Everyone wants to minimize objections, and the Critical Selling framework will help you do just that. In Chapter 8, we'll look at four key skills salespeople can (and should) use to address objections. We'll look at how to handle even those objections that customers have a difficult time articulating. And we'll take a close look at handling price objections, which is one of the trickiest landmines in the selling landscape and one that weighs heavily on the minds of most sales professionals. In addition, we'll discuss why top performers view objections as opportunities rather than obstacles (and why you should, too).
Accepting that it might be time for a new sales approach can be difficult. Change is hard. But top performers who follow the Critical Selling framework understand that it isn't a one-and-done experience. Top performers continually practice planning, opening, discovering, and closing. They reflect and assess. They learn from what works and what doesn't. And, importantly, they keep an open mind to change, to new processes and tools, and to the various evolutions in the world of buying and selling.
Look: we understand that there are a lot of ways to improve sales performance. There are a lot of tools and resources and gadgets and programs that purport to help sales reps win more sales. We know – because research has proven – that the process we'll share with you in these pages is one of the most effective ways to improve sales performance so that you can close more deals, closing them faster and with fewer objections. That's because sales isn't about tools or gadgets or programs. As we said before, sales comes down to the sales professional and the customer – and the interactions between them. Sales is all about executing on the critical moments in the sales process in order to achieve desired outcomes.
Critical Selling provides a proven process that shows sales professionals how to handle those critical moments. This process helps sales professionals improve their customer approach, build trust, shorten the sales cycle, and close more deals. Having trained thousands of sales professionals in the Critical Selling program, and having gained research-driven insight from hundreds of companies and thousands of sales professionals, we've learned a thing or two about what makes the most effective sales approach for today's customers.
Top performers who embrace this process – and practice it regularly – understand that doing so will help their companies, their customers, and their careers. One of the first steps is to understand that having the right mindset is key to improving performance, and we'll look closely at that in the pages that follow. But before we do that, we first need to understand how customers have changed and what that change means for the sales process in general and for sales professionals in particular. We'll look at that next, in Chapter 1.
1
SELLING TO TODAY'S BUYERS: REMAIN CUSTOMER-FOCUSED
Maybe it's changing technology. Maybe it's the still-recovering economy, which in some sectors has yet to bounce back from the Great Recession. Maybe it's increased competition. Whatever the reason, it's useless to deny that sales is changing – and in dramatic ways. Researchers note, for example, that “[c]ompanies are reporting longer sales cycle times, lower conversion rates, less reliable forecasts, and compressed margins.”1
If the selling landscape is changing, so too is the buying landscape. Buying behavior is changing in numerous ways. Of course, today's buyers have always been and will always be different from the customers of yesterday. From the production era to the sales era to the marketing era to the information era, selling and buying have progressed, evolving with changing times, changing needs, and changing technology. It's no different today – except, perhaps, for the pace of change.
Back in the day, sales professionals held all the cards. If a customer needed something, the sales rep provided all the information, educated the customer, and drove the selling conversation. Oh, how the tables have turned.
Today, customers are in large part driving the selling conversation. In fact, many studies have shown, and thought leaders agree, that customers are much further along in the buying process before engaging the sales professional; some reports indicate that customers are as much as 60 percent of the way through their decision-making process by the time they connect with a sales rep.
The implications of these findings are no less than earthshaking. In addition to changing technology, a challenging economic climate, and increased global competition, sales professionals today now must deal with customers who are much further along in the decision-making process, who are much more educated, who are technologically savvy, and who are busier than ever. Customers often know what they want and have an idea of what it should cost as well as how long it should take to get it. They know what you and your competitors can offer, and they might even understand how the products and services you can provide vary from your competitors' products and services.
As a result, it's becoming harder and harder to differentiate yourself and your organization by what you sell. Products and features, options and benefits, prices and specials – despite all the various nuances that might make what you sell at least a little bit different from what your competitors are selling, the truth is it is much more difficult to differentiate on these points. Therefore, today's sales professionals face an important challenge: how to differentiate themselves from all the other sales professionals out there who are selling similar products and services for similar prices.
This is a critical point: in order to succeed, today's top-performing sales professionals must find ways to differentiate themselves. They do this by providing value in how they sell, not just by what they sell. They differentiate themselves by how they build credibility with their customers, by how they nurture customer relationships, and by how they become trusted advisors. In doing so, they can better sell to today's demanding buyers.
Throughout these pages, we'll discuss how these changes have affected the selling conversation, and we'll look at how applying the steps in the Critical Selling framework will help you accelerate the sales process and close more deals, all while remaining focused on the customer. We'll look at planning, opening, discovering, presenting, and closing. And we'll look at overcoming objections. But for now, let's focus on what it takes to sell to today's customer. Because the bottom line is that, despite all the changes, selling is still all about the customer.
That means that today's sales professionals have to focus on the customer. Our research has shown that top performers do several key things to remain customer-focused: they use the right sales approach in dealing with customers at whatever stage they are in their decision-making process. They understand how customers perceive them. And, finally, they work to become trusted advisors. But before they can do any of that successfully, they first have to recognize (and accept) the fact that buyers have changed.
Recognize That Buyers Have Changed
Yesterday's paradigms and yesterday's customers and yesterday's selling approaches no longer apply. Sales and selling are evolving, largely because buyers and buying are evolving. In many cases, buyers are bringing sales reps in much later in the process (the extent to which this happens depends in large part on the complexity of the sale). By some measures, most of the traditional sales process is already done by the time a customer even contacts a sales rep. Forbes recently noted, for instance, that about “57 percent of the sales process [has] just disappeared.”2
Faced with such data, it is useless to deny the facts that sales is changing and that customers have changed. Today's customers have little desire to have their hands held by sales reps who usher them through a lengthy decision-making process. Rather, buyers already have access to a lot of information, and chances are they've figured out