I believe life revolves around our meaningful connections and how we make people feel. That's what your brand should be focused on.
—Bruce Poon Tip, founder of G Adventures
When you have a compelling purpose, you want to share it. Before you slap your NSP on a white paper and send it out, let's talk about how you can activate live time with your customers.
In this chapter, you'll learn how to help your sales team turn a traditional pitch into a transformational engagement with your clients. The key to bringing your purpose to life with customers is to help them experience it in live time during your sales process.
Remember G Adventures from Chapter 2, the sales team whose NSP is We help people discover more passion, purpose, and happiness? They're a wildly creative organization. Their employees use their free time to make music videos about their trips. Their marketing materials are gorgeous, and their analytics are laser‐focused.
When the sales team adopted their NSP and became the GPS (Global Purpose Specialists), they could have created another killer video showcasing how their trips change lives. They could have done a slick ad campaign to help targeted travel agents see that booking a G trip has a positive impact on the local economies around the world. They did those things.
They also wanted to go further. They challenged themselves. They asked the team, if our NSP is to help people discover more passion, purpose, and happiness, how can we help the travel agents, the people selling to our customers, experience that during our sales calls?
First, some background. On a typical sales call in the travel industry, a travel rep describes their offerings to the travel agent. Travel reps have glossy brochures about their trips, hotels, boats, etc. A good rep will ask the agents questions about their client base. A rep will also talk about pricing, specials, etc. He or she is trying to get the agent to send clients on their trips or to their properties. David Green, who ran a large global travel agency at the time G Adventures was implementing their NSP, says, “Most partners come in and try to sell you their product.”
G Adventures wanted to differentiate, so they flipped the model. Instead of organizing their sales calls around their product, the GPS team made their calls about the agents. Instead of telling, they started asking. Rather than walking in with a brochure, they walked in with purpose cards.
Purpose cards are a sales tool G Adventures created to engage customers in different kinds of conversations. They're a purple, G‐branded deck of cards that asks a provocative question on each card, like:
The cards were designed to help the agents think more deeply about travel and the impact of their jobs. Green says, “When I was running an agency working with G, their team changed their title to Global Purpose Specialist. This company started using language centered around purpose. We all wanted to know what it meant. And the purpose cards came in, and they said we want to help you around your purpose. There were subtle ways they got the word purpose into conversations.”
G Adventures channeled their sales team's evangelistic enthusiasm for a product, and pointed it toward their resellers. Sales calls took on a different tone. Agents reconnected with why they got into the business in the first place. Using the questions on the purpose cards, the GPS jumpstarted an entirely different conversation. The agents shared their thoughts about how travel impacted people's lives. The cards directed them with questions like:
Agents began to look forward to sales calls and even request them. In an environment where other tour reps are turned away, travel offices call people away from their desks to experience sales calls from the GPS team. The cards became a differentiator because of the sales experience they created. Agents loved the experience so much, they started asking for their own set of cards to use in their office. It's not a coincidence that David Green left a high‐profile agency leadership position to join G Adventure team as their VP of Commercial. He says, “Coming from an agency background, there was almost an envy. I really wanted to be in the gang.”
Imagine you're starting a job as a new travel agent. During your onboarding your boss takes out a deck of G Adventures purpose cards, he pulls out some cards and asks you a few questions. He tells you, “We use these cards at meetings to get to know each other and remind ourselves what a difference our job makes.”
As a new agent, you're feeling even more excited about being in the travel business now. You see the big purple G on the cards, and you ask, “What's G Adventures?” Your boss replies, “They're an amazing tour company. Their trips change lives. Their salespeople are called Global Purpose Specialists. They gave us the cards to help us remember our own purpose and passion. Next time the rep comes in, I'll introduce you.”
Are you getting what's happening here? A simple sales tool—a deck of purpose cards—has changed the entire customer interaction. G Adventures customers have become their brand ambassadors.
As of this writing, millions of purpose cards are in agent offices all over the world. G Adventures now sells the cards on their website. Travelers from around the world are using the cards on trains and around campfires and dinner tables to discover more passion, purpose, and happiness.
It all started with the question, “How can we activate our NSP during sales calls?”
You may be thinking at this point, “Well, we don't sell adventure travel. Our clients are IT people, bankers, manufacturing firms, plumbers, analysts, etc. They're not going to talk about the most beautiful sunset on sales calls.” You're right. G adventures used their tool to jumpstart a conversation about their area of expertise.
Let's look at how at someone in a slightly less sexy industry jumpstarted a differentiated conversation with customers. Edmonton‐based Servus Credit Union is the largest credit union in the Canadian province of Alberta. They're hardly as flashy as G Adventures, but they're equally committed to their Noble Purpose: We shape member financial fitness. Many financial firms use their sales interactions to uncover clients' needs and then pitch them on various products. Servus wanted to engage people in a more meaningful conversation about financial fitness.
Driven by their purpose to shape member financial fitness, Servus created a goal planner to guide financial conversations with prospective members. Using the planner, front‐line staff help members identify their Love to Do's vs. Must Do's vs. Already Completed financial priorities. Using a list of choices such as reduce debt stress, reliable transportation, flexibility in my budget, invest like a guru, personal wellness, educate my kids, travel the world, and other life‐oriented priorities creates a more holistic conversation than the traditional financial discussion. The reps are trained to have an empathetic, caring conversation about what are often sensitive topics. This helps them build a good relationship and understand the member's goals before they start talking about personal assets.
This type of conversation is both subtly and dramatically different from the types of conversations most financial institutions have with customers. It's subtle because most firms are more than eager to talk about your money. They want to talk about how much money you have and where is it. Clients recognize these questions as a cloak for “How large is your wallet, and how can I get a bigger share of it?”
The Servus process is differentiated. It builds trust that enables their people to ask questions like, “How do you balance saving and spending?” The shift seems subtle, but the results are dramatically different.
Just as G Adventures uses their purpose cards to help clients discover more passion, purpose, and happiness during sales calls, Servus uses their tools to shape member financial fitness in the moment of interaction. It's not “later if you buy from us you might get this kind of benefit”—the sales tools activate the purpose in live time. Creating the tool helped Servus ensure consistency in its sales interactions. New associates who might not have the confidence or expertise to jump into a financial fitness conversation now have a tool to help them. It's not a cheat sheet that forces people into a script; it's the opposite. It's an interactive tool that enables their team to demonstrate their sincerity and intent.
As you read about G Adventure and Servus, think about your own NSP and how you can activate it during sales interactions. Notice that both Servus and G Adventures did something very important: they gave their sales teams tools to jumpstart a purpose‐oriented interaction. They didn't just tell their teams to focus on the customer and ask better questions; they gave their team a concrete tool to help them engage.
We often tell sales people to make the call about the customer. But in most cases, the sales collaterals are about the product, and that's why the conversations go in that direction.
For an example of this, let's turn to another field: health care.
Imagine your firm sells a treatment with a clinically proven competitive advantage. Your drug is just as effective as your competitor's for treating the condition, but the big differentiator is that your product has fewer side effects. After researching the target market—physicians and patients—you settle on a core message: We heal patients with no painful side effects.
At this point, the temptation is to train the sales team on the messaging. Here's what often happens. The company creates a script with the key elements of the message. You bring the team together for a big sales conference. You have the salespeople practice delivering the same message over and over again until they can all do it the same way every single time. They become so good at it, they sound just like a commercial.
The only problem is … customers hate commercials!
Sales calls aren't meant to be commercials; they're meant to be interpersonal interactions between two human beings. The minute a salesperson starts sounding like a pre‐scripted commercial, customers tune them out.
As the line between marketing and sales becomes more blurred, the challenge for organizations is to create personalized engagement quickly. Buying behavior has changed dramatically, especially business buyers. The majority of the customer journey now takes place online: they've done their homework, they've seen your messaging, and they've compared you against the other options before they meet with you. This is just as true in a B2B setting as it is in consumer sales. The consumer buyer who compares light fixtures online before buying a chandelier mirrors that same behavior at work. They're the IT buyer who compares systems and reads client reviews, the business owner who compares bank rates and reputations, and the physician who looks at drug studies before they meet with a rep.
That's why sales scripts are so ineffective.
Whatever the length of your sales process, you have to identify the moment when you flip the switch from the collective messaging, which tends to be a marketing function, to interpersonal engagement, which is the heart of sales.
Instead of handing your sales force a scripted message, teach your sales force why the message matters. Using NSP‐focused tools, you can help your team create a differentiated conversation. If you want them to become true expert advisors, they also need subject matter expertise. You want them to be able to skillfully connect the dots between the individual customer's goals and challenges and your solution.
Let's go back to our health care example. For the drug with fewer side effects, the sales team needs to understand the impact that side effects are having on patients and the practice. Do the side effects cause problems for the nurses or the doctors? How does the issue affect their ability to treat the patient? Do they have to spend extra time? Do side effects prevent the patient from taking the medication?
Schema is your knowledge about the subject: the concepts within it, how they relate to each other, important facts and events pertaining to the subject, etc. For example, I have a deep schema upon which to draw when it comes to sales, and perhaps parenting. I've been deeply involved in both for over two decades and have done extensive study, reading, and practical applications. But when it comes to chemistry or sky diving, I don't have much knowledge beyond basic information.
If you want your sales force to have compelling conversations and ask insightful questions, they need a deep schema about your subject area.
A salesperson with a deep schema can ask better questions. He or she knows where the pain points might be and so knows what to explore. A deep schema also gives the salesperson the confidence to step into a back‐and‐forth conversation: wherever it goes, he or she knows how to engage. Without a deep schema, the rep is just another generic salesperson reading off a marketing brochure.
It's important to differentiate here. The “spray and pray” model of sales (spray a bunch of stuff out there and pray some of it sticks) is long dead. Improving your sellers' schema doesn't mean you're training them to information dump—quite the opposite. Your team can draw from their knowledge to create robust interactions with customers. Knowing what most customers will likely care about can guide a rep to ask better questions. You don't assume you know; instead, you leverage your knowledge to gain faster insights.
Let's look at the differences between a salesperson leading with information vs. a salesperson drawing upon a deep understanding of the issues. Here's how this might play out in our medical example.
Do you see the difference? Statement 1 assumes this customer is just like every other customer. It leads down a product path. Statement 2 flips it. The rep draws on a common problem to engage the customer in a conversation about how it might be affecting that specific customer. Statement 3 goes even further, addressing an issue that is specific to this customer (that the rep uncovered on a previous call). In this case, the salesperson knew to look for the issue (side effects) because market research and training told the rep it was likely there. The salesperson validated it with someone in the customer's office first and then initiated a conversation about how the issue was affecting this specific client.
The salesperson's understanding of the issues guides discovery. Reread this example and substitute your own product research and insights. This model of using deep schema and research to guide interactive sales conversations applies to any sales interaction.
Let's go back to the two organizations mentioned earlier. The G Adventures team knows a lot about the challenges their agents face because they've done their research. Their white paper “Purpose in the Travel Industry” provides its team with deep information about how travel agents feel about their jobs, and what they're looking for. Servus Credit Union has similar data about their customers. They know what people are saving and spending and how they feel about it.
These firms don't organize their calls around sharing this data. They draw upon their data to jump‐start meaningful conversations with customers. Their salespeople are trained in two things:
To illustrate why it's ineffective to offer information too early, let's look at a subject where lots of people like to tout their wisdom: parenting. Imagine you have a new baby, and you're back at work for the first time.
As someone who well remembers that stage of life, it would be easy for me to give you lots of unsolicited advice. In fact, as I look at you huddled over your coffee, clutching it with both hands as if your very life depends on it, it's obvious to me: you are exhausted. Clearly, you need my help. It's time for me to tell you how to get your baby to sleep better. If you're my friend who trusts me, you may be eager for my advice. If I'm just a random colleague, you may react differently. Perhaps you're doing everything you can and you don't want another person telling you what to do. Or maybe your baby is sleeping great, and you're tired because you stayed up all night working on your novel.
Instead of starting with my point of view, I'm going to draw upon my schema (my knowledge of the subject) and ask you questions like: “How's your baby sleeping? How are you sleeping? What's been the most fun part of new parenting for you? How are the mornings going? What's it like to get out the door and get to work?”
The conversation is going to be about you. I'm able to ask you good questions because I have a good understanding of your space. But I'm not making assumptions.
If you tell me that you're bone‐crunching tired because no one is sleeping, I can ask you what's going on and express empathy, saying something like, “Wow, I remember that. It's hard. What have you tried?” What will likely happen next is that you will ask me for advice—advice you will perceive as more valuable because it came from someone who has demonstrated they understand your situation.
The same model applies to sales calls. Go back and reread the previous conversation, substitute customer for colleague, and instead of a baby, imagine we're talking about patients, clients, financial issues, or operational challenges. For a skilled seller, the conversation will follow the same model: draw upon your expertise to ask insightful questions, find out their perspective on the issue, identify where they want to go, and figure out how you can help.
If you want your team members to be perceived as experts and trusted advisors, they need to do more than repeat pre‐scripted messages. They need in‐depth knowledge about typical customer challenges, and they then need to be able to draw them out of the customer in live time. That's how you ensure that your NSP is more than a tagline.
In our studies of sales team performance, we've looked carefully at the interplay between messages and interactions to determine what works and what doesn't. We discovered three key distinctions between top performers and their average‐performing counterparts:
Tailoring your approach to the customer is not a new concept. As with many things, it's the depth and consistency of execution that will differentiate your team. You can and should do this at every phase of the sales process.
Product demos are an area that often goes unaddressed when it comes to tailoring the approach. Whether done by your sales team or another function, the right demo can make or break a sale. The sales enablement team at Fiserv engages with clients and prospective clients throughout the sales process. Two of their most crucial inflection points are discovery and the demo.
Fiserv is a global leader in payments and financial technology; their solutions are complex. They provide account processing and digital banking solutions, card issuer processing and network services, payments, e‐commerce, merchant acquiring and processing, and cloud‐based point‐of‐sale solutions. They work with banks and credit unions. Implementing a Fiserv solution can affect every person in the organization.
Not surprisingly, the Fiserv sales process can be lengthy and involve multiple players. Often, someone at one level, typically higher up, drives the decisions, but multiple other levels can stop or push forward the sale. For a sale to stick and have a successful implementation, people at every level need to buy in. A new system or process means change, which requires additional work for the front lines.
When the sales enablement team does a demo, it's crucial they connect to the customer's strategic objectives and also understand the reality of every single person in the room, which can include someone who represents the bank tellers, the IT team, senior leadership, branch operations, and others. The demo is a pivotal point in the sales process; it can create buy‐in and urgency to move a sale forward—or, if the demo falls flat, Fiserv can lose the sale.
Fiserv's larger aspiration is to Move money and information in a way that moves the world. The sales enablement team got even more specific. They decided their nested purpose (which sits under the larger aspiration or purpose statement) for their team is We empower success.
The team started using the game‐changing question we talked about in Chapter 5—“How will the client be different as a result of doing business with us?”—as a lens for discovery.
Empowering client success in demos meant the team had to identify what success looks like for all of the constituents within their client. This meant the team had to ask more questions in advance and then frame the demo in service of meeting the objectives they had uncovered with the client. It worked. Their demos became more customized and compelling. Because their team knew what success looked like for each person in the room, they could share with each person how the software would improve their function.
Activating their purpose in live time on demos helped the Fiserv team improve buy‐in. Clients started to see the sales team enablement team differently—they weren't just there to pitch a product; they were there to empower success. Solution Consultant Kathy Houghtalen says, “This NSP culture is permeating our group, and we are morphing into motivated and enthusiastic success empowerers!”
Fiserv VP of Sales Engagement Lisa St. Germain, who led her team to adopt the approach, says, “This took our demos from product‐oriented to client‐oriented. With our team aligned around empowering success, we were able to transform what was once a micro‐detail run‐through of features to a strategic conversation about business results.”
St. Germain explains, “A quality implementation is determined by a successful transition from the presales team to the implementation teams. We saw our voice of the client scores improve as we focused on engagement through the lens of our NSP, We empower success.”
As you think about the interactions your team has with clients, challenge yourself: How can you go beyond a product pitch? How can you help your clients experience your NSP live time during your sales process? Do you need more differentiated sales aids? Should you use a creative self‐assessment tool? Does your team need to ask different questions during discovery?
Announcing your NSP is great. Helping your clients experience it live time is more differentiated. We started this chapter with the G Adventures team of Global Purpose Specialists who use purpose cards to transform their sales process. Now let's look at how they activated their purpose in an even more challenging situation.
The G Adventures team decided to use their new sales approach in a very high‐stakes situation: a major industry travel conference. They were one of 20 vendors presenting to an auditorium of the world's highest‐volume travel agents. The team had just seven minutes for a presentation, wedged in between 19 other big‐name tour operators, cruise lines, and hotel chains: companies with big budgets that would no doubt be pulling out all the stops with impressive dog and pony shows to demonstrate how fabulous they were. The high‐end hotel group that went on stage right before G passed out champagne in fluted glasses for everyone in the audience.
In the past, the G Adventures team would have done their own version of the dog and pony show. Their videos are both beautiful and emotionally compelling. If they had just used those, they would have made a great impression. But the GPS team wanted to do more: they wanted to reach into the heart of every agent in the room and help them see how much their work mattered.
When it was time for G Adventures to take the stage, the VP of sales stood up, faced the room full of agents, and asked a simple question: “How many of you have ever booked a trip that changed someone's life?” Almost every single person in the room raised their hand. He then said, “Instead of talking about us, let's spend the next five minutes talking about you. Turn to the person next to you and describe the trip you booked and how it changed the life of your client.”
The entire room came alive. The energy soared as agents described booking a golden anniversary trip to the Eiffel Tower, the I beat cancer trek through Scotland, and the I found my true love at 60 honeymoon to Bali. Minutes earlier, this same group of agents had looked bored when a fancy hotel chain served them champagne. Now they were on fire.
That single prompt—asking the agents to describe a life‐changing trip they booked—lit up the frontal lobes of almost everyone in the room. Keep in mind, G Adventures had only seven minutes with the audience. They had now spent five of them without even telling people about their trips.
With two minutes left, the VP of Sales called the room back to order. He said, “The way you feel right now is the way we want you to feel every single day. You give people memories that last a lifetime, and we don't ever want you to forget that. Our team of Global Purpose Specialists has been trained to make you feel like this every time you interact with us.”
He closed by saying, “Here's a video to remind you why your work matters. If you'd like to talk about discovering more passion, purpose, and happiness, come meet us at our booth.” He walked off the stage as the video, showcasing the faces of travelers around the world experiencing happiness, played to the tune of Queen's “Somebody to Love.” That, my friends, is the difference between proclaiming your NSP and activating it in live time.
You won't be surprised to learn that, after their mic drop moment, the G Adventures booth was swamped. The team had to run to the van for more brochures. They lined up sales calls for weeks to come.
I confess, when I recount this story, I feel myself getting misty‐eyed. I still remember the moment their VP of Marketing called me from the parking deck and exclaimed, “Holy crap, it worked!”
The G Adventures team had the courage to try something different. They weren't content with a traditional “show up and throw up” sales presentation. They wanted to truly engage, and they wanted to do so in a meaningful way. The GPS team and the others described in this chapter went beyond their products: they turned their sales process into a transformational experience for their clients.
Your team can do the same thing. You simply have to decide: “Are we here to talk about us, or are we here to make a difference to the person on the other side of the table?”