charm?”

He laughs, dearly pleased. “Did he tell you that this morning I got him a nice order?”

“Yes. He mentioned that as well.”

“It was a piece of cake.” Don drops into a chair. “It went by the book. No surprises, not even one.”

“What was it?” I ask. “Why did you play salesman? I thought that you went there to find out why Pete’s sales force is ineffective.”

“Oh, we did. Each of his four salespeople already has a sale under his belt. They love it. They think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. But, you see, after slaving on it for two weeks, I had to see if I could do it myself, not just teach it. So they arranged a meeting for me with a small prospect. Almost a cold call. And it worked like a charm. I really liked it.”

“Maybe you should switch to a career in sales,” I tease him. “Tell me, what was the problem? I’d like to hear it from you. In detail.”

“As you suspected,” he starts, “they simply didn’t know how to present it properly. I think that the biggest mistake was that they started a meeting with a buyer by talking about how great this new offer is. How much it would save the buyer, how low the inventories could be. You know, all the good stuff.”

I don’t get it. “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t it what they are supposed to do?”

“If they want to ruin their chances of getting the sale, yes. Otherwise, no.”

“Don, will you please stop with your riddles and start to explain.”

“I am. Look, Alex. Put yourself in the shoes of a buyer. Here is a salesperson praising his offer. What is your natural reaction?”

“If I’m a typical buyer, I’ll try to play it down,” I say.

“Exactly,” Don concurs. “You will start to object. You’ll object to his claims about how unique his offer is, to his claims about how badly you need it. And if some of his claims seem to be exaggerated, as is the case with our unconventional offer, you will probably express your skepticism.”

“Yes, that’s probably what I’d do,” I agree.

“And the more objections the buyer raises, the less likely the salesperson is to make a sale. This correlation is established by broad-scale studies.”

“You don’t need studies to prove it, every salesperson knows it from experience. So, what are you telling me? That a salesperson should not start by presenting his product? Especially when his offer is non-conventional?”

Instead of answering, he goes to my white board and starts to write a cloud. As he writes, I read it out loud. “The objective is, ‘Bring the buyer to see your product as the best value for his money.’ I hope that you didn’t have any problem convincing Pete’s salespeople that that should be their objective.”

“No, not at all. They’re professionals.”

“Fine,” I say, and continue to read. “In order to ‘Bring the buyer to see your product as the best value for his money,’ you must ‘Show value to the buyer.’ That’s obvious. At the same time you must be careful to ‘Not cause the buyer to object.’ I agree to that also. Now, let’s see the conflict.

“In order to ‘Show value to the buyer,’ you must ‘Present your product.’ Of course. But in order to ‘Not cause the buyer to object,’ you must ‘Not present your product.’ ”

“Remember,” Don hurries to explain, “what we just discussed. You start by presenting your product and instinctively the buyer starts to object.”

“Yes, lovely conflict,” I agree. “No wonder salespeople are dancing between the drops, trying somehow to build rapport with the client, before they go to the real business. So, how did you break this conflict? What are they supposed to do?”

“Pete and I built a detailed Transition Tree for it. Want to see?”

“Sure.”

Don goes to his office to get it. I look at the cloud again. It is generic. Nothing in this cloud is unique to Pete’s case. Maybe Don’s solution is also generic? I hope it is, because this cloud shows to what extent we will face difficulties selling our breakthrough solutions. Since they are, by definition, going to be unconventional, they are bound to cause the prospects to raise many objections.

Where is Don? What is taking him so long?

“I thought it would be better if you had your own copy,” he says as he returns.

I look at the two pages he hands me. A typical Transition Tree: the “how to” tree; the detailed logic of how to transfer from the present into the desired future. At the bottom there are statements that describe the present state of mind of a buyer—that is the starting point. At the top of the second page is the objective, “Congratulations, or in depth analysis of the failure.” How typical of Don to write it like that.

Along the right side of both pages there are several square boxes; these are the recommended actions. Some of them don’t make any sense to me.

“Shall we read it together?” I suggest to Don.

“With pleasure. We started by describing a typical buyer. ‘Many buyers see their job as pretending that they don’t necessarily want to buy.’ ”

I smile. “Yes, there are too many buyers like that. I can’t stand them.”

Don continues to read, “‘Buyers don’t usually have full trust in the salesperson regarding his praises about his products.’ ”

“Nice understatement.”

He grins at me. “Look at the next one, ‘Usually buyers don’t exactly have a delightful history with printing companies.’ ”

“This is not just an understatement, this is a British understatement,” I tease him. “Did Pete write this one?”

“Of course. Now, do you agree that each one of these starting conditions leads to the same conclusion, ‘It is likely that a buyer will greet a conventional presentation of our win-win offer, not with enthusiasm, but with deep skepticism’?”

“Unavoidably,” I agree.

“Now, look at it from the point of view of Pete’s salespeople. They knew that our offer would definitely be a great deal for the buyer. He pays the lowest prices, he is holding surprisingly low inventories and he doesn’t suffer any obsolescence. At the same time, they were far from sure that this offer was good for them. They were not sure at all that they were going to get more sales. Under this frame of mind, how do you think they reacted to the buyer’s skepticism?”

“They are giving him what he really wants and he plays hard to get.” I can envision the situation. It’s funny. “I hope they were professional enough not to give their opinion in too many words.”

“No. Like I said, they are professionals, but there is something called body language. You can imagine that from there the meeting went downhill.”

“Yes, I can. So what did you do differently?”

“The first thing was to guarantee that they would have enough time to present it properly. We made sure that the meetings would be minimum half-an-hour.”

“I see, that’s what you mean by, ‘The salesperson and the buyer meet without time pressure.’ ”

“Correct. Now our salesperson starts by presenting the buyer’s Current Reality Tree.”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “What Current Reality Tree are you talking about? I don’t remember that Pete did any Current Reality Tree. He started directly with the buyers’ cloud.”

“Correct, but as it turned out, we couldn’t escape doing it.” Noticing that I’m still confused, he elaborates. “When Pete developed the solution his intuition was strong enough to allow him to jump some steps. But when we tried to figure out how his salespeople could explain it to the buyers, the only way was to go back and construct all the trees according to our generic map. You’ll see in a minute.”

“So one way or another the entire work must be done. Interesting,” I say, not fully understanding why. “Let me see the Current Reality Tree of Pete’s buyers.”

He hands me an additional page. “No surprises,” he clarifies. “Basically what we discussed when Pete presented his solution to us. At the bottom are the printing company policies, and you see how we rigorously derived all the buyer’s UDEs. The idea is that our salesperson reads it, from the bottom up, to the buyer. Since it begins by pointing the finger at us, the buyer is not displeased with such a start to a meeting. This is important, otherwise he will tell the salesman to cut the crap and give the offer. He will give it, and the spiral down starts.”

“Doesn’t the buyer have problems understanding the tree?”

“Not at all. Why should he? Everyone understands if-then. It is part of our language.”

He is right. I tend to confuse the difficulty of constructing a tree with the difficulty of understanding one. When the tree is written on a subject a person is intimately involved in, nobody has difficulty understanding trees, not even kids. Not even someone who has never seen such a tree before. “Carry on.”

“Then the salesperson supplements it with a numerical example, just to clarify the concept of price-per-usable-unit.” He hands me another page.

“Did the buyers have any problem with that?”

“No, not at all. As a matter of fact, they all regarded it as a very useful concept. They immediately started to use the term. I suspect they knew it all along, what was missing was just the verbalization.”

“I see. So, ‘The buyer follows with interest.’ That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Oh, yes, they commented, they remarked, but not one of them objected to anything in the Current Reality Tree. They simply have too much intuition about their own job.

“Now we reached something really important. You see, the Current Reality Tree vividly shows how the printing company policies make the buyer’s life miserable. Do you know what was the result? The buyers realized that at last there was a salesperson who really understands them.”

“This is a real achievement,” I concur. “I can see how you broke the cloud. Rather than starting by presenting your product, you start by presenting to the buyer his own problems. And you do it in a way that he really appreciates. That’s the way to build rapport. Not based on riffraff but on real substance. You know, Don, to reach this level of rapport usually takes months, even years.”

“I guess so,” he says. “Anyhow, at this stage we found out that the salesperson should, once again, show the direct link between our policies and the buyer’s UDEs. It helps to summarize the page. The result is what you would expect,” and he reads from the Transition Tree, “ ‘The buyer responds with a sigh, a nasty remark, or something similar, but he does not attack the salesperson.’ ”

“Of course, at this stage the buyer knows that the salesperson is on his side,” I agree.

“Right. And now the salesperson explains that we have realized that as long as our policies create problems for the buyer, that by itself is a problem for us. We are simply blocking our own sales.”

“I’m sure that every buyer loved this confession.”

“Yes. Most responded by asking what we were planning to do about it, which opened the door, nice and wide, for the salesperson’s next step. He hands the buyer his Future Reality Tree, saying ‘here are our new policies.’ ”

“May I have a copy?”

“Certainly.”

At the bottom are the injections: Ordering in batches of two months and receiving it in shipments of two weeks; the right to cancel after the first shipment without any penalty or explanation. Don is right. These injections do represent changes to our existing policy.

Don continues to explain, “The salesperson reads to the buyer his Future Reality Tree. This gives the buyer a vivid understanding why these injections will unavoidably lead to the positive outcomes.”

“Interesting,” I say to Don. “You were careful to use only the if-then logic that the buyer already agreed to when you read his Current Reality Tree. That’s smart. It almost guarantees. that he cannot object to it.”

“None of them did, but don’t think that we got the sale at that stage. If you switch back to our Transition Tree, you’ll see the next obstacle: ‘A buyer facing what he perceives to be seller’s generosity becomes suspicious.’ ”

“Naturally. So how did you convince him that there aren’t any snakes in the grass?”

“We decided that the easiest way was to show him a snake. We told him that this was not the entire offer. You see what the next recommended action is? We give the buyer the negative branch.”

“Which negative branch? What are you talking about?”

“Oh, sorry.” He gives me another page.

I take the time to read it. It is the negative branch that I highlighted to Pete; the possibility of the buyer abusing the offer, by declaring a one-shot small order as a big order, getting a lower price-per-unit, and then canceling after the first shipment.

“What was their response to this?” I ask.

“All over the map. But in each case they found a way to trim it. A way that was acceptable to us.”

“I see,” I say. “That way you made the buyer part of constructing the offer. He must have known that at this stage he had actually bought in.”

“Yes,” he laughs. “At this stage it was apparent to me as an observer that the buyer was preparing himself to defend against our salesperson’s closing attack. To overcome it, we tried something unique. We instructed the salespeople to say to the buyer that he probably needs time to think about it, and to suggest scheduling another meeting. This is guaranteed to increase the buyer’s trust in the salesperson, and the offer. But, only in one case was a meeting scheduled.”