Sales methodologies are supposed to give selling a logical structure. Companies implement them to standardize the sales or “GTM” (🤡) function so they can scale with minimal friction, ideally.
The problems happen when salespeople mistake their company’s sales methodology for how to have a productive conversation.
Most sales methodologies are not designed to be used literally to guide a conversation. For salespeople, at best, they’re milestones or reminders of information that the people who put the methodology in place or created it believe is important to the deal.
While there’s information the company needs for its own processes, not all of it is necessary to moving a deal forward to next steps.
at its core, selling is grounded in 2 things:
The issue the buyer is trying to resolve. Pain (Self Preservation) and Gain (Self interest)
How they’re thinking about the decision to change with or without you
If you want to be efficient and more clear headed, keep those two things at the center of your attention: the issue and the decision.
It’s impossible to give someone your full attention when you’re constantly in your head trying to remember what you’re supposed to say/do next.
All things equal, the salesperson who can stay present while using reasonably good judgment has an enormous advantage over the salesperson who uses the perfect methodology but is stuck in their head.
a lot of you already struggle to stay present (in your body) during sales meetings. trying to remember your methodology, especially in the moment, won’t help you. Better to remember yourself instead:
🐲: I am here. And I notice [my name] doing/thinking/feeling [XYZ]
Consuming more sales methodology will not help you if it outpaces your ability to integrate and embody it.
Look at the top 1-2 salespeople in your company. I bet they often outperform everyone else by a yuge margin.
Watch how they behave in their meetings. How much attention are they giving the buyer(s) in front of them vs trying to remember what they’re supposed to say next? it’s probably 80/20 at mininum.
You must stop wasting your precious energy worrying about what to say next, whether you’ve missed something, or whether you’ve collected enough information to appease so-and-so in GTM / Ops.
They are not in the trenches. You are.
Not everything your company wants to know about a deal is information you need to get in order to close.
Some of it matters more for forecasting, reporting, and internal processes. And some of it matters more for closing. It depends.
Push comes to shove, I’d rather you stay present and miss some noncritical information you can always get later than be in a live meeting and missing what’s happening right in front of you.
Too many salespeople ‘merge’ with and become identified with their company’s sales methodology as if it’s their willy wonka golden ticket to quota and p club. in reality, it often becomes another thing creating separation between buyer and seller.
Sellers who lean too hard on it make themselves look and feel salesy. The buyer becomes increasingly aware that they’re talking to a salesman who’s working through a list of company mandated questions. What the buyer actually wants is to feel like they’re talking to someone who understands their issue, has a credible perspective, and can genuinely represent the product/service they’re considering.
When I’m working with clients, and in my new course, I teach a simple conversational framework. How to guide a conversation using Socratic inspired principles and techniques.
The rest of the time is spent training your awareness and instinct to use the framework so you can lead the meeting without being too much in your head.
Even if your methodology asks you to remember only a handful of details that are easy to remember, it doesn’t teach you how to guide a conversation to uncover that information, along with plenty of other useful information indirectly, through asking higher quality questions. Low Effort Selling solves for this.
Question Equity
We all have a limited amount of what I call Question Equity. It’s the amount and type of questions we can ask before exhausting the other person’s willingness to answer.
Every question draws on the other person’s willingness to engage with you. Some questions quickly deplete that willingness. Others can actually increase it.
However, not all questions cost the same amount.
A question that helps someone arrive at a realization can actually earn you more Equity (more willingness to engage with you). Good questions GIVE energy and life to the meeting.
A question that serves no apparent purpose other than satisfying your company’s checklist exhausts the buyers willingness to engage with you. It TAKES energy and life from the buyer and meeting.
The skill is knowing what to ask, when to ask it, and whether you need to ask it at all.
In Low Effort Selling, I teach you how to cultivate this skill.
I use the word realization because an idea hits differently when you have the aha moment yourself.
When you guide the buyer to have a realization, they own the conclusion. They can explain it in their own words and make the case for it when you’re not in the room.
And they remember who helped them see it. You become associated with that realization, making you more memorable and trustworthy. You become “sticky” to them.
Sales = Science & Art
Selling is both a science and an art.
The science provides the structure, principles, and clarity of thinking.
The art is YOU, the Aurtist. Your taste, personality/eccentricities, frame of reference, and the choices you make in why, how, and when, to apply that science.
Two salespeople can understand the same principles and use the same conversational framework, yet have completely different styles. this is a feature not a bug.
There are a million little side rules and sales-isms constantly being posted online. Becoming aware of many of them can be useful because it expands your Frame of reference (your internal knowledge base), but without a solid foundation and KEEPING IT IN MIND, the side rules will quickly confuse the hell out of you.
We go through cycles of expansion and contraction. We consume information, connect new dots, and expand our awareness.
Eventually, we find ourselves craving simplicity again. Only this time, we’re returning to foundations with a larger, more refined frame of reference and a deeper understanding.
I’m experiencing this with improv right now.
I started with the basics, got good, then studied the theory and accumulated a ton of language and context that helped me recognize patterns I couldn’t see before. But then I started to suck because I was too in my head. I could theoretically tell you exactly what made a scene good and the underlying mechanics but was struggling to do it myself.
I got tired of hearing all the little side rules about what makes a scene good and found myself craving simplicity again. I wanted to return to first principles and trust what I’ve internalized.
Boom, scenes are good again.
This process will continue as long as I stay in this field. This applies to sales too.
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