A couple of weeks ago I posted an article about what closing looks like in the new, modern business landscape. There is no discrete closing phase, and buyers don’t need information from sellers like they used to, so sellers lack leverage. More finitely understood, buyers have so much information that they know what prices they can get, when there are deals to be had, and who they can buy from so the old tactics deigned to manufacture pressure to buy just don’t work very often anymore.
The two things that do work, because they speak to our human nature are visualization and urgency. Visualization helps a buyer imagine a future where the desired outcome exists and that vision helps motivate the buyer to move the deal forward. Urgency reminds the buyer of the negatives associated with the status quo causing them to compare a solution to a problem rather than one solution to another, which is a much more favorable setting for a seller to work in.
Both visualization and the creation of urgency require a key ingredient that stands on it’s own merit and must be developed throughout the sales process. I call it, animating the enemy. In most cases, the enemy is the status quo, but it can also be an incumbent, a competitor, or an internal group at the buyer pushing back against change or progress for one reason or another. If you are the one who can help the buyer clearly paint a picture of why the enemy is a problem, and how much it costs, you will have a major leg up when it comes to your buyer picking a solution.
This concept so important and yet no one coaches to it. Sales managers, trainers and coaches like to talk a lot about making the buyer the protagonist, or the hero of their own story. But we forget that every hero and every story needs an antagonist.
A story where the problem is no big deal, and can be solved over time by incremental steps, is just not that compelling. It won’t motivate anyone to act.
They only way to tell a compelling story is to animate the enemy in a way that calls for a hero to act. But we, as sellers, dont focus nearly enough on creating and animating a tangible enemy.
Without an enemy it is also not a very fair fight. We are trying to pitch our solution and they end up comparing something vs. “nothing”. “Something” is scary but “nothing” is not scary. “Something” comes with risks while no one gets blamed if “nothing” goes wrong because it already existed and no decision was made. It is always easier to stick with the status quo unless the status quo itself is scary, and carries risk with it.
As sellers, we must learn to animate the enemy.
Good discovery should be designed around learning what is hard and bad so it can become part of the animation of the enemy. Don’t use discovery to learn what they like about your products. Use discovery to learn what they don’t like and what is scary about their current situation.
Of course, what I just said is aided by everything else you do in a sales cycle. You need to have done great discovery to have the tools to do this. You need to have handled objections well, and you need to have moved through the process in a prosocial way that has developed trust with the client.
If your discovery was properly executed, and you properly drew out objections and handled them in a way that builds trust, you should have worked through a lot of explanations of the problem that should tell you how to detail out and describe the antagonist in a way that helps your protagonist visualize it. Even if there are no deadlines or time constraints for the buyer, the simple existence of a well described antagonist can help them understand the need for quick change. If their answer to your question about timing is something like, “as quickly as possible”, that sounds great, but it means nothing, and will not help you close a deal. Work with your buyer to establish a goal date so that you can work backwards and set a calendar that you can both work off of. That is urgency that must be developed throughout the process and cannot be manufactured at the end of a deal cycle. And, the only way that urgency can be developed is if there is an enemy that needs to be escaped from.
Once you get to the end phase of a deal cycle, things change a bit. Deals don’t close on their own, so you have to be resilient and dedicated to pushing forward. Don’t spend your time on the deals that are not likely to close, but when you pick one to work on, don’t let up. Develop many relationships across the buying organization, and it is important to touch base with all of them and work through these processes so that when they all come together internally everyone feels comfortable.
Buyers, and especially C-Suite buyers, care about risk and loss. Sure, they like efficiency and growth, but uncertainty, risk, and loss of principal are much much worse than limited growth. Uncertainty is potential risk, and if they are not comfortable in the understanding that the risk level of making a choice is very low, they just won’t move. So, be aware that while your individual stakeholders need to understand the risk of the status quo, your C-Level executives need to understand the lack of risk associated with what is new compared to that status quo risk.
Without an enemy, your buyer can visualize an outcome where they want to end up and they can even feel some urgency to get there, but if they are not running away from something, other priorities will overshadow that urgency and the vision will fade. The only way to reinforce your ability to have a real closing conversation with your buyer is the enemy they need to escape.
