When did we learn of this opportunity? Are we ahead of or behind the pack? In one important respect, mid–middle game is like playing poker—at each new opportunity to place a bet, you have to assess whether your hand supports further investment in the pot. No matter how much money you’ve already bet, you should be willing to fold if the cards turn against you. So it is in business development. Smart companies revisit their decision to pursue an opportunity at various points during mid–middle game, and they stop pursuing the opportunity if they learn that their position has deteriorated or that the opportunity has changed in some way that diminishes its attractiveness. This can be one of the toughest parts of being smart because it’s all too easy to be swept along by raw sales enthusiasm—that cockeyed optimism of never give up, never surrender; it’s always darkest before the dawn; clouds and silver linings; and so on—manifested behaviorally by an almost genetically encoded resistance to facing reality, saving precious resources from a futile pursuit, and saying, “No go. We’ve either already lost it or we’re so far behind that winning will cost us more than the deal itself is worth.”
We might think of these decision points during mid–middle game as gates. To continue chasing an opportunity, you have to pass through a series of gates, and the first one occurs when you initially learn of the opportunity. Here are the kinds of questions companies should ask at this point:
When did we learn of this opportunity? Are we ahead of or behind the pack?
What is this opportunity? What does the customer want or need? Who is involved? Where did the need originate? How broadly is the need recognized and supported throughout the customer’s organization, particularly among the key decision-makers and influencers?
How good is the fit between the customer’s needs and our solutions? Is this an attractive opportunity for us to pursue?
How well do we understand the rationale behind this emerging need? What is driving it? Why is it surfacing now? What is the customer’s business case for purchasing a product or service that would fulfill this need? How does the customer value the solution?
Are we currently positively or negatively differentiated from our competitors in the customer’s mind? Can we build greater preference during middle game? Can we reduce or eliminate any negative differentiation?
As you explore the customer’s needs, it is wise to engage the key contacts throughout your zippered network—inquiring about the need with everyone at every level in the customer’s organization who can provide insight and who may be instrumental in shaping the solution and selecting the supplier. It’s important to ascertain how they’ve solved such problems or met such needs in the past; what’s important to each key person about the solution and the supplier; what requirements they are likely to have; how open they are to considering innovative, value-added solutions; and what criteria they typically use to select their supplier. It’s also important to know whether any of your key competitors has an installed base with the customer, or is already in a preferred position, or is well connected with influential people in the customer’s organization. A complete list of the questions you might ask while exploring an emerging opportunity would take more room than we care to devote to it, largely because the questions themselves are usually not behavioral differentiators. Suffice it to say that a thorough exploration of the customer’s needs requires an exhaustive inquiry and far more asking than telling—which does bring us to a key behavioral differentiator during this part of middle game.
When opportunities emerge, it’s common for salespeople to switch into a sell and tell mode far too quickly, especially when customers ask them for information about their company and their products or services. On the theory that their competitors will be aggressively presenting their capabilities and that they must be equally aggressive, salespeople (and the executives, project managers, and others who support them) often have a compulsive need to tell their story, no matter how much they’ve learned about the value of listening. In the sell and tell trap they fall into, they talk mostly about themselves, don’t ask enough questions, miss important clues, and behave in a manner that suggests to customers that what they have to say is much more important than what the customer has to say. Don Traywick, vice president of sales for BE&K, notes the danger of the sell and tell trap:
Traditionally in the engineering and construction industry the classic approach to selling involves citing a laundry list of strengths: track record, safety, people, references, low risk, schedule and budget vigilance, customer focus, value-added, and so on. Well, that approach is all but dead for one simple reason—all our first-tier competitors have these strengths, too, and they trot them out as often as we do. Customers have heard it so often and for so long that they end up concluding we’re all basically the same. And when we let that happen, price unravels the deal for all but the lowest bidder who, more often than not, doesn’t end up meeting the customer’s needs as well as we could have. The only problem is—we lost the opportunity to prove it.¹
The self-serving, self-focused behavior endemic to the sell and tell approach is what most customers experience from salespeople enough of the time that the alternative is a refreshing contrast. What is the alternative? It’s the facilitative selling approach that many people advocate but few actually practice, and it has these basic principles:
Seek to understand before seeking to be understood. The cardinal attitude to have when you begin a dialogue with a customer about an emerging need is that what the customer has to say is more important than what you have to say. Furthermore, if you run off at the mouth about your capabilities and wonderful products and services, you risk frustrating customers (who don’t feel listened to) and talking about the wrong solutions to the wrong problems. Until you completely understand their perspectives, you should refrain from even discussing your company and your capabilities. Seek to understand them first—and you do this by asking questions and listening. It’s simple, but few people do it well.
Sit on the customer’s side of the table. Beyond merely understanding their perspectives, you have to be able to see the world from their side of the table. You have to be able to empathize with them. Forget your company for the moment. Forget your products and solutions and the great things you have to offer. Forget features and benefits and selling solutions and all the other buzzwords, frameworks, and gimmicks. Early in the dialogue, you should release your own agenda so completely that you are free to experience the world through your customers’ eyes. What would it be like to be in their position? How would it feel? What would be important and unimportant? What would seem urgent? What is at stake? What is the big win for them, and what are they afraid of losing? Whom should they include in their decisions? Who should be excluded? What does their political environment feel like? What’s worrisome? What are the risks? What’s exciting? Sitting on the customer’s side of the table doesn’t mean giving up your own place; it just means allowing yourself to connect with the customer at the emotional level where personal and institutional needs commingle—and where most buying decisions are actually made.
Great client advisors are superb listeners. Their ability not only helps them gain information critical to their work, but gives their clients breathing space and allows them to think through the issues on their own. Empathy also underpins their personal and professional relationship with the client and helps it grow over time.—Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel, Clients for Life
Follow the customer’s agenda. Too often, salespeople and company executives go into a meeting with customers with a firm sense of what they want to accomplish in the meeting, and they push their agenda no matter what response they get from the customer. Polite customers, who sense that you are driving your agenda and won’t deviate from it, may be patient and appear to be listening, but in their minds they are writing you off. Less polite customers often show their discomfort—or downright hostility—and may throw you out or cut the meeting short. When this happens, you are losing time share, not winning it, and you have done your competitors a huge favor. You have managed to create negative BD that makes them look better than they might have otherwise. (They should send you a thank-you card for your efforts on their behalf.) A far more positive behavior is to abandon your agenda the moment you sense that customers want to deviate from it. When you begin the meeting, ask them what they want to get out of the meeting, and then follow their agenda throughout the meeting. Yes, this could mean that you don’t discuss what you had hoped would be discussed; you may need to pursue those things in later meetings or phone calls. Sometimes, the best outcome of a meeting with customers is getting them to agree to another meeting. Your positioning may take time. Think of it as a process, not an event.
Go through the open doors. When you try to push your line of thought and encounter resistance, it’s best not to keep pursuing that line of thought. Think of the dialogue as a long hallway with a number of closed doors along the corridor. Behind each of those doors is a topic for discussion. If you knock on a door and the customer opens it (i.e., seems willing to discuss that topic), you can go through that door and continue with your discussion. However, if you knock on a door and the customer doesn’t open it (doesn’t want to discuss it), don’t keep knocking on the door. It annoys the customer and frustrates you. It’s far better to go through the open doors and engage customers in areas they are most interested in and are open to talking about than to pound on the closed doors or, worse yet, try to knock them down with a battering ram (we’ve seen salespeople do this, and we’re willing to bet that you have seen them, too).
Stay in the “No-Pitch” zone. When you pitch your wares, you are clearly motivated by self-interest and you come across as a vendor. If you want to build trust with customers, you have to stop pitching and start acting like a thought partner—someone who’s genuinely interested in helping them solve their problems, whether or not you gain from it. If customers perceive that you are determined to make the sale, no matter what, then they will have good reason to distrust you. On the other hand, if they perceive that you have their best interests in mind and are helping them think through their needs and explore the alternatives from an un-self-serving perspective, then their trust in you will grow and you will behaviorally differentiate yourself from the hawkers and vendors. Most salespeople start pitching far too early in the process.
Ask insightful questions. During mid–middle game, most salespeople ask the standard, fact-finding questions: What do you need? When do you need it? How many do you need? Where should it be delivered? And so on. A somewhat more enlightened set of questions would be: Why do you need it? Why now? What would happen if you didn’t get it? Would something else be better? The typical salesperson asks questions to qualify the opportunity (e.g., Do the customer’s needs match our product line? Are they open to buying from us?) and to learn enough about the situation and the customer to know what to pitch and how best to pitch it. The behaviorally differentiated approach is to ask the kinds of questions that stimulate customers to think more deeply about their problems, opportunities, and needs. The framework we’ve found most helpful in asking insightful questions is GAIN, which stands for Goals, Achievement Value, Issues, and Needs. In the GAIN framework, you would ask these kinds of questions:
GOALS
What are you trying to achieve? What is your vision? What is the ideal outcome for you? In the best of circumstances, what would success look like? What business purpose are you trying to accomplish? What opportunities do you want to pursue? What’s the optimistic view? If there were no obstacles, what would be possible?
ACHIEVEMENT VALUE
What will it be worth to you when you achieve your goals? What are the business implications of solving this problem or capturing this opportunity? Why is this goal important to you? Why are you pursuing it instead of something else? What investment do you anticipate in pursuing this goal, and what is your projected return on that investment?
ISSUES
What is your current situation? What is standing in the way of your achieving your goals? What are your concerns? What’s keeping you up at night? As you think about achieving this goal, what roadblocks do you see? What avenues of possibility? What have you tried before? What haven’t you tried? As you analyze the situation, what do the numbers tell you? What do your customers tell you? What do your own people tell you? What will happen if you don’t solve this problem or achieve your goal? What’s the risk of doing nothing? What’s the risk of trying something and failing? What’s the upside of achieving a spectacular success?
NEEDS
What would help? What do you need in order to solve this problem or capture this opportunity? What are you missing? Why are you looking for help? What other approaches, products, or services have you tried or considered? Why did you reject them? What’s the most effective way for you to approach this? What’s most important to you? How would you prioritize your needs? If you could find the ideal partner or supplier, what would that company do you for? What is the ideal outcome of the help you receive from any supplier?
What differentiates the GAIN model is that it focuses on customers and is intended to be as helpful to them as it is to the salesperson or executive asking the questions. Further, GAIN is not just an interviewing model; it’s a behavioral model. It raises your customers’ expectations of what a valuable exchange with a provider should look like and accomplish. When that happens, you have not only raised their expectations, you have raised the bar on your competitors. GAIN is not intended to create demand, increase customers’ discomfort, or convince them that they need your products or services. On the contrary, GAIN is intended to provoke a thoughtful discussion of customers’ needs, and it’s an excellent way to behave like a thought partner instead of a vendor. When you ask Goal questions, you are trying to understand the gap between customers’ current situation and some ideal future they envision. In this ideal future, the problem has been solved, the needs met, the opportunities captured. In essence, you are trying to understand their dreams. This is what they wish would come true.
In asking Achievement Value questions, you are trying to link this potential buying decision with customers’ business needs and objectives. They are thinking of buying something you offer or engaging your services. Why? What value would such a solution add to their business? In asking this question, you can help them think through the value of various alternatives, including some of the value-added solutions you might propose. The Issues and Needs questions help customers think through the ramifications of their current situation and of the various alternatives they might consider. These questions also help them prioritize their issues, concerns, and needs. The answers tell you what’s most important to them, how they are thinking about solutions, what they value (and don’t value), and where they are open to considering value-added options. In effect, using the GAIN framework to explore customers’ needs helps you and them build the business case for the solution and determine the urgency and scope of their needs. It should be clear how this approach to a customer dialogue is more helpful to customers, can position you as a thought partner with them, and can behaviorally differentiate you from your competitors who use the traditional sell and tell approach. With GAIN, you replace the selling is telling behavior with a suite of behaviors that are customer focused, engaging, and insight provoking.