Bridging the Chasm
In April, I led a panel discussion at the New Enterprise Forum meeting on the topic ìThe Bridge to Crossing the Chasm, Acquiring and Retaining Customersî. This title for the panel was given to me, and Iím not completely sure I know what it means. What I can guess from this title and what I observe with many clients when I first start working with them is that there is a distance they feel, and perhaps create, with prospects and customers.
Too often the relationship vendors have with customers is not unlike 7-card poker players; holding 2 ìholeî cards down, and the next 5 revealed gradually as each player kicks in their wagers. This lack of trust, and the hiding from each other of pertinent information, assures the maintenance of the chasm, and a less than optimal vendor / customer relationship. This chasm is mostly created by vendors going for the ìyesî, cueing the programmed defensive response most people exhibit when feeling undue pressure to buy something
Why Go for the ìNoî Instead of the ìYesî?
Going for the ìnoî sounds courageous; it might even make us feel better about sales, but is it really an effective approach to selling? Now, going for the ìnoî shouldnít be about rubbing our prospectís nose in the fact that we donít need their business, or to get revenge for when they canít get off of the dime to make a decision, rather, going for the ìnoî is an approach that is best served softly, and honestly.
Letís talk a little bit about the traditional approach that creates the walls to communication with our prospects and clients, the going for the ìyesî approach.
Going for the ìyesî, means selling with features and benefits, it means presuming we know what a particular prospect wants and why they want it. It means going out and trying to qualify everyone to buy our stuff, and once qualifying them, convincing and cajoling them until they come up with a PO , a check or their credit card.
The problem with this forcing features and benefits at unknown prospects is that they feel pressure to acknowledge our validity, when they havenít necessarily discovered how our product, or the way we can deliver it, can be mapped over to resolve their unique (from their perspective) problems or situations. So selling this way, (ìÖhereís why to buy from us, now buy it!î), is presumptuous, arrogant and bound to put prospects on full-alert and resist our advances.
No is the Answer.
I invited Dwight Carlson (Founder of Xycom and Perceptron) now CEO of RealCite, Mike Mack, Owner of DatMap, and Greg Peterson, VP from Limno-Tech, Inc. to join me on the panel for the NEF meeting. We were tasked to answer the following questions in our panel presentation:
As we prepared for the panel we realized that that in order to resolve all of these issues the single biggest factor that creates these problems is the adversarial relationship borne out of employing the arrogant, high-pressure, features and benefits, go-for-the-yes approach.
Ted Williams Went 2 for 5, Career!
In marketing just about any product or service, we are destined to sell to only a fraction of all of the possible customers for it, even if we do everything right. Many of my clients tell me that itís not unusual for them to be one of 10 bidders in a given sales situation. The odds of success in this situation, all else being equal, are only one in ten.
Given these odds, going to market with the attitude that ìyesî is the only right answer is setting ourselves up to fail most of the time. However, if we go to market to find out who isnít qualified to buy our product, or looking for the majority of ìnoísî we are bound to receive anyway, off comes the pressure, down come the defenses, up goes the trust, open becomes the candor, and counter-intuitively, we get more ìyesesî.
Closing the Chasm
The chasm closes in our relationship with customers when we set out to politely and honestly disqualify them by asking great questions and listening carefully to their answers, not by pushing a long list of features and benefits.
To submit suggestions on topics for future articles, e-mail Joe Marr at joe@marrsales.com.
©Copyright 2004 ñ Marr Professional Development Corporation