Grip on your conversation is grip on sales

During a 1 on 1 with your account manager:

"… Your pipeline is nice and full, but your proposals keep getting postponed. So you are not clear enough in your conversation, you do not force a choice. No is also a choice. Let's chase everything up once more …"

You say something like this without thinking, and in my experience it happens all the time. You want movement, you want revenue, so you come up with a solution. It is just a solution on autopilot …

A solution for which problem, exactly?

This is a possible solution for a possible problem. In this blog I want to show you two things. First, that you become aware of your own autopilot, because that is the first step to changing it. Second, that you base your actions on what is happening at the customer, and not on what you or your account manager think.

Maybe you are right and your account manager does not push hard enough, because he does not dare to ask for a clear decision. The proposal may also be with the wrong person, the customer may not see the value yet, or the timing may have been off. If you look from the customer's side, you also look at his buying process. Maybe he is simply not ready yet, and then you lose the deal if you push harder. We do not really know. Yet you pick one explanation and immediately attach an action to it.

In my experience we still look too little from the customer's side. Too little is asked and too little is found out about what is really going on at this company and with this person: his pains and gains, his jobs to be done. So we talk from our USPs and not from his reason to buy, his unique buying reason (UBR). Only when your account manager knows that can he show what he can add and why the current situation hurts the customer more. That takes good discovery, good positioning and an explanation of the alternative of doing nothing. Make sure your account managers have that in order first.

If that is in place and the deal still stalls, you have a luxury problem, because your account managers are already a level further. That is where the JOLT effect comes in. Dixon and McKenna looked at around 2.5 million sales conversations. In The JOLT Effect (2022) they write that 40 to 60% of the deals they saw were not lost to a competitor, but stayed on the table because the customer made no choice. Fear is often behind that: fear of messing up (FOMU). A mistake made by doing nothing feels less bad than a mistake made by acting, and nobody wants to take the blame personally. The customer does see the pain of doing nothing, but it feels smaller than the risk of making the wrong choice and being held responsible for it. Pushing harder usually does not work then, it tends to make the fear bigger. What does work is taking that fear away: success cases and testimonials from similar companies, explaining the process clearly and showing that you have done this many times before. In my experience chasing everything up and forcing a choice mostly leads to irritation, and you lose warm leads that would simply have come in later. Chasing up may well be the answer, but you only know that once you have asked the questions first.

You think you already know before you walk in

That autopilot starts before the conversation does. If things are going well with your account manager, you keep it short, because you have nothing to give him. If things are going badly, two or three solutions are already waiting. That reminds me of the halo effect and the horn effect. With the halo effect one strong impression carries over into everything else you think of someone, the horn effect is the negative side of that. Thorndike already saw in 1920 that people judge each other on one general impression and not on each trait separately (Thorndike, 1920). That research was not about 1 on 1s, but I do recognise the effect. You do not even know the problem yet, and you already walk into the conversation with a shortcut.

Look from the customer's side

We are often busy with our own sales process and not with the buyer's journey. Our stages, our closing date, our targets. But the deadline that counts is the customer's.

Winning by Design calls that a critical event: a moment in the buyer's world where there are real consequences if nothing has been arranged by then (Winning by Design). The customer decides that date, not you and not your account manager. If the problem is not solved by that date, things go wrong at the customer. Does your account manager know which date that is?

The same goes for movement and progress. Movement is what your account manager does: calling, sending a proposal, chasing up. Progress is what the customer does: confirming a next meeting, bringing someone else along, putting a date in the agenda. One sometimes leads to the other, but not always. Chasing up is movement. Whether you have progress, you only see from what the customer does.

Four themes per proposal

Go through four themes for every open proposal. It is a checklist for you, not a list for your account manager. For each proposal you pick what you need.

The first theme is whether these are the right companies and the right people. Does this company fit your ICP? Who does your account manager talk to in the DMU, and what are their pains and gains? Who is causing the delay, and is your account manager talking to that person?

The second is how well your account manager knows the customer, from the customer's side. What is this customer's reason to buy, in his words and not in ours? What are the decision criteria and how does the internal decision process work? What does it cost him to do nothing, and when does that start to hurt?

The third is progress compared to last week. What has the customer done since then? Was this proposal still in discovery then, or has it been standing still for months? Or is it because your account manager has not made time for it?

The fourth is the next step. What has been agreed concretely, who does what and when, and does the customer know about the next best action? In many agendas "follow up" is listed as an action, but it is not one. An action has a name, a date and someone who does it.

Assumptions are deadly

In sales we say: assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. There are assumptions in every one of those themes. What an account manager says about a customer is often what he thinks or hopes. So keep asking, like you do when someone says this is a big opportunity: "How do you know? Are you sure? Did the customer say that? How did he say it, what were his words? When is that, and what signals have you seen?" If he answers that he does not know, that is fine too. Then you know what he has to find out next week.

What you say to your account managers also applies to yourself. Whether you are a commercial director, shareholder or founder: if you discuss the pipeline, you ask yourself the same questions. What do I base this on?

After a few proposals you see a pattern. You can also use that for deals that are still early in the process. That way you put out a fire and you also do fire prevention. Chasing up can still be the outcome, but now you know why.

Where it starts

What the other person does you cannot change, your own behaviour you can. So look back after a 1 on 1: which of these questions did you not ask, and which will you ask first next time?

Your conversation is the first domino. If you go into a 1 on 1 more consciously, your account manager goes into a conversation with his customer more consciously, and in the end that touches your revenue. I cannot promise that it will bring more revenue. What you do get is more grip on the conversation, and with that more grip on your sales.

Grip on your conversation is grip on sales.

Do you want to get more out of your 1 on 1s with your sales team, with less autopilot and more impact on your revenue? Send me a DM or call me, and we will talk it through.