Sales and marketing industry experts have been talking about how ineffective Power Point presentations are at building audience engagement and accurately conveying information for years now. Perhaps the most vocal critic is
Edward Tufte, author of the widely acclaimed "Presenting Data and Information" books and lecture series.
So why does it seem that we’re being subjected to more bland deliveries than ever?!
PowerPoint’s failings as a medium for sales presentation have already been well-established. When used in today’s standard fashion, Power Point:
Inhibits engagement and audience rapport,
Muddles the transfer of information, and
Diminishes salesperson effectiveness.
It’s easy to imagine the mechanisms by which PowerPoint inhibits audience engagement – simply think back to the last time you sat through a text-heavy, read-directly-from-the-screen slideshow-style Powerpoint presentation. Basically, when you put all of your relevant information onto slides that can be easily read in advance by your audience members, you eliminate the incentive for them to follow along and actually engage with the information you’re sharing...in fact why bother showing up...you can send it advance, they can read it without you and they can call you if they need you.
At the same time, the physical limitations of a poorly-given PowerPoint presentation diminish rapport and reduce message retention. Because most PowerPoint slides are read – word-for-word – by their presenters, a connection (which is often founded on eye contact and body language) can’t be formed between audience and presenter. The result – as you might expect – is a room full of tuned-out attendees, discreetly trying to check their mobile devices instead of listening intently to your pitch.
Overall, though, the biggest hindrance to salesperson effectiveness is a reliance on Powerpoint to tell their story. In many cases, Power Point encourages
comfort-zone selling. After all, there’s no reason to learn and master delivery of your company’s sales message when it’s printed on slides right in front of you!
An illustration of why this matters, imagine two sales people – one who depends upon a PowerPoint presentation to lead client meetings and one who’s embraced his company’s sales message to the point where he’s comfortable expounding upon it in a free-form manner.
Which of these sales people do you think will be better prepared to deliver an effective conversation with a buyer in the face of unforeseen circumstances (for example, a lost USB memory stick or a broken projector)? Which do you think will be better prepared to ad-lib when needed in order to address unique or unexpected questions and concerns brought up by prospective customers?
The bottom line is that, if you’re relying on Power Point to give your sales presentations, you’re leaving an awful lot of opportunity on the table!
So if you can’t use the corporate world’s most treasured presentation tool, what options exist when it comes to delivering engaging sales presentation without Power Point? Consider any of the following options:
Whiteboard Selling
As a partner of Whiteboard Selling, I'm a user of the methodology, author of nearly 30 whiteboards and have trained thousands of salespeople to use the whiteboard to tell their story. I still use Powerpoint from time to time, but merely to project an image...I am telling the story, it's my ideas and me that people have come to see and listen to.
The whiteboaring presentation style works because it appeals to both the left and right sides of our brains. The hand-drawn illustrations delight our visual sense, while spoken words and facts give our analytical sides the data they need to be satisfied. The result is a message retention rate that’s much higher than audio or visuals alone – not to mention, significantly improved over traditional Power Point presentations.
As an added bonus, whiteboarding creates more effective sales people. What happens when a company adopts whiteboard storytelling as its presentation and buyer engagement medium? When sales management executives hold their sales team accountable to achieving mastery and then certifies them as competent and confident in delivering the whiteboard story, they elevate the performance of their sales team. When sales representatives know their story inside and out, - I call it the Zen state... they can engage buyers and influence opinions through delivering relevant information in a seemingly-casual manner.
Message ownership means that salespeople can engage buyers in conversations that are relevant to each client’s needs – anytime, anywhere.
Hands-on Demonstrations
Another effective alternative to PowerPoint is the hands-on demonstration.
Obviously, this style won’t be a possibility for all products or services, but it’s a great option if you are selling, hand-held or portable items or software. Marketing experts like to say, “Show me – don’t tell me,” and there’s a reason for that. Giving prospective customers the opportunity to interact with your product in a live environment is one of the most engaging, effective ways to showcase capabilities and guage buyer interest.
Conversations
Conversations where salespeople lead with an informed opinion about the buyer condition are extremely effective. Simply sitting down at the conference room table and telling your future customers, “Let’s talk about your business,” is an easy-to-implement alternative to traditional Power Point slideshows, disarms the buyer and creates wonderful opportunity for rapport and trust to develop.
The benefits of this approach are two-fold. Not only do people love to talk about themselves (and will be flattered that you care more about their individual needs than about sticking to a standard or custom Powerpoint whipping), leading with an opinion backed by your and your company experience opens up a World of possibility that you may never achieve in presentation mode.
By taking the time to actually engage your prospective customers – rather than berate them with boring slides and empty talking points – the odds that you’ll be able to build rapport and convey your sales message effectively increase significantly.
Whiteboard Selling is now a part of Corporate Visions.
Effective Friday 31st August 2102,
Corporate Visions now owns Whiteboard Selling. Whiteboard Selling co-founders, Corey Sommers and David Jenkins and their affiliate partners have developed over 500 whiteboards over the past 5 years for more than 50 companies. The whiteboard stories are used to help salespeople own their value creation message and to engage buyers in conversation, without using PowerPoint slides.
YOUR VISUAL STORYTELLING JUST GOT BETTER
The strength in the Whiteboard Selling approach is in capturing a companies
value proposition in a visual story. Whiteboard Selling creates a
visual story and synchronized script that salespeople can quickly learn to tell in a 1/2 day workshop, so that they are more confident in front of customers and their conversations are more consistent across the company. A well constructed Whiteboard story will enable salespeople to engage buyers around their issues to answer that question and that makes the conversation compelling for the buyer.
Visual StoryTelling hits a Tipping Point in Sales
This acquisition signals a tipping point in the adoption of visual storytelling in sales and a recognition that the old ways of selling, led by questioning technique that looked for pain, coupled with PowerPoint presentations that laid out the solution to the buyers problem are over.
The integration of Corporate Visions messaging process and the Whiteboard Selling visual tools is an ideal fit in a new acquisition for Corporate Visions.
Take a look at
Selling Power's Top 10 list of sales training companies in 2011 and drill down on their approaches. About half are rooted in traditional question-based consultative selling which I contend is obsolete, of the other half, some are getting started in storytelling, but very few have the clarity of Corporate Visions, with their focus on messaging and conversations to equip salespeople to disrupt the status-quo, who now have the visual tools to effectively engage buyers.
The Majority of Salespeople are Spectators in the Buying Process
Anyone in selling today will admit that the selling process has given over to the facilitation of a buying process. This means that most B2B salespeople are unwilling spectators in a buying process which has disintermediated all but the salespeople who are able to connect with buyers, engage in conversation around their issues and develop trust and influence as consultants first and salespeople second.
But what specifically are the 13% of successful producers in the Sales Benchmark Index report doing that is different from the core group? Research shows that these salespeople have highly evolved interpersonal communication skills and emotional intelligence and are using stories to engage buyers… either because they are story-telling naturals or because they have learned and mastered the techniques.
This is the essence of the Corporate Visions approach and combining visual storytelling tools from Whiteboard Selling gives customers of both companies a complete methodology to help improve the performance of the core group. Naturally nothing happens without disciplined practice, coaching and feedback from sales management teams, and that is also part of the methodology.
I’m here in Boston for #Inbound12, with 2800 HubSpotters, customers and partners at the World’s largest gathering of Inbound Marketers, for 3 days of meetings, presentations, tutorials and networking with the HubSpot community.
View from my hotel of the Charles River and Cambridge
Keynotes from Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, co-founders of HubSpot on Wednesday highlighted the momentum that HubSpot is building in the market and the increasing velocity of the Inbound Marketing movement.
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah took the stage for 90 minutes to announce HubSpot3 and demonstrate the new product capabilities that will enable marketers to easily create marketing that people will love.
The First 6 Years
HubSpot is just 6 years old and has been the leader and visionary in the movement to transform marketing from the traditional interrupt-driven marketing forms of direct mail, advertising, email marketing and telephone solicitation to opt-in, individual inbound engagement.
Halligan stated that the first 6 years of HubSpot were all about building a software platform for inbound marketing that would pull people into the sales funnel with great content. In just 6 years HubSpot has created a customer base of nearly 8,000 customers, a partner and services market-place that is now selling and supporting 25% of the HubSpot revenue stream and through the API, delivering nearly 80 value-added applications and completing more than 5,000 service projects.
The Future
In the next 6 years, HubSpot is focusing on how to use context to pull people through the funnel and create marketing that people love, - in the same way that Amazon does… relevant messaging at the right time. Amazon achieves this through the integration of front and back-end processes and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the capability.
Halligan highlighted the problem in the marketing software industry and the reason why marketers were still using old methods and it's because the software required for doing this is not connected and runs on different systems and it’s just too damn hard to make it work. Then he announced the fruit of the past 12 months of development effort, HubSpot3 and handed the stage to co-founder Dharmesh Shah.
HubSpot3 Highlights
Shah likens Hubspot3 to an iPhone for marketers , everything you need, beautifully integrated at your fingertips, (he also announced HubSpot for the iPhone and demonstrated 3 of the most important HubSpot applications).
HubSpot3 boasts 100 new capabilities, some of which were demonstrated in the 6 new applications that form part of HubSpot3. The central capability being a single new contacts database that captures everything about a contact. I have been using a number of the these new capabilities for the past several months as part of the HubSpot Beta program and I love the elegance, ease of use and integration of HubSpot3.
My message to marketers who are on undecided as whether to jump into the inbound marketing water is, now is the time and HubSpot is the platform.
Core applications in HubSpot3 are;
Contacts Database
Capabilities from basic information, CRM and importing data, custom fields, drag and drop, visitor tracking, a Facebook inspired timeline, email and social interactions.
Social Publishing
New capabilities include bookmarklets, ability to publish from multiple accounts to multiple networks, suggested times to publish and schedule posts, social analytics, social contacts, retweets, likes and the ability to see who in your customer base is interacting.
Landing Pages
The Landing pages module is elegant and creating new landing pages takes minutes, with pre-populated, beautifully designed templates or the ability to import your own, require no coding, are optimized for conversion and development is drag and drop with live preview. Smart forms that remember if you have completed a field in the past and remove it from the conversion form, enabling a visitor to get your offer with just their email address.
Calls to Action Buttons
I have been using the new CTA module and it is really easy to create or import CTA’s that look professional. CTA's are located in a central dashboard, with A/B testing that’s super easy to build, along with click and lead tracking analytics. A neat feature if you discover from testing that one CTA converts much better than another is the ability to change out all of the CTA’s you have developed that could be resident on dozens of pages from the dashboard with one click.
Email
The email tool is completely new and better than any of the competitive toolsI have used recently. No more exporting lists to run in someone else’s email tool. The email tool comes with dozens of beautifully designed templates, it’s designer friendly, and features a single page view and floating live preview, it enables easy personalization, uses the same Calls to Action buttons and makes social sharing easy.
Workflows
The new workflow module is a killer-app that will really appeal to users of the traditional marketing automation platforms. Users want marketing programmed email and offers that are relevant, insightful and that create value, - they are receptive to the right offer at the right time. While traditional marketing automation platforms have promised this, they are too hard to use and customers have typically spent in excess of $50K on consulting to try and make them work. The new workflow module enables, development of workflows based on behavior from simple form submissions, email interactions, social engagement, offline engagement and will enable you to update the CRM, update a lead score, set a lifecycle stage, or change a call to action.
Conclusion
There are plenty of competitors to HubSpot that mimic HubSpot’s language and do pieces of the inbound marketing puzzle - and you can get the job done by cobbling all of them together. But it takes time, effort, coding, developers and I don’t care how much money you pour into your old marketing automation platform, it’s not going to give you what HubSpot does today.
Bottom line, HubSpot enables marketers to get more done in less time, with less effort and lowers the cost per lead.
HubSpot is innovating faster behind a powerful vision – “create marketing people love” and delivering software with the power that you need and the ease of use to make it easy. Time to get on board.
As a sales professional, you know that there are three possible outcomes for every sales encounter with a buyer. In the best-case scenario, you end up closing the deal, or in complex sales, you get an advance to the next step. But what about the deals you forecast to close, how many of them actually do close?
The marketing World is always evolving, and one of the most notable shifts in recent years has been the move from the outbound marketing era's “top down” branding approach to the more inclusive buyer-centric messaging favored by savvy startups, marketing innovators and companies utilizing inbound marketing to drive sales.
Billions of dollars are spent in the technology business every year to bring sales and support people together for
sales kick-off events to start the new sales year.
These events are a celebration of the achievements of the prior year and offer a chance to; recognize individual performers, refresh on corporate strategy, a product update, and often a product training session.
Apart from a good time and hangover to remember, salespeople typically leave the kick-off event with little more than they came with. Despite best intentions of organizers, this is sadly the case and sales and marketing leadership need to take a more qualitative approach to planning kick-off outcomes.
Why Bother with a Kick-off?
This is a good question and one that event planners and sales leaders are finding increasingly difficult to answer. Cisco has saved a small fortune since they scrapped their nation-wide kick-offs, which are now held virtually in regional offices. A day of speeches and death by executive PowerPoint presentations over a videoconference to remember - I'm told (not).
Given the huge investment in time and money to stage a kick-off and the risks involved, salespeople should take something home of value that they can use as soon as they return to work, other than the memory of a good time.
Don't Bother with Traditional Product Training
Product training on a newly announced product, a recently acquired companies product, or a refresher on existing product is often a driver for bringing sales team's together for an event and part of the business case to fund kick-off events.
The trouble with traditional product training, despite best efforts of the product
management/marketing team is that salespeople will not begin to sell the new product in the volumes the company would like until at least 12 months after introduction - on average.
To get true product ramp time, we need to add the time it takes for the core group to get comfortable selling the new product (6 months), to the time it takes for the sales cycle, from lead to close and let's use 6 months as an average cycle time in our example.
Let's assume that the sales team has an
inbound lead conversion system that works and a supply of sales-ready leads are available from the day they are trained in selling the new product. Using a
traditional product marketingroute it will take about a year to get the core group to sell-though... so at the next kick-off, the product management team will finally start seeing the results they sought in the prior years kick-off.
I looked for a study on ramp-times for B2B software products after introduction and the closest thing I could find was this chart from
CSO Insights 2012 Sales Performance Optimization survey of more than 1500 B2B companies.
Visual Storytelling & Role-playing
Question: What if you could cut 90-120 days from the new product ramp time? - what would that do for your revenue and profit?
Question: What if you could embed a process into new hire training and use it at your next kick-off to get everyone trained and capable of selling the product, the day after training?
In these enablement sessions, salespeople engage in intense 1:1 role-playing sessions using
visual storytelling and a visual confection that is fully scripted and peppered with best practices discovery questions, common objections and counters to those objections.
At the end of the session, salespeople will have seen or presented the visual story up to 9 times and they know the story and can engage customers the next day. We have received numerous emails with feedback from successful salespeople who have used the visual confection in the weeks following the training to identify and close multi-million dollar deals.
Sales Management and Coaching Follow-up
As with any behavior change initiative, disciplined practice, coaching and feedback from sales managers in the weeks and first few months after a visual storytelling event are key to getting ROI and cutting the ramp time for sell-through of new products.
Without coaching and regular practice/use of the visual confection and script, salespeople may revert to their comfort-zone and to leaning on PowerPoint to tell their story. We recommend creating an expectation in the sales team that the Visual storytelling approach is here to stay and not an option and they will be required to pass a certification role-play in front of their managers.
I’ve developed a conditioned reflex when I know I’m going to have to sit through a PowerPoint presentation. After nearly two years of working on
whiteboarding to communicate with buyers instead of presenting to them, I feel a certain uneasiness and find myself shifting in my chair, stomach sometimes churning and often - my jaw clenching when the presentation starts.
This is a conditioned response and natural reaction to the way the majority of
sales and marketing presentations unfold; the slides are dense and chock-full of words, the medium is dull, the delivery is product-centric and tedious and the presentation style is generally uninspiring – exactly the type of atmosphere you want to avoid when trying to inspire people to action!
However, I recognize that there are certain situations in which PowerPoint is unavoidable. Conference organizers may require that presenters deliver information using the same slide template; corporations may insist that you use the corporate slide deck or potential customers may specifically request a PowerPoint presentation.
In these cases, how can you use a PowerPoint presentation without boring your audience to tears or losing out on the engagement levels that other delivery styles allow?
Here’s one rule that’s worthy of repeating –
“Never give a presentation you would not want to sit through.” (Nancy Duarte)
In truth, it is possible to create engaging PowerPoint slides, but it takes a lot more effort than most people think. Unfortunately, because the vast majority of presentations are created the night before they’re used, preparation is rushed, the ideas are jammed-up against each other and it’s no wonder the majority of them fail to achieve their intended outcomes.
The worst offenders are often our sales and marketing leaders, who beat us over the head with bullet after bullet at the
annual sales kick-off meeting. By avoiding their example and adhering to the following guidelines, you’ll increase your odds of both connecting with your audience in a delightful, authentic way and delivering a message that’s both well-received and retained.
Lesson #1 – Be prepared to present naked.
Recently I read "
The Naked Presenter" and recommend it for its simple message to all presenters. Here is a partial list of the things that have gone wrong for me as I began presentations in my selling career;
The bulb blows on the projector just as you are getting started and there is no spare
Your computer crashes on slide 3,
The projector is weak, just not enough Lumens,
There’s too much ambient light to make out the slides?
At your kick-off, the sales people are either jet lagged or hung-over and come in late and fall asleep,
Or worse still, the buyer comes into the room and says, I'm sorry, something has come up, I've only got 10 minutes.
You didn't allow yourself enough time to get to the buyers office to complete set-up and test 30 minutes in advance of the scheduled meeting and you are stuffing around with the projector and cables when the buyer and his team enter the room and valuable credibility is lost.
When it comes to giving a sales presentation, many things can go wrong – and often do...particularly difficult to overcome is the opening, "I've only got 10 minutes" statement. (Which is why salespeople need to create a
visual confection of their story printed on high quality paper, that can be pulled out in this case and the buyer can be engaged and walked through.
If you think about your presentation objectively, you’ll realize that it’s just a visual aid to help you to convey concepts. In fact,
you are the presentation– it’s you they came to see. As a result, you should be able to present your ideas without the laptop or PowerPoint, as you never know what type of situation you’ll encounter when you arrive for your presentation.
To prepare for this, imagine walking into the room naked… It’s just you, but it’s O.K. because everyone else is naked too.
You don’t have anything other than what God gave you – and you’ve got to use these skills to create a connection and convey your ideas without the crutch of Power Point or other tools. To see how this can be done (except without actual nudity), go to the
TED Talks website and listen to the passion, emotion, conviction and insight that these speakers bring, using minimal visual aids to make their points.
Lesson #2 – Less is more
One temptation with Power Point is the propensity to add more information than is truly necessary and I think this is part of the problem; PowerPoint is really easy for presenters to use and create slides.
Since adding more information is as simple as clicking the “New Slide” button, many presenters fall into the trap of addressing multiple story lines within the same presentation – leading to disjointed, muddled messages and sides loaded with every possible feature/benefit.
To prevent this from occurring, start by outlining what you want to say in your presentation, pen and paper will suffice or even the outline view in PowerPoint, but I prefer using a mind mapping tool. I use and recommend
Mindjet, but there are many tools out there that can facilitate this process.
From the thoughts that you write down, select one major story arc, along with no more than a handful of key takeaway points you’d like your audience to remember.
Ultimately, delivering a single, compelling message will be more effective than going on various related tangents. If you can’t say what you want to say in between ten and absolutely less than twenty slides, you haven’t put enough thought into your structure and slides, meaning that you need to narrow it down even further.
Lesson #3 – Focus on audience members’ emotions
As a general rule, people want to be sold. They come to presentations with both their left- and right-brains open to new information – hoping to be both entertained and informed by a magical combination of your insight, relevance to their situation, core capability to assist and an urgency in your message, underpinned your intellect and emotional connection.
The key to developing a strong emotional appeal within your PowerPoint presentation is to figure out what your audience really cares about ahead of time by creating a mini “
buyer-persona,” if you like. By understanding who your audience members are; their goals and challenges and the pressures and issues they face on a daily basis, you can connect to what they really care about, and you’ll be better able to craft an emotional argument that engages both sides of their brains.
Lesson #4 – No “product speak”
Features and benefits are dead. Buyers don’t care about features and benefits – they care about
gaining insight from you and getting their needs met. This means tailoring your presentation to the audience. The only relevant information is the capabilities your product or service brings to the table in the context of the buyers problem and your opinion on how they can take advantage of those capabilities to achieve positive results, backed up with proof points.
If your presentation doesn’t make these capabilities absolutely clear, you risk losing out to audience members who prefer the status-quo.
Lesson #5 – Address all learning styles
Additionally, when crafting your PowerPoint presentations, keep in mind that people interpret information in different ways. I’m a big fan of using the
4-Mat method for this purpose, as it allows me to address important
“Why,” "What," “How,” “When,” and "What If” questions in a logical way to capture audience attention, educate listeners, extend the conversation and refine understanding in a way that different learning styles can all benefit from.
Of course, you don’t have to use this methodology. What’s most important is that you account for the possibility that different audience members may take different pieces of information from your presentation if you don’t account for their varied learning styles.
Lesson #6 – Limit text to an absolute minimum
According to Seth Godin, PowerPoint slides should feature no more than
six words apiece. If that sounds overly stringent, that’s good – the idea here is to challenge the existing presentation status quo in the way that viewers will best respond!
To fill in the blank spaces where your words used to be, add evocative pictures that reinforce the points you want to make on each slide (which should be printed on hand-held cue cards – not on the slides or slide notes sections themselves – if necessary). Using images in this way enhances understanding by creating the cognitive connection that occurs when words and visuals are in alignment.
Lesson #7 – Practice, practice, practice
Once you’ve got your newly-effective PowerPoint presentation up and running, take the time to practice it over and over again until you own it.
Knowing your story and slides inside-out will free you from the dependence on Powerpoint to tell your story, enabling better connection with your audience and allowing you to "present naked".
Lesson #8 - Engage your Physiology and Voice to convey emotion.
Check out this great video from
Topher Morrison, that demonstrates how to use your overall posture and your hand/arm gestures effectively to convey emotion. The Satir categories work at an unconscious level and are very powerful non-verbal communication cues:
Non-Verbal Communication—Satir Categories Virginia Satir was one of the World’s first family therapists.
She was extremely successful at intervening in family relationship issues and family counseling. She observed and categorized the following 5 patterns which are extremely powerful non-verbal communication gestures that we can use in presentations to connect and convey both emotion and believability when communication with individuals 1:1 or groups.
The Leveler Physiology: Symmetrical physiology, palms down, moving in a downward direction from inside the trunk profile, then outward and held stationary for a few moments.
Meaning: “This is the way it is”, This is true” (Very powerful when done by Women). Learn to use Leveler to profoundly make a point...don't over-use it or it will lose its power.
The Placater Physiology: Symmetrical open physiology, palms up, moving in an upward and outward direction
Meaning:
“I want to please you”, “I need help”, “ I’m open and honest”. "Help me." Politicians use this one all the time.
The Blamer Physiology: Pointing finger, leaning forward.
Meaning: "It's your fault” "It's down to you". Be careful with Blamer and never point directly at anyone.
The Thinker (Computer) Physiology: Hand on chin other arm folded across chest, university lecturer stance, Rodin’s ‘the thinker’, voice flat and expressionless…like a computer.
Meaning: “In the authority”, “I’m reasonable”, logical and sensible”, “here’s the facts." Use Thinker when taking questions.
The Distracter Physiology: Asymmetrical physiology, incongruent, off centre, goofy
Meaning: “I don't know"," It's not my fault", "Who cares anyway?”
Use this when you accidentally said something you didn't mean to say, to distract the audience.
Take-Aways
If you have to use PowerPoint, then these presentation tips should keep your audience members engaged, while ensuring that your most important points are conveyed, understood and retained in the most effective way possible.
If you are interested in exploring an alternative to PowerPoint that uses
whiteboarding or digital paper over the Internet and:
Clearly captures your value proposition,
Helps your sales team own your message,
Enables everyone on the team to tell the same story in 3 or 30 minutes,
Can be used to engage the buyer and briefly explain your story just a few minutes if the meeting is curtailed, then you should take a closer look at the Whiteboardselling process and offerings and we invite you to download the new Whiteboardselling whitepaper.
NLP has its strong proponents and equally strong detractors in the sales training community. If it can’t be measured it must be bunkum is an oft heard rebuke of NLP.
However the scientific community occasionally publishes something that proves and supports the adoption and use of certain techniques that have long been observed and adopted as part of NLP, and when they do - I like to use it so that the skeptics in the audience have the proof they need to take on that particular belief and use the tools.
I have embedded this 2007
Sociometrics video from MIT Prof. Alex Pentland to introduce concepts being discussed in this article. Pentland and his colleagues have come a long way in their understanding of the dynamics of human communication and group interaction since this video was recorded and there are many other videos and studies published and accessible in a few keystrokes.
This post explores the nature of objections and examines their meaning and offers an interactive game at the end of the article to test skills in unpacking the buyers objections and fluffy language.
There are hundreds of ways for buyers to say no to a salesperson, but there are really only four basic objections and all other objections are variants of there four.
The objections in Table 1. are the type of objection we are likely to see early in a sales cycle and very typically when we on the phone trying to advance the sale and set the next appointment.
Objections typically occur when the sales person is trying to advance the sale beyond the buyer's readiness to move to the next step. "I'm not interested" is a variant of I don't have time and usually occurs when cold-calling and having asked the buyer to something they are not ready to do.
Table 1. The Four Basic Objections
B2C
B2B
1. I don't have the time
The timing isn't right
2. I can't afford it
We don't have the budget
3. It won't work for me
It won't work here
4. I don't believe you
I don't trust you = we don't see a fit
What Buyers Really Mean
If we get to the end of the sales-cycle in B2B selling and we get objections like the ones in Table 2. below, we are in big trouble.
Objections are far more likely to come up in the qualification phase or during evaluation, but when salespeople don't listen and miss the buyers comments, questions and feedback, then these questions or concerns typically resurface as objections.
Objections typically occur as a result of unanswered questions that salespeople missed earlier in the sales cycle, which is why
reversing the buyers question is so important.
Table 2. What Buyers Really Mean
1. It won’t work for us!
which means
you have an adversary in the decision group who prefers the status quo.
2. We’re not convinced of the ROI!
which means
either you did a poor job in diagnosing needs, or you should not be in this deal.
3. The timing isn’t right!
which means
we've been wasting your time
4. The project is delayed!
which means
we prefer the competition and are busy talking to them
5. We don’t believe you can deliver what we need!
which means
we are talking to someone else who can.
6. We've decided to proceed with a different project!
which means
a competitor has cleverly changed the ground rules and they are proceeding with them.
7. This needs board sign-off!
which means
we've been wasting your time
I'm grateful to
Stephen Allott who shared the above chart, based on his experience as president at Micromuse. Having sold B2B technology products and services around the World for more than 30 years, I have heard every one of these more than a few times.
With the above chart there are of course exceptions and when there is a trusted advisor relationship and rapport, the buyer may well be telling the truth. Only yesterday I was told by the EVP of a mid-sized technology company that they had corporate initiative under-way, (code for - we're doing an acquisition), that prevented them from focusing on our messaging and whiteboard story development until mid Q4 = a nice way to say "the timing isn't right".
Overcoming the Four Big Objections
The following excerpt is from Wiki "selling technique" "While many sales techniques offer specific advice on how to handle objections and stalls,
Sandler suggests that only the objecting client is able to remove the objection"
I'm in complete agreement with
David Sandler on this one and am not going to offer specific technique to overcome objections...there are hundreds of entries on Google and Youtube if you are interested.
I am offering an exercise in the use of precision language to get salespeople thinking about how to uncover the underlying reason for the objection, so that a conversation can occur around addressing the buyers concern.
Precision in Language Exercise
The following exercise is excerpted from the Selling Psychology section of our
Selling in the Internet Age, Adaptive E-Learning program. It uses a number of linguistic techniques and should be both amusing as well as informative.
Take Aways
Objections are not neccessarily a bad thing during the sales cycle. I would prefer to have objections, that way I know there is interest.
The opposite scenario is proceeding through the sales cycle and getting no objections, which often means that you are being invited along for the bake-off and they are actively engaged with another vendor...who is getting objections.
Language and communication skills are traits of the most successful salespeople. They can be learned and will pay a dividend for those sales people prepared to learn and deliberately practice using them.
Sales books, blog-posts and training courses that offer “consultative selling secrets” and magical closing-techniques, constantly amuse me.
Most of the ideas in these so-called secrets are common sense and have been in practice since the “Fuller-brush man” came a calling.
If there truly were secrets to success in consultative selling or any other form of selling, then nobody would know them. Another myth is "Consultative Selling is Dead", but I will deal with that one another time...clearly it is not.
The truth is that there is a growing body of knowledge around consultative selling best-practices that anyone with a Web browser and an ability to read can access.
Great sales people are great communicators with strong ego-drive and the self-discipline, to do on a daily basis the little things that average sales people do not, that lead to successful sales outcomes.
Consultative Selling Discipline
What really matters in consultative selling and professional selling in general are the understanding, mastery and daily practice of the following disciplines, skills and techniques;
A genuine desire to succeed (fire-in-the-belly) fuelled by realistic short and long term goals which extend beyond your immediate sales goals. (this is no secret)
An ability to control your emotional state; - your physiology, language and focus to produce the results you are seeking
An ability to communicate and to develop rapport with anyone (there are naturals, but these skills can be learned by anyone except those with certain types of autism)
Learning to listen clearly to what people are saying. This means listening for comprehension first, not for clues to competitors or to disqualify. Then to drill through the intellectual smoke-screen and fluff to understand meaning and intent (the use of language and the ability to listen are skills that can be easily learned)
A curiosity to learn and discover what makes people tick and to synthesize new ideas to expand your view and appreciation of the World you live-in.
Diagnostic skills underpinned by the use of best-practices questions that can be learned, which will enable you to chunk the buyer up to get the big picture or chunk down for specificity.
Strong qualification after each meeting, which commits the buyer to acknowledge they are in agreement with your assessment of their situation and to proceed with agreed next steps
Formal sales process which commits the buyer at each step of the sales cycle to disqualify non-buyers early and enable accurate forecasting
Disciplined use of CRM, Knowledge Management and Performance Support tools.
A reciprocal commitment (give to get) from the buyer at every interaction from asking for a demonstration to negotiating an agreement.
An understanding of the buying process and tools and technique to help move the buyer through the Positioning phase (where most opportunities die) in the universal buying process I-M-P-A-C-T
Add to this list, a knowledge of the buyer's business and industry knowledge, that enables the sales person to come the table as an equal and bring insight and an opnion that challenges the status-quo and gets the buyer thinking differently about their issues and your capabilities.
