Partnering: Selling Is Not a Four Letter Word - But Being Sold Is!

Let's face facts. Who in the world wants to be sold? I bought a new car a few years ago. It was my third of the exact same model and series. I had already done all my research and I wanted the same car - except a newer model. I knew what I wanted. Instead of just selling me the car - the sales person attempted to sell me. I had already explained what I wanted and that this was going to be my third car. But he continued to sell me. I told him I was already sold - that I just wanted a fair price and the color I wanted. But he continued. I finally asked him to stop and told him he was actually unselling me - and that if he couldn't give me the car, the color and the price, I would go to someone else.

I think this story is typical of buyers today.

Back in the day, selling was an active process of persuading the client. Often this meant persuading the client to do something they didn't want to do. This was high-pressure salesmanship (there's a word you don't see any longer) and often involved manipulation, distortion of the facts, and outright lying. Fortunately, these days are long gone and no one who is in sales does this any longer. However, the misperception of sales and selling still lingers on.

The idea of "I win, you lose" is one where some client people today still come from. This old idea - is where sales person and client are adversaries. While almost every person who is involved to getting business has moved away from this adversarial positioning, there are still those people in client accounts who now set up this adversarial positioning and in fact, their job depends on it - especially in certain services and solutions that are considered a commodity.

In the past, the client was seen as the adversary. Now it seems that some people in the client account see us as the adversary. Of course, this all depends on the client and I believe, where they are in the organization's pecking order, or food chain.

In order to have an adversary or competitor, you have to make the other person disadvantaged. This is an "I give up a little - you give up a little more than what I just gave up" approach. Someone inevitably gets a bad deal and/or feels cheated or "trespassed against." The client feels like they paid too much, or didn't get what they needed, and the professional makes a profitless sale. In other words, both walk away from the transaction with a deficit. When this occurs, the buying process has mutually disadvantaged both parties.

I think the more sophisticated the client and the professional, and the less the service or solution the client wants to buy is viewed as a commodity, the better both the client and the professional interacts with each other. Both parties are aware of trickery and deceitfulness, and ploys and counter ploys that can be used against each other - but choose not too act in that manner with each other.

When both parties are sophisticated enough, and feel they can operate from a higher plain because their self-esteem is strong enough to withstand scrutiny and shrug off judgements of other, they can both get into a term of what everyone knows and hears of as "partnering."

I am leery of the word, "partnering." As one CFO said, "It's not until you have skin in the game that I consider the provider as a partner." I do think there is a middle ground - where there is a certain "skin in the game" for the professional and even the client. It's what we have all heard by now as "win-win."

Even as I type this, I know some of you who will read this will say, I know "win-win." This is nothing new. And I can say, "I agree." The big however is this - so few of us and the client - really truly act in accordance with win-win. Win-win is a sales strategy and buying approach whereby both parties truly act and behave in ways in which both parties make it their objective to create a premium-value/premium-price buying transaction where the professional receives a premium price for what he is providing and the client receives the premium values of the professional's benefits, advantages and results. In this approach, both profit mutually.

Now that you have read the last two sentences, you probably will agree with this statement: very few of us have those kinds of relationships with clients. Am I right?

Negotiating is the process of where you as the professional are working to help the client achieve what they want and need. Mutually beneficial negotiating is the art of making mutually profitable consulting agreements. Profitable for both parties, because that's really what both parties want and need. It is not the art of deception, manipulation, or double-speak. The objective of the buying and negotiation process is to create  a partnership.

5 Levels of Adaptability - How Adaptable is Your Client to Change?

If you aren't thinking about how to interact with your client and attempting to figure out the best way for you to adapt your style to their style, you are going to miss out on a lot of business. Equally important is trying to figure out how well your client is to adapting to change or something that is new.

It's incumbent upon you - the consultant, the professional, advisor, or whatever you call yourself - to work at relating your style to best match theirs and understand what is going on inside their head. Is this manipulative? Only if you think it is? Some of you may be thinking, "Why should I change? Why shouldn't the client accept me as I am?"

I don't think this is a good question at all. But I receive this question a lot. And the question usually  comes from - not surprisingly - people who aren't very successful with clients, and not very successful with people in general for that matter. These are the people who are rough around the edges. These people are usually argumentative and would rather be right than change.

I usually can't coach these people beyond the question, "What if you are wrong?" because they can't get their head around that question. It never really occurs to them that they could be wrong.

So, assuming you dear reader, are not one of these people, I am going to walk you through how people, specifically clients, interpret a new experience. A "new experience" deals with whatever it is you are trying to convince a client of - for example; one way is better than the old way, this new service is better than the other service, this offer (as in a negotiation) is different and meets what they are asking for, or some other event where they are getting new information, new data, and are trying to determine "where it goes" in the catalog inside their brain.

Five (5) Categories of  Adaptability  (Accepting Change)
When the client encounters this "new event" or "new experience" - and this happens quite a bit when meeting with you - he will do one of the following things:

Category 1 - Assimilating; He will assimilate the information with a past experience or previous information. It will slip into one of the many categories his has - as in a file inside a filing cabinet or a drawer inside a dresser. Think of it as new socks. These new socks are easy to categorize because they are like all the other socks. And they all go into the "sock drawer." Simple, easy, pleasant, compatible, and fast. Summed up by "Got it."

Category 2 - Threatening: He sees this as way too different. Radical.  Too far outside the box of categories. It may seem too threatening to his beliefs, his way of thinking, his current operation. It could go against the grain of the culture, too confrontational of a style coming from you versus his laid back style or his team's laid back style, or it goes against where the organization is heading because it requires a left turn or an about-face. It could be summed up as, "No way."

Category 3 - One-Off: -  He will see it in isolation. It is different than what he has seen before - and keep it apart from the other things. He will treat it as an exception, so that he can continue forward as he normally and customarily does. When thinking of a negotiation or a sale - this is a way to overcome the item above (number 2). Offering it to the client as this will be a one-time event and not disrupt the other things going on as in the current negotiation, other contracts, other projects, etc. It can be summed up as a "one off."

Category 4 - Similar: He might distort and morph the new event or information to make it fit into his current categories or past beliefs and behaviors. He will say, "It's similar to this, but a little different." Then he will explain how it relates to the other things.

Category 5 - Accepting: He will change his old thinking, beliefs and behaviors. More people are willingly accepting that  the information they have currently, may be outdated. This is summed up by, "Okay, this is different. Let's see how we can do this."

As a person who is trying to get the client to buy, negotiate, learn or change, you are always, and I mean this, always looking for win-win circumstances. Clients, as worldly as they are in today's business environment, on still on-guard for someone trying to pull the wool over their eyes - to try and trick them.

One of your tasks as a professional is to reach client-professional win-win strategies. This is especially true of new clients - and since they don't know you, it's incumbent upon you to convince the person that it wouldn't benefit you in the short or long run to go for win-lose propositions. Clients - especially clients who haven't worked with you in the past - are looking to see "what's wrong with this picture?" It's not the way I operate frankly, as it seems to me, this way of thinking is just too time consuming and energy draining.

However, a lot of clients have been burned before by half-baked ideas and proposals and purchases that came "without the batteries" if you get what I mean. They are part of a vast majority who after they bought something they have this feeling of, "If I would have known then about this, I would have asked this about it." I know you can relate to that - because we all can. Sometimes our experiences make us wiser and "we wish we would have known" something in order to ask about it.

Your job then, is to approach the client as if they are skeptical and perhaps even a little cynical. To overcome any skepticism what you can do is "over educate" them. Give the client all the information they need to make the right and best decision. Start off by confirming what they want and need and confirm how they want the process to go - this includes the buying cycle as well as the implementation cycle. And if they aren't asking the right questions - tell them that they aren't asking the right questions. The give them the questions to ask - before they learn the hard way.

This places the client in control of the buying process. They are not being sold, they are being educated. The client is learning. And by providing the client with enough information, the client slowly drops his guard, however he still might be a little wary looking for any indication that this might be a trick. Except there is no trick.

This is a great way to differentiate yourself by the way. Say to the client "You're not going to have an uneducated client." And you are looking for a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship, where you are working with the client in an open, non-confrontational, win-win manner.

I have worked with prospective clients where they not only were skeptical, they were deeply cynical. To overcome this, I pointed the prospective client to my other clients and pushed a client list of names, titles, and phone numbers, across the desk before I left, for them to call - to "see if I was real." I even offered to place the call and set up con call with clients where I screwed up, or the project was challenging, so they could hear from the client first hand where I made a mistake - and then hear how I corrected it.

I have gone even further, and you may not think this was a good idea, but I have told clients how much I made in profit or margin on a transaction before. When I did this, the client was shocked. First, they said, "You mean you can tell me how much you are going to make off a transaction?" I've also told clients  that I would actually place a cap on how much we would make in profit before - again - shocking the client. Clients think we make a lot of money - a lot of profit. When I tell clients what our margin typically is, I've actually had clients say, "Wow, that's all you make? That little?"

Well, I've gone on a little past where I wanted to go in this piece of writing. The main point I wanted to make is that there are certain psychological aspects you should be aware of in order to break through to the client and distinguishing yourself from the pack of other professionals you are competing with who are also vying for the client's business. Some of my ideas may seem radical, but from my perspective - I don't think they are, because you are opening yourself up to the client and telling him the truth and the facts and this is a very different approach.


 

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