Completing The Puzzle

Think about closing this way. We hear all the time that the buyer has to be the hero of the story, but we don’t often hear how to create that situation. In order to make your buyer the hero, you have to create a situation where they feel some sort of ownership over the solution. That means they have to share in the process that matches the solution with the problem, and leading them to that collaboration is your job as a seller.

In the modern business landscape, closing is not what it once was. Buyers have all the information they need and can easily see through urgency tactics that used to be effective. This means that sellers cannot close buyers, but instead need to help buyers close themselves. This is harder to do, but very effective when done well.

It is incumbent upon us as sellers to help buyers build the story of the solution for themselves. If we build it for them, they won’t trust the answer. In order to do this, we must straddle the line between exciting / interesting, and familiar / safe. This is a hard line to straddle, especially since we can’t give them the complete answer, we have to guide them and help them get there themselves.

The easiest way to conceptualize this idea is through the use of a four-piece puzzle. There are two ways to approach this four-piece puzzle, and the one you choose is dependent on the situation you are in. There are two things that can hold a buyer back from making a buying decision, either they don’t understand how the solution will get them where they want to go, or they don’t believe the value of getting there is worth the cost.

I find that sellers don’t often know which situation they are in, and therefore, what they should be addressing for the client. That part is really important. You need to know if you are addressing a solution issue or a value issue, and you can work towards that by asking the right discovery questions. Does your buyer understand the problem and are they deciding between solutions, or does your buyer still lack a full understanding of the problem and the weight of the other issues being caused by the problem?

If you are addressing a solution situation, your buyer understands three things and does not understand one thing:

1. The buyer knows what they are currently doing, and what the current problems are.
2. The buyer knows what competitors are doing and what the differentiators are.
3. The buyer knows what their ideal outcome looks like.
4. The buyer does not know how to get from problem to outcome.

There is nothing revolutionary in what I have just laid out, the problem is that we often talk about problems, we talk about solutions, and we talk about outcomes, but we don’t do a good job of putting the three together, and connecting what that implies for value. Thinking about this puzzle as your guiding star as you create agendas and presentations in the closing stages of your cycle can be very helpful. Show the client the missing piece and ask them how they want to get from problem to outcome, or how they want to fill in the empty space. That can be very powerful.

If you are addressing a value situation, your buyer understands three things and does not understand one thing:

1. The buyer understands their current status quo.
2. The buyer understands the options that are out there in the market.
3. The buyer understands that a solution gets them to a desired outcome.
4. The buyer does not understand the cost/payoff ratio.

In this scenario, laying out the three things that they know together is still very powerful, but this scenario changes the focus a bit. Now, instead of talking about how you get from problem to outcome, you are talking about all of the costs that they are currently incurring that they are not factoring into the equation: efficiency, people, systems, opportunity. All of these costs change the equation, so the answer to the puzzle here is an equation. You can set up the equation for them, and remind them of all of the costs they are not already factoring in, but you will have to let them work the equation out for themselves. Of course, you can also remind them of factors on the value side that they may not already be thinking of as well.

Each one of these visualizations allows you, the seller, to paint a picture of what your buyer currently understands by leading a conversation about three of the boxes and developing their descriptions of those three boxes. It is incredibly important to understand the exact words and descriptions used by the buyer to describe those three boxes.

Then, when it is time, a conversation about the box on the bottom right of each puzzle allows you to flesh out the buyer’s description of a perfect solution in the context of the other things that are already known. This allows you to help them complete the puzzle in their mind. The trick to these simple puzzles is that people want to discover something new, but if it looks vastly different from their current world, it will be scary. The conversation visualized in this way puts the discovery in the context of what the buyer already knows, marrying the exciting and interesting with the familiar and safe.

Whether conversationally or visually, the buyer should be the one in the driver’s seat when the puzzle is completed, but you must be the guide who decides which puzzle to complete, and in which way to do it. In fact the buyer wants you to do that. The buyer wants to feel that they understand the situation and the solutions and all of the implications at a high level, but does not want to do all the work associated with truly understanding the ins and outs of the decision. That is why you get to do that work for them, so long as you leave room for them to finish it.

If you do leave that space for them to finish, they will take ownership and closing will feel effortless.