It’s one of the oldest questions in the book: How do you make people care about what you have to say? It’s not just about your sales tactics; it’s more about how you’re delivering your prop.
Here’s the hard truth: Most sellers lead with their solution, and that’s why they fail 97% of the time. Why? Because people these days get over 4,000 messages a day and yours is just another one in a pile of unanswered emails/texts/calls.
In other words, we’re overwhelmed with information, so the brain has to filter out what’s important and what can be disregarded. What’s essential to understand here is the criteria behind that filter — how is our brain determining which messages get through?
The messages that are getting through are either related to something we know we need or related to a problem that we know we have. So here’s the key to engaging the decision-maker and sift through the noise with your sales strategy: You need to lead with their whiteboard, AKA you need to lead with what they know they need or by solving the problem they think they have.
Engaging the decision maker is about alignment and not about selling, so we need to find out what’s on their whiteboard. Think about this whiteboard sitting in their office, or hanging on the side of the wall — it’s whatever their plan is for what they want and their plan to get there. And if you can say something related to what’s on their whiteboard, they’re going to pay attention. You’ll get their attention 100% of the time.
Great strategy, but it begs the question: How do you know what’s on the decision maker’s whiteboard?
Well, in a perfect world, you’d have a relationship within the account and you could just ask them. You could ask:
- What does the decision-maker care about?
- What are they working on?
- What are their challenges?
- What are the problems they have?
Then, you could just lead with whatever they say. But in the real world, most of the time we don’t know the answers to those questions. So what we need to do is study the people that we are serving.
Here’s what you need to know: Everybody you serve has a specific role. People in that same role have similar challenges. So if you continue to study them and research and know what’s required to be successful in that role, and what are the biggest challenges they face, you will be able to guess what’s on their whiteboard and your engagement rates will skyrocket.
It’s a simple approach, but it has exponential returns. Let us know how it works for you in the comments below.
Want to learn more about the sales tactics that result in higher returns? Check out our free ebook 5 Surprising Reasons 50% of Reps Are Missing Quota, and tune in for sALES with ASLAN® where we grab a couple of cold brews and chat about a serious subject: selling.
Tom Stanfill
As Co-founder and CEO, Tom’s primary role is to create content that helps people live, sell, and serve more effectively. Find him on LinkedI
