5 Selling With The Buyer’s Perspective Motivators

The other day, I watched a documentary about football coaches and how they motivate their players to remember tactical free-kicks practised during training sessions and apply them in the game. Football is a complex game because in the 90 minutes endeavour to score more goals than your opponent, there are hundreds of different scenarios of how the ball can roll. Practising free-kick scenarios is a great way to take advantage of a situation and score a goal. Coaches know that their teams will go through initial success stages, followed by a skill plateau. The plateau effect, or the levelling-off period, refers to a stage in the skills-learning curve where the rate of improvement becomes stagnant or temporarily levels off. Professional sports coaches are aware of the Mastery Curve and use the right moments to motivate their teams to progress to the next level of skills mastery.

A fascinating correlation

What fascinated me was the correlation between the challenges we face in our endeavour to progress in Selling with the Buyer’s Perspective and the challenges we face during our sales transformation. Salespeople go through training and practice sessions; they roll-play multiple scenarios so that when meeting with Customers, they can apply what they learned and win deals. Similar to mastering the free kicks, sales execs also arrive at a plateau stage.

Like the football players listening to their coach in the locker room during half-time of an important game, I would grab this opportunity to share five short motivational speeches with you to level up, leave your plateaued stage, and win deals going forward by using Selling with the Buyer’s Perspective skills: It is no surprise that all of them are about your mindset, your behaviour, and your actions with Customers in the Why Change? and Change to What? phases of their buying process.

1. Remove the noise for your customer

“Logics says that stakeholders know more than you about their industry and their business. However, they are struggling with knowing what to focus on to accelerate their business growth. They are dealing with more information, more options, and more people to make progress in their buying process, and this overwhelms them. They are getting confused and often gravitate to the status quo. Help them remove the noise and focus on their common objectives (growing their business) and how you can help them. Trust your skills, trust your experience. You can do it”.

2. DO NOT PITCH your company or solutions

“We have practised this at role-plays, and you know what happens when you fall into the trap of pitching your company and solutions when your Customer is still in the Why Change? phase: Resist pitching and using words like: “we have, we are, we can”. Instead, focus on how sharing third-party information helps change your stakeholders’ perspective about their situation and business challenges”.

3. Horses for courses; get different people involved

“When, for example, you are working in the logistics industry, meeting with operational staff and managers in logistics and supply chain roles is natural. To move a company, however, out of their Why Change? buying phase, you need to involve stakeholders with revenue responsibilities, such as marketing and business development managers. The discussions you need to have and the insights you will share are business-related. And they like that”.

4. Control the meeting…in advance

“Like taking a free kick in a football game, you want to make sure you control what is going to happen the moment you take that kick. You want the right stakeholders at the meeting and talk about theirs and your agenda. Don’t leave this to the last minute; send an agenda in advance. Start the meeting by referring to the agenda so all know what the objectives are. Don’t forget to ask what they would like to add to the agenda”.

5. Trust your sales process to win deals

“You have been trained on the new sales process aligned to the buying process. Go into your next meetings trusting this process. Prepare with what you want your stakeholders to discover and ensure you earn credibility before sharing your insights, stories and experience of how you can help them grow their business. When you see the impact, enable your stakeholders to get others involved at the next meeting. Get the commitments you prepared in the preparation”.

With these motivational shorties, go out there, brush off the dirt, and get back into the battlefield with new inspiration. I am sure you will be ready to kick goals and win deals. Thanks for the pep talk! 🙂