The Uncanny Value-Add Conundrum

The “Uncanny Valley” theory suggests that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. Essentially what this means is that as robots appear more and more like humans, we evaluate them similarly to how we would evaluate a human. However, these robotic entities cannot quite ‘pull-off’ being a human, which elicits uneasy and strange feelings from the evaluator. On the other hand, when a robot entity is clearly a robot, that evaluation never takes place, so there is no apprehensive, uneasy feeling produced. This is relevant for us because sellers; who are almost exclusively humans…regardless of what others may think of them, run the risk of falling into a similar trap by robotically proceeding through preconceived conversation starters and discovery questions, rather than acting like real human beings and adding value to their conversations with customers. Adding value to a conversation is a simple social skill that we all do in our everyday social interactions.

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I once had a sales manager who asked to join an in-person meeting of mine. This manager had never come to one of my meetings, so I did not know what to expect. He prepared a list of questions that he wanted to get answered by the client, which made sense. Some of the questions were overly simplistic, and some were overly technical, and we talked about how that would affect the conversation, but what we did not discuss was the structure and approach of the discovery session itself. The structure and approach was very influential in shaping the client's feelings about us, and had a much more significant impact on the quality of the meeting than the content itself.

The meeting did not go well. We had a captive audience with the entire executive team of a fintech firm with money to spend, and we missed a big opportunity. This was about 13 years ago, and I was a much less experienced seller at the time, so I am by no means claiming that I would have ‘nailed it’ had I led the meeting. However, I knew in the moment that it wasn’t going well. I would even call part of the interaction cringeworthy, and it was pretty clear as to why. My sales manager had prepared a list of questions, and he went through the list in order, robotically, calling out that he had a list of questions and that he wanted to learn as much about them as possible. That was his singular task in that part of the meeting.

Bear with me here because this point is important in evaluating ourselves as sellers and sales teams. The problem was not the learning; customers want you to learn about them. The problem was not the questions; customers like to talk about themselves and answer questions. The problem was the long list of uninterrupted questions that were openly discussed as a way for us to gather as much information as possible. It was the approach a robot would take; singular focus on a goal to the exclusion of all else; until that goal is achieved. It lacked the human conversational quality of give and take. It made the evaluator uneasy.

I could feel the collective eye-rolls and sighs in the room. We had sucked the life out of the room, and we did it by leaching off of their knowledge through our questions without adding any value of our own. Why would that client ever need to, or want to talk to us in the future if all of the information and value-add was only headed in one direction; towards us.

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Presentations are different than conversational meetings and they serve different functions. Presentations are one-way affairs. They are scripted and not meant to simulate or evoke feelings similar to social interactions. They are not conversational; they don’t reflect normal interpersonal behavior, and they are seen as such. However, as sellers try to turn meetings from presentations into conversations, they run the risk of getting close enough to normal interpersonal interaction without getting all the way there, and that makes them seem robotic. More precisely, this mis-step makes sellers seem like robots impersonating humans, trying to pull-off normal human interaction, and THAT is the Uncanny Value-Add Conundrum.

The most important part of a sales cycle is learning, but every time you ask a question, you capture value from the buyer without adding any to the conversation yourself. You must add value in order to be perceived as a true consultative resource for the client and gain the ability to influence the decision. So, how do you balance learning vs. adding value?

Asking questions and truly listening to answers is the most important part of every sale, but as a seller you have two jobs in the early stage of a sale. One is to ask questions, and truly listen to the answers, and the other is to sell yourself. You need to make sure that the buyer wants to talk to you, as a person. The buyer(s) must appreciate the value that YOU, as an individual, can add to the process. That is the only way that you will earn the right to truly be a valued consultant to the buyer and thus have the ability to influence the decision.

Discovery, as a phase in the sales cycle, is a misunderstood concept. As sellers we must be constantly learning, while at the same time adding value. If we are asking too much, we will be seen as leeches, not worth the buyer’s time. If we are adding too much value, we will be seen as pushing too hard, and not understanding the clients business well enough to give tailored advice and solutions, and in many cases they will be right.

It is not a seller’s job alone to add value. Companies as a whole must participate in this. The marketing team must provide insights that can be used in material and by sellers, and sales managers must discuss opportunities with their sellers to help tease out ideas and concepts that can be brought up in conversation with the client.

In their excellent book, “The Challenger Customer”, Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon go to great lengths to describe the process and value of creating a “commercial insight” that can be used by marketing and sales teams to challenge their customers’ pre-conceived mental models. These “commercial insights” can be used to “confront” notions that often lead customers to default decisions like remaining with the status quo. Alternatively, these legacy notions can lead buying teams away from consensus decision making and into an antagonistic cycle that emphasises each internal individual’s issues with the deal. These cycles tend to lead to decisions that focus on lowest common denominators like price and ease of implementation, rather than the actual benefits of the solution and its potential value for the customer’s business. That can lead to suboptimal outcomes for your buyers and lost deals for you.

It is your job as a seller to prepare yourself to add value. To do this, you must think about the areas where you know more about the client’s business than even they do. At first, it may seem like this is not possible since they live and breathe their company. But you see things from an outsider's perspective. You are more easily able to understand their competitors and the broader landscape, because you talk to those competitors. You also have the ability to see how companies in their space are using tools and products, like the ones you sell, to help themselves adapt, and grow, and even rethink well-established industry dogma. Lean on your marketing teams, and sales leadership to help define these insights, and come prepared to add value. Adding value makes you human, and gives you the permission you need to ask questions and learn everything that you need to know from the client in order to make the right deal for them and for you.