You Are Not in The Persuasion Business

We live in a world where sales is becoming harder; real sales, the kind where you truly influence the outcome. Truly influencing deals is getting harder because information is becoming ubiquitous. Buyers all read the same things, think about problems in the same way, have access to the same information, and are expected to have fully formed opinions on how to confront problems before ever talking to a seller. They don’t have the organizational political leeway to rethink solutions based on learnings from an outside source, let alone a biased one that is hawking a product. So, in order to improve or maintain their internal standing, buyers use sellers as pawns in the internal story that they tell their organization. The story is about how they, and they alone, understand the problem and the desired solution, and are comparing vendors and prices in a way that will benefit the organization, thanks to their diligence.

This reality was not always the case. Buyers used to need information from sellers, and old sales strategies and playbooks reflect that. In that world, it made sense to talk about differentiators, and unique value, because buyers simply did not know it on their own. But the world has changed, and we, as sellers, have to as well.

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Daniel Pink, a seven-time New York Times best-selling author, who spends much of his time talking about human psychology, and behavior as they relate to business and sales says that sellers are no longer in the persuasion business as they once were. He says that instead, sellers are aggregators of information and must do so in a way that makes their point. He is right, but I would put it differently. The job is no longer to persuade people that our products are better, the job is now to persuade people that we, as human beings, are valuable to them; that we are credible; that we have a point of view that is helpful to their business; and that we have the integrity to help them with decisions regardless of whether it is commercially beneficial for us. We are in the business of positioning ourselves so that when the buyer recognizes an issue with the status quo, they know who to turn to in order to have the best possible conversation about their problems and desired outcomes.

All of this does not mean that we, as sellers, should idly sit by and hope that the buyer gets to that realization on their own. We can be proactive about pointing out problems, and illustrating inefficiencies, but the buyer must come to the point where they recognize and assess the problem before they will decide how to go about fixing it, and the only people they will truly confide in regarding how to fix it are those who have proven credible.

Buyers’ reactions to the consistent barrage of outreach, combined with their unprecedented access to information is simple. They have put up filters and shields to block out salespeople. It is not because they don’t want to talk to salespeople, rather it is because salespeople are talking to them about the wrong things and in the wrong way. Buyers don’t need information and proof of product anymore; they have all of that in spades. They need consultation and analysis of their business and the possible outcomes. Salespeople are talking about the wrong things and leaning on the wrong tools.

There is a huge disconnect between what a buyer in the modern business environment needs and what sellers are talking about, and sellers who don’t pivot are driving a wedge further and further into the problem and pushing buyers away. Twenty years ago, you still had old school sales gurus pushing old tips and tricks but most of them are out of the game now, and people realize that those old tips and tricks don’t work anymore. So, what has replaced them? A whole lot of nothing. Outdated tactics, like The Sharp Angle Close, the Time Limit, and many others, don’t work in a world of information parity, but the world of sales learning and training has not replaced them with an understanding of how to close business given the new world we find ourselves in.

What these closing tricks have in common is that as buying organizations have developed more robust procurement processes, and as information has become more readily available, buyers have become less amenable to tricks and in-the-moment tactics. Not only have buyers had access to stories and information that tells them that these tactics exist, they are exposed to a far greater number of approaches, due to the prevalence of email and video calls, and they simply have more access to information about the seller, their products, their competitors, and the seller’s organization.

This increase in information, and experiences has made it so that many of these techniques have lost their effectiveness. The reason they have lost their effectiveness is because closing tactics are inherently designed to be an end run around the buyer’s filters and defenses, and to work in the moment when those defenses are not present or are ineffective. However, since fewer and fewer decisions are allowed, or able to be made in the moment, by a single buyer, and since many buyers are desensitized to the tactics in the first place, closing tricks and tactics have largely become less effective over time; significantly less effective.

So how is a skilled and thoughtful seller meant to respond to this reality? Management still expects a lot from sellers, and even though traditional pressure closing does not have the same effect it used to, management still expects sellers to be “good closers” and “more aggressive”. They remember the “old days” when there was correlation between aggressiveness and closed deals.

None of this is meant to claim that hard work and thoughtful selling can’t drive better and more sales for individuals and organizations. In fact, reliance on traditional sales principals is the only thing that drives sustained success, but the simple throughline from aggressive and sometimes uncomfortable closing tactics to better numbers just doesn’t exist anymore. The idea that aggressiveness, can drive short term results, just does not manifest in a world of buying committees and greater information parity between sellers and buyers.

We can’t be focused on trying to change individual peoples’ minds about our solutions because people don’t change their mind because you prove them wrong or convince them of something. People only change their mind when their incentive structure forces them to do so. We need a new set of tools and a new mindset that incorporates traditional and proven sales principals, but rethinks closing in a way that is congruent with the changed buyer landscape that we now encounter.

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Sellers used to learn about discovery, and about objection handling, and about relationship building, and then separately about closing, but it is becoming more and more obvious to those in the business that these elements just do not exist as discrete stages anymore.

Discovery, objection handling, and relationship building are consistent parts of the sales process, and no longer discrete stages. They rely on an understanding of the buyer’s business, the buyers themselves, and a broad range of knowledge about competitors, products, and value. While a few well-timed questions, and well-rehearsed responses to objections used to set a buyer at ease that a seller understood their business and was listening, the significant amount of exposure that buyers have had to seller’s overtures have turned good questions, responses, and social forays into trite wastes of time. Good discovery has become about the ability of a seller to earn the right to ask questions, and to show the buyer that they are able to engage in a conversation that is productive at a conversational level. Good objection handling relies on thorough discovery and thoughtful problem development. And, good relationship management takes much more social acuity, and is much less transactional.

And then there is closing. Closing just does not exist as a discrete stage in the process anymore. Of course it exists, but a seller attempting to ‘close’, in the traditional sense of the word, has likely already won or lost the deal; and the ‘close’ will have very little impact on the outcome. Closing no longer happens on the spot, it happens throughout the sales process, and it happens in the mind of the buyer more so than ever before. The buyer comes to the table with more information and more experience, and although sellers can be just as influential, if not more so than ever, it takes a specific type of perception, and opportunism in order to take advantage of those chances to be influential.

Closing is no longer about convincing a buyer to buy, it is about selling your own value to the buyer, as a person. It is about how good of a job you do reminding the buyer about problems and desired outcomes so that they don’t have time to worry about the minutiae of products and solutions. Most importantly, once you have sold yourself, closing becomes about visualization. Specifically, it becomes about helping the client paint a picture in their mind that highlights the problems associated with the status quo and emphasizes the merits of their desired outcome.

Closing has changed, but we can still be influential