Same Side Selling by Ian Altman & Jack Quarles

Author:Ian Altman & Jack Quarles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781940858074
Publisher: IdeaPress Publishing
Published: 2014-03-29T14:00:00+00:00

One of my client organizations was calling companies for whom they knew they could have a huge impact, but their message was falling on deaf ears. They were seeing a 1 percent response rate. For every hundred calls they made, they got one meeting. Not only was it frustrating, but they also didn’t realize how much the effort was costing them.

They went through a process to define the problems they solve, and now they call using the Entice, Disarm, Discover approach. How do you think their results have changed? They now get a 30 percent response rate. How do you think that approach might affect your type of business?

The third-party story provides a comfortable way to let someone relate to a situation as if he is viewing it from the outside. From this position, the listener can think, “I’d like to have a story like that.”

Educating on the Impact of Your Solution

The third-party story above illustrates the impact that Ian’s solution had on a client. Just as the buyer is more important than the product, the impact of your solution is much more important than the solution itself. Buyers need to understand that you are uniquely qualified to solve their problem, but those qualifications usually don’t come from what you sell or how you deliver. Buyers are most interested in knowing that you understand the problem completely and that you can guide them to a resolution with results.

We’re not saying that the product or service doesn’t matter—of course it matters. But in the conversation about impact, the particulars of your solution and experience have relevance only as they directly relate to either the buyer’s challenge or your solution to it.

In fact, providing too much information about your qualifications and product features presents not just one but two paths to the adversarial trap. First, sellers are more likely to be concerned about disclosing too much sensitive information or to feel like they need to prove themselves. Second, buyers who are presented with too many details can feel like they’re being dazzled and sold to.

Making the solution itself more important than the solution’s impact for the buyer caused a huge loss for a company selling to one of Jack’s clients, as described in the following story.

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