Watch your language. Driving is what we do to sheep. Is that how you feel about your customers? If so, it probably shows. If not, then be careful about the language you use, and the messages it sends.
If you don’t respect your customers, and you don’t show this in every detail, you can’t expect them to respect you. Lack of respect leads to lack of trust, and we all know what that does to sales.
This is a recent email conversation between Kirk Mousley of Mousley Consulting, Carl Ingalls of Embossing Technologies, and Jacques Werth of High Probability Selling. The first email is a broadcast email from Kirk to his mailing list. The remaining emails are between Kirk, Carl, and Jacques.
— From Kirk Mousley, 12 Oct 2010, 12:11pm —
Hi all,
Please let me know if you do not wish to receive any emails from me about updates to my company blog, and I will remove you from my emailing list. I certainly hate spam myself, and really do not wish for people to view this as spam, and I will definitely remove you from the list if you desire.
For those of you that are interested, please check out my very short blog entry on “Working Together” at http://mouscon.blogspot.com/
I would love to know your thoughts!
Kirk Mousley, Ph.D.
President
Mousley Consulting, Inc.
— From Carl Ingalls, 19 Oct 2010, 4:35pm —
Kirk,
The email that you sent out to your mailing list indicates that you have decided to continue to treat the list as an “Opt-Out” list. This means that people somehow get onto your list (whether they chose to or not), and that they have to take action to get off of it.
If you decide that you want to have an “Opt-In” list, you would write to them in a very different way. You would be telling them that, in order to continue to receive blog updates from you by email, they would have to take action to specifically request it.
This is a very tough decision. We are also struggling with it.
We have both kinds of lists. The subscriber list to our blog is strictly Opt-In. The list of people who have purchased something from us is Opt-Out. The first list is extremely valuable. The second is not worth much.
Carl Ingalls 610-627-9030
Embossing Technologies
— From Kirk Mousley, 19 Oct 2010, 4:31pm —
Hi Carl,
There is no question an opt-in list is much better.
My problem is how do you “prospect” with an opt-in list? In my mind, prospecting means reaching out to people that don’t know you.
Kirk Mousley, Ph.D.
President
Mousley Consulting, Inc.
— From Carl Ingalls, 19 Oct 2010, 5:17pm —
Kirk,
I think what you are doing is marketing, not prospecting. Marketing is done with messages that are broadcast to a large number of people at once, where the price per contact is small enough to justify the very small success rates. Prospecting is done one-on-one.
Marketing to an opt-in list has a much higher success rate than marketing to an opt-out list. The size of the opt-out list has to be a huge multiple of the size of the opt-in list before it has any hope of being as effective.
Carl Ingalls 610-627-9030
Embossing Technologies
— From Kirk Mousley, 19 Oct 2010, 5:24pm —
How do you market to get people to opt-in?
I had not really thought there was a lot of difference between marketing and prospecting.
My take is that normally you would get a list and start making calls. That is prospecting.
I suppose one-to-one email would be closer to prospecting but still very low success rate.
Kirk
— From Carl Ingalls, 19 Oct 2010, 11:00pm —
Kirk,
This is an extremely important principle at the core of High Probability Selling. We do not attempt to “get” people to do anything. Instead, we find (or attract) people who want to do it for their own reasons.
There are two very significant problems with the intention to get people to do something.
This principle is also very useful when giving advice to a paying client. I have discovered that my clients are far more likely to take my advice if I make no attempt at all to “get” them to take my advice. When my clients actually take my advice, they get a lot more benefit from me than when they don’t, and they hire me back more often. I believe that this is part of the reason my business has improved so much lately.
Carl Ingalls
— From Jacques Werth, 20 Oct 2010, 10:44am —
Carl,
With some minor changes, this is a very good blog article.
Jacques
— From Carl Ingalls, 20 Oct 2010, 2:36pm —
Kirk,
Jacques suggested that our email conversation might make an excellent post on our blog. I agree.
Do I have your permission to post an edited version of this conversation thread (starting with your broadcast email dated 12 Oct) on our blog? I will send it to you for your approval first (and also to Jacques).
If you are ok with it, I would like to identify you and your consulting company in the post.
Carl Ingalls
— From Kirk Mousley, 20 Oct 2010, 3:58pm —
Hi Carl,
I guess it would depend on how bad I look.
Let me know what you come up with, and we can decide.
Kirk
— From Carl Ingalls, 20 Oct 2010, 4:32pm —
Kirk,
In my opinion, our email conversation presents you in a positive light. I would not want to proceed if it didn’t. Let’s see what Jacques thinks. If he feels the same way I do, then I will put the conversation together and send it to you (and to Jacques) before I do anything else with it.
Carl Ingalls
— From Jacques Werth, 21 Oct 2010, 6:55am —
Kirk and Carl,
It’s admirable that a skilled high-tech consultant wants to learn how to communicate more effectively with his clients and prospects. If we stay focused on that intention, Kirk will come across as who he really is. Mutual respect is already demonstrated in your conversations.
That kind of authenticity is uncommonly interesting to most people.
Jacques
Have you ever noticed that the very top salespeople in the sales force rarely attend the sales meetings that are mandatory for everyone else? Have you ever wondered why?
The usual explanation is that their high sales performance causes them to be excused from having to attend the sales meetings. But what if it’s the other way around?
What if their great success in selling is because they don’t attend the sales meetings?
It’s harder to trust someone whose first thought is to influence my purchase decision. Even if I can see that they only want to steer me toward something they think will be good for me, I know that they are not focused on listening to what I want, and that it’s going to be a time-consuming transaction at best. If I wanted their help in making a purchase decision, I would ask for it.
Trust takes more than just good intentions. Knowing that someone’s intention is to persuade me to go with something that they believe will be better for me is not enough, and especially if they haven’t listened. Many terrible things have been done by people with good intentions. I also need to trust in their ability to hear me well, and also in their ability to make good judgments based upon what they hear. If they start out with anything at all that suggests a desire to influence me, then they have failed on both of those counts.
I would rather do business with someone who listens to what I want and helps me get it, than with someone who wants to change my mind.
High Probability Selling is more about being than doing. It requires a radical change in a person, not just a radical change in action.
Who you are is revealed to other people by what you do. People make conscious and unconscious decisions about who you really are, in response to things you do both consciously and unconsciously. Very few people are fooled when you pretend to be someone you are not. It feels wrong.
We teach High Probability Selling as a sales process, the details of what to do and how to do it. Using this process will change who you are. If it does not change you, it is not likely to work for you.
When you start using High Probability Selling, people will see a new person. This is the kind of person that decision makers prefer to deal with. People who cannot be or become that kind of person usually cannot “get themselves” to follow the process. It feels wrong.
If you want to understand more about this, we recommend that you read the book “High Probability Selling” by Jacques Werth and Nicholas Ruben. It tells the story of a person who is learning, doing, and being transformed by High Probability Selling.
Note: You can read the Intro and the first 4 chapters of the book “High Probability Selling” online.
Being willing to walk away from a deal will get you much better deals. This may be obvious to some readers, but may not be so obvious to salespeople who cannot take “No” for an answer.
Most buyers see an abundance of salespeople in the world. They have no difficulty in walking away from any one of them, because there will always be plenty more. They feel they can afford to be selective, and this reveals confidence.
Many sellers see a scarcity of buyers. They act as if they have to pounce on every opportunity for a sale, even when the chances are slim. They feel they cannot afford to be selective, and this reveals desperation. Salespeople who cannot take “No” for an answer are people who are not willing to walk away, and they pay a penalty for this. For one thing, they have to cut their prices, and then they blame the customer for caring too much about price.
The most successful salespeople see plenty of buyers in the world. They have no difficulty in walking away from any one of them. They just move on to the next person in their list. They are very selective about the people they do business with. As a result, they make more sales and they get better prices.
Author’s note: The theme of this blog article was suggested to me by Linda Sgoluppi in a conversation on Twitter.
We have a new idea for marketing HPS. We are going to use part of the High Probability Selling process as a marketing tool. It’s called the “Conditions of Satisfaction”, and is normally used when closing a sale. One feature of this closing process is total disclosure of all of the known benefits and detriments that a customer might experience from purchasing the product or service. Since it is highly structured and self-explanatory, it may work well for presenting a new product or service on a webpage. We are going to try it, and we hope you will tell us how well it works.
We will use the “Conditions of Satisfaction” closing process to announce and describe a new workshop that will train people how to use the customer’s “Conditions of Satisfaction” to close sales. When the webpages and the workshop are ready, we will announce them on this blog, and that will be within the next few weeks.
(Update on 14 January 2010 – The Conditions of Satisfaction Workshop is described at www.HighProbSell.com/workshops/CoS_Workshop.html)
What kind of marketing would fit with High Probability Selling? A lot of marketing methods are designed to persuade people to buy a product or service, and they often present a very unbalanced picture of the strengths and weaknesses of what they are pushing. This is contrary to the way we train people to sell.
Selling and marketing are different. However, if persuasion and telling less than the whole truth don’t work in selling as well as many people believe, then how well do they really work in marketing?
This is not a rhetorical question. We struggle with this every day, and we really would like to know what our readers think. Many of you have a lot of experience using our selling process, and have a deep understanding of what it means.
We do have a few ideas for marketing HPS, and we will discuss them in upcoming blog posts. Meanwhile, we would love to hear your thoughts.
Do you need to hear a plausible explanation for why something works before you are willing to try it out for yourself? Or is it enough just to know that it has worked for others?
Most selling methods or processes are very logical, and they fit in very well with what most people believe about selling. In fact, most of them are so logical and consistent with common belief, that I wonder if they were designed to be that way. In other words, their primary justification may be that they make sense to salespeople and to sales management.
High Probability Selling was not designed to make sense. It was designed to duplicate what the top performing salespeople actually do. It was discovered completely through observation and careful documentation, followed by testing and measuring the results. If “making sense” had been important, then much of what had been observed would probably have been rejected.
The people who are most successful with High Probability Selling tend to be those who learn by doing, rather than those who learn by thinking. They are willing to try new things. It doesn’t bother them that they don’t have a good reason why the new thing should work, as long as there is a way to try it out without risking too much.
The people who are not successful with High Probability Selling are often those who must hear a very plausible reason for why it should work, before they are able to try it out. Sometimes they attempt to take only the parts they can make sense out of, and try to blend them in with their favorite selling method. The results are often worse than if they had just stayed with the old method.
Most of our past marketing messages have been targeted to the first group, those who learn by doing. Do you think we should also try to address the others, those who learn by thinking?
Do you think that we should try to provide logical explanations for why High Probability Selling works so well?
I’m sure you’ve had a salesperson try to push you into a sale by asking something like, “You do want to make money, don’t you?” How does that make you feel?
A few weeks ago I got a call from a salesman representing a major telephone service provider that wanted my business back. He was eager to send me a quote so he could prove to me that he could save me money.
The next time he called, I thanked him for the quote. I told him I had decided to stay with my current provider, which was a small local telephone service reseller. He asked me who that was, and I told him.
And then, in a slightly derogatory tone, he asked, “Why would you want to stay with them?”
That stopped me cold. It felt so disrespectful. I thought about it a bit. Then I remembered a very important principle.
I said, “I don’t do business with people who talk to me like that. Goodbye.”
Only do business when there is mutual trust and respect.
I once read an article (by Seth Godin I think) about the difficulty of selling something that requires prospects to give up long-held or cherished beliefs. The author had only two solutions for this problem.
There is a third approach that he did not mention, and this is to find people who are already beginning to question their beliefs.
Of course, this is the problem of High Probability Selling. It is based upon several very radical ideas that contradict very strongly held beliefs.
We already know that persuasion is counterproductive when applied in the prospecting or selling process. It also appears to be ineffective in the marketing process. People react negatively to being pushed. The harder you try to convince someone to change their mind, the less they trust you.
So how do we find people who are already questioning the belief that persuasion is a good way to get people to buy from you?