Sunday Sales Tip #2: Pull, Don't Push

The biggest problem with the word "sell" is that it gives the mistaken impression that it's something you can actually proactively do.

Consider this... there are plenty of people who buy stuff all day long without a salesperson (no, cashiers don't count as salespeople). On the other hand, no sale ever occurred without a product/service and a buyer. Remove the buyer, and there's no sale. Remove the salesperson, and there may still be a sale, or maybe not. But you need to realize that as a salesperson, you're non-essential to the transaction. The deal is not between you and the customer, but between your product/service and your customer. You're just a facilitator.

No legitimate sale ever occurred until a customer was ready to buy the product/service at the price offered. But surely salespeople are more than just price negotiators, right? What exactly is it, then, that salespeople actually do?

If the customer were completely ready to buy, they would have just placed the order. So the fact that you're "selling" means that they still have some barriers on their end. Odds are that many of them have very little to do with you and your product, but with things like their internal politics, fear over making a bad decision and it affecting their job, competing budgetary considerations, etc. Your job is not to sell them anything, but to help them identify those barriers that they may not even yet be consciously aware of and guide them through the process of eliminating them.

That's why fundamentally, pulling is a better approach than pushing. That's not to say that pushing never works, but pulling generally works better, and most importantly, leaves the customer feeling good about their decision. Rather than push information about your product onto the customer, rather than drown them in a flood of features and benefits, rather than throwing everything you've got at them and hoping something sticks -- instead ask open-ended questions that help them identify those barriers and how they're going to overcome them. Get them to tell you how they are going to buy your product.

Author and sales trainer Sharon Drew Morgen calls this approach "Buying Facilitation®", and has built her system around this core principle. Here are some of the questions she suggests:

1. How are you and your Decision Team going about taking care of this problem (internally/with the product you've been using until now) so you don't need an external resource?
2. What has stopped you from using this internal fix until now? or What is stopping you from having the success you've had with that product until now?
3. At what point would you know that you might need to seek an external/additional solution?
4. What criteria will you and your Decision Team need to assess before you make a joint decision? What baseline will you all be using for that criteria?
5. How will you cut through any political problems you all face that would get in the way of aligning together?
6. What specifically will you need to see from an external provider/new product to know it would meet your criteria ( for example, technology integration, service, human acceptance, interdepartmental politics)?
7. How would you know that working with us or buying our product/service would meet those criteria?

Rather than just having them regurgitate information ("What's your budget?", "What are you using now?", "When do you plan to make your decision?"), this style of questioning helps both you and the customer remove the barriers and allow them to buy.

Here are some other articles by Sharon Drew Morgen to help you understand this approach:

Facilitating the Discovery Process

Why Information Isn't Enough

How to Get the Decision You Want in Difficult Times

Laying the Groundwork for Successful Client Engagements