- August 9, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When it comes to navigation I usually opt for Waze but sometimes Siri can find a way out of traffic that Waze can’t. On the other hand, try asking Siri to dial a phone number while she’s navigating and you’ll quickly learn that she can’t multi-task. If you are navigating using Apple maps in CarPlay, then Siri will navigate to the address you asked her to call. She gets in the way!
Sometimes Siri doesn’t actively listen and decides to send you somewhere different from where you asked her to navigate; a different city or town and/or a place that doesn’t sound remotely close to what you asked for. She gets in the way.
So what do you do when Siri isn’t cooperating? Do you give up and wing it? Do you try again? Do you stop navigating with Siri and switch to Google, Waze or your built-in system? Do you persist until you get what you need?
That’s exactly what salespeople are supposed to do. Get creative, be persistent and find a way to reach the decision maker. You do it with Siri, so why don’t you do it when someone in the company won’t introduce you to the decision maker, when they won’t give you the decision maker’s name or when they don’t cooperate? Why do so many salespeople give up and plow forward with the contact they are speaking with right now?
Objective Management Group (OMG) has more than 2 million rows of data on this and the science says that salespeople who reach the actual decision maker are 341% more likely to close the business compared with those salespeople who don’t reach the decision maker. It is not only profound, nothing could be more straight-forward!
Also at play is a salesperson’s need to be liked and their fear that if they push, challenge or question it, or if all else fails, they go around this person, said person will become upset, no longer like them, so they won’t get the business. While the feared consequences are outright false, 59% of all salespeople do need to be liked and that gets in the way – a lot.
Something else gets in the way of getting to decision makers and it isn’t Siri. It’s timing! There is a specific moment in the sales process when your odds of reaching the decision maker are stronger than at any other time. It’s like a Tornado. When certain weather conditions exist, those conditions become perfect for a tornado and without those conditions, there is virtually no chance. So it goes with selling. There are certain conditions that make it perfect for getting the decision maker engaged but without those conditions, there isn’t much of a chance.
You must be able to first ask, “Who else cares about this?” and upon hearing the decision maker’s title, ask, “How do we include Mary in our conversation?”
In order to properly time the “who else cares?” question, you must have already discussed something so compelling, so powerful and so impactful, that the “who else cares?” question is the next logical question in the discussion. Asked at any other time and the question won’t fit.
In order for the person you are speaking with to care about getting the decision maker engaged, you must have monetized or quantified their issue to the degree that its cost is many, many times that of your solution. In essence, you are asking who else cares about that much money.
There is a fourth potential reason – salespeople get lazy, take shortcuts, and simply don’t try. I’ve seen it happen with good, veteran salespeople – a lot. The good news is that this particular reason is VERY easy to fix.
Siri might not be able to get you to the decision maker, but using science, ignoring your need to be liked, and getting the timing right will make it 341% more likely that you will close the business.
