What Have You Got?

Consultative selling is just about the only kind of selling anyone talks about anymore. We don't push products - we solve problems. We don't sell stuff - we form partnerships.

I realized how far the pendulum had swung the other day when a sales manager told me that his team is trained to find the customer's "pain points". Sales people as doctors! Brilliant!

Don't get me wrong, learning about the customer's business and creating customized solutions that meet their objectives is exactly the right way to sell. But, customers don't have time to teach every sales person how their business operates so that the sales person can go back to the office and whip up a customized proposal. Customers expect sales people to know quite a bit about their business before they walk in the door. Not only that, but they expect to see the skeleton of a possible solution at the same time.

Back in the early 90's when I was first learning how to sell radio advertising, the mission was all about the consultative sale. I was trained to seek out the business owner or high-level decision maker and let them know that I wasn't a radio sales person but had been transformed, through 24 hours of training over three days, into a media consultant. My job was to sit down with them and ask a series of questions designed to elicit their two or three most important marketing objectives. Armed with this information, and their ad budget, I could put together a whiz bang proposal.

Here is how it would usually go in real life:

I would go out prospecting and walk into a paint store. Seeing a man on a ladder stocking paint I would approach and say, "Hi, I'm looking for the person in charge of advertising."

"Hi, I'm Bill, the owner."

"Hey, Bill. My name is Tim and I am with Magic 96 radio. Based on research that I have done on paint stores, I am very confident that advertising on my radio station would benefit your store. I would like to talk to you about that and explore ways that we can help you achieve your marketing goals."

Then, Bill would say something that the training had not mentioned. He would say,

"What have you got?"

What have I got? Did Bill expect me to pull out a ready-made advertising schedule? With whom did he think he was dealing? Some sales schlep straight out of the 70's?

So, I would say,

"Bill, what I've got is a customized approach to solving your problems. We'll sit down so that I can learn about your business. With this information I can go back to the station, convene a meeting of our brightest people, and customize a unique solution just for you. When can we sit down for about 45 minutes or so?"

We were taught never to ask for an hour because that seemed like a long time. Forty-five minutes, on the other hand, was just a little longer than a half hour and everybody has a spare half-hour.

I'll tell you what seemed like a long time, though and that was the time it took me to say the last three sentences in that little monologue. That's because it was inevitable that after the first sentence, the business owner's eyes would start to glaze over and he began to dream about the joys of stacking paint cans. (I remember one guy's eyes started to roll back into his head and I was afraid he was going to pass out when his phone rang and startled him back to consciousness).

Honestly, my intentions were good and the training that taught me how to engage a business owner in a conversation about the specifics of their business was the right idea. The problem then and now is that nobody has 45 minutes or 30 minutes or even 15 minutes to sit down with every Tom, Dick and Jane sales person to explain to them where it hurts.

So, after being asked "What have you got?" a dozen times or so and delivering the same coma inducing speech and getting nowhere, I improvised.

Now, after "What have you got?" I used this approach:

"Bill, I specialize in creating customized marketing plans for all of my customers. However, I know that you need some idea of what my product costs and the scope of our abilities. In my briefcase, I have a couple of examples of the work that I have done. I will show them to you as a conversation starter as long as you agree not to think that this is what I am proposing for you because I don't know yet what to propose for you. Is that fair?"

In every single case, Bill and every other decision maker agreed that this was fair and I pulled out the proposals that I kept with me all the time. These proposals, of which there were usually three, indicated a range of costs from reasonable to I'm-going-to-buy-a-new-boat-with-these-commissions. The one thing they had in common was that all had actually been purchased by someone and they all worked. That is, the customer who had made the purchase had done business with us again because they were satisfied with their return on investment.

The answer to "What have you got?" is now a conversation starter. What is the conversation about? The decision maker's business, of course.

Let's say that none of the three proposals struck a nerve with my decision maker. My final gambit was this:

"As I mentioned earlier, Bill, I customize unique marketing solutions. These programs don't seem to fit your needs. Before I came in here, I did some thinking about some of the most likely challenges you are facing. I thought of an idea and I am willing to share it with you under one condition."

"What condition?"

"The idea is only half-baked. I don't have all the details worked out and, in fact, I dont' even know if it can actually be done in the form I am thinking about. I will tell you what it is to see if you like it and to work with you to shape it into a workable program. My condition is that you have to be ready for the possibility that the idea can't actually be done since I haven't dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's."

"That's fine. Let's hear the idea."

Of course, I always had an idea before pulling this little stunt but the idea didn't have to be anything earth shattering. It just needed to have a some thought behind it and it had to make sense for the business to which I was presenting. Inevitably, if the decision maker didn't like the idea, I would get an appointment to brainstorm some other ideas.

Sales people who walk in cold off the street have zero credibility. No business decision maker is going to stop what they are doing to explain the way their business works in order for that seller to work on a proposal to establish her credibility. However, business decision makers are looking for solutions to their problems. They will do business with credible sale people. The trick is to establish one's credibility without asking the decision maker to do a lot of work to get you up to speed.

The easiest way to do that is to be prepared to answer the question: "What have you got?"