8
EXPERTISE SELLING
In expertise selling, you differentiate yourself from other sales professionals by using your special knowledge and skills to meet a customer’s needs. The product or service you represent is probably available from many sources, but your expertise is not.
Expertise selling is one component of a larger strategy that would be used to sell a product or service. It is an intellectual selling method that is not meant to be used exclusively. A buyer finds this approach compelling because your expertise comes with something that he wants. In fact, your expertise may be the factor that makes it possible for him to understand the value of what you’re offering.
With that thought in mind, we want to offer you some good news the Harvard Business Review. An article titled “The New Sales Imperative” opened with a sentiment that should be sweet music to the ears of anyone in expertise or solution selling: The assertion is research from CEB (Gartner) indicates that B2B sellers are wrong if they think customers are in the driver’s seat and armed with the information they need to make purchasing decisions. In contrast, the research spotlights why customers feel overwhelmed and even paralyzed when faced with a major purchase.
Buying complex solutions, such as enterprise software or manufacturing equipment, has never been easy. But with a wealth of data on any solution, a raft of stakeholders involved in each purchase, and an ever-expanding array of options, more and more deals bog down or even halt altogether.1
Expertise selling is often a good path to get from an influencer to a decision-maker in the company. What you share with the influencer gives her confidence to walk into the decision-maker’s office and say, “You probably want to meet with this guy. He has a good grasp of what we’re dealing with.”
Whether the expertise is something like leadership and organizational skills, or there is a product or process involved, the person needs to hear and see your expertise in action. Case in point: If Maryann is trying to get a company to hire her for body language training, she’d better display her expertise by using effective body language.
Apple led the way in bringing expertise selling to consumers and making it come to life. Their differentiation in stores is making advanced expertise in software, hardware, and services available to customers. They have a solid grasp of the dollars-and-cents value of putting expertise into action by staffing stores with genuinely knowledgeable people. Whether you’re at the Genius Bar getting a quick repair or just curious about the latest iPhone release, you are rubbing shoulders with people who not only talk technology, but also show you how satisfying it is to use it. You know you’ll never be as good as they are (they’re the experts!), but you want to be a high caliber user so you listen, learn, and buy.
All the expertise in the world is useless, of course, unless you have a way to communicate it. In this chapter, we guide you through ways to communicate your unique knowledge effectively to a buyer and to use that knowledge to drive a sale. We also look at ways people involved in expertise selling have failed to close the deal and what they needed to do to fix their shortcomings.
How It Works
An area of expertise for Jim is helping executives determine the ideal organizational risk posture for the components of their organization. An efficient way to begin is to assess their risk quotient (RQ), as well as the RQ of their companies and their teams. The concept of RQ is commonly used in investing and portfolio theory as an indicator of an investor’s risk tolerance. It also surfaces in assessing environmental issues and in supply chain management. Using it to discuss personal excellence or team leadership is a relatively new application, however, that comes out of Jim’s research with executives and teams. When there is a significant variance between the RQ of company leadership and that of others in the organization, invariably there are problems with performance—most notably, sales performance. Think of your RQ as a point on a line between two extremes, with risk averse a “1” on the far left and risk inclined a “10” on the far right—everything to the left of the RQ point is your comfort zone. What exceptional sales people have done through various experiences and decisions is to move that point methodically further and further to the right to expand their comfort zone beyond what had been normal for them. A haphazard approach provokes inconsistent performance; the person has a surge in fear that causes the emotions to rise and cognitive ability to fall.
Entrepreneurs may not start out closer to a 10 than a 1; however, they are forced to have a consistent pattern of risk-taking—regularly pushing the envelope, if you will. Eventually, their number would logically be much closer to 10 than 1.
With that in mind, let’s look at how Jim earned a new client by using his RQ expertise in the sale.
A colleague of Jim’s was convinced that a company founder and CEO that he knew could use Jim’s assistance in upgrading his sales organization. He set up a lunch meeting.
Jim quickly suspected that the CEO did not want to be sold. Conversation suggested he was the kind of person who wanted to be intellectually challenged—to be given constructive ideas that he had not come up with on his own. After an extended discussion about fishing, vacations, and families, the topic finally turned to business. The prospect started talking about his company as CEOs commonly do: high performance, great expectations, strong culture, and so on.
Then Jim asked, “What’s the risk quotient of your organization?”
He looked quizzical. “What do you mean?”
“On a scale of one to 10, how risk-inclined is the company you created? And how risk-inclined are the people who work for you?” The CEO gave him a number that was in the middle on both counts. Jim continued, “How does the rating compare to yours?”
His own number was substantially higher than the one he assigned either to the company or to the people who report directly to him.
“What is the impact of that variance in the numbers?”
The CEO said, “Wow, that’s really an interesting question.”
Jim explained that risking less than your RQ makes you feel like you’re not challenging yourself enough; risking beyond your RQ makes you feel uncomfortable. When the people around the company’s leader fall far below him in terms of taking on challenges, disappointment will permeate the organization. In this case, the CEO suddenly realized the significance of the mismatch and knew he had to take steps to align the numbers.
That’s when the conversation turned and the CEO realized he wanted Jim to come work with him. He wanted help systematically ratcheting up the risk quotient within the organization.
Jim had physically pushed back from the table before asking the question. The push-back was intentional to give a sense of patience and an invitation to contemplate the question. He didn’t want it to be an in-your-face question, but rather to be part of a conversation, not a confrontation. The positioning went from sales to advising. By pushing back, the suggestion is that he was giving the person more time as well as more space—more time to give a thoughtful answer and more personal space that he “owned.”
He also used a slightly slower than normal pace in his speech. This suggests, “There’s no hurry here. Take your time.” It’s a confident way to pose a question and supports a sense of thoughtful exchange. The natural conversation motivator after posing the question was silence.
In contrast, leaning forward in the chair would have created a sense of urgency and heightened emotion. It would have approached a confrontational movement, so the body language would have countered the intended message. Coupling that with too much energy behind the question would have also been counterproductive, effectively crowding the air space. The expertise would have been the same, but the way it was communicated would have damaged the interaction.
In this situation, the delivery of the expertise, therefore, is worth spotlighting as a critical part of closing the deal.
How It Didn’t Work—at First
Eric sold solar panels for residences and commercial buildings. His ideal customer was someone who asked dozens of technical questions. Armed with an engineering background, as well as specifications and spreadsheets illustrating cost-savings, Eric had dozens of answers for them.
His nightmare prospect was the person motivated to consider solar panels for moral or social reasons. He had no idea how to respond to their priorities or counter their objections. Whereas their focus was on environmental consciousness, Eric was concentrating on the engineering and economic arguments for investing in solar energy. The prospects who wanted solar systems for emotional satisfaction thought Eric’s presentation of his expertise was excessive.
Eric’s failure as a sales professional highlights two traits that people who do expertise selling poorly have in common:
1. They assume other people process information the way they do. It’s inconceivable to them that other people are not persuaded by the same information and methods of presenting information that they are.
2. They have more passion for the product or service they are offering than they do for the priorities of the prospect. The sales rep is therefore transmitting data to the target rather than letting it come to him from the person. The sales encounter is akin to push technology versus pull technology: The request for a transaction comes from a source like a central server rather than from the client server.
Eric’s sales performance was so disappointing that he dropped his price, preferring a cut in his commission to reporting to the company owner that he was failing. That didn’t work well, either, and Eric soon found out why.
The Turnaround Discovery
The company kept Eric, but brought in Joel, whose results quickly exceeded expectations. Like Eric, Joel had plenty of engineering savvy, but he listened to his prospects and responded accordingly.
His listening gave him more than a connection to customers. It gave him an insight on how to make even more profit-per-unit than the company projected. What Joel realized was this: None of these customers had ever purchased a solar electric system before so they didn’t know what to expect in most aspects of the deal. They had no preconceived notions about the time or materials involved in installation. Some had a preference on color and wanted blue photovoltaic panels, which lacked the efficiency of their black counterparts; they didn’t care because blue held aesthetic advantages for them. Most importantly to Joel’s bottom-line calculations, they also had no well-defined sense of what the cost should be.
So, Joel listened in the manner of a true advisor, a sales professional with expertise that was totally foreign to his customers. He responded to their priorities, told them what they wanted to know, and stayed away from specifications they had no interest in—and sold every system for more than the company’s recommended price.
The Turnaround Technique
As we said earlier, body language isn’t just what you do with your body. It is your whole presentation. When Joel was hired, management hadn’t made any recommendations about suitable attire for a sales encounter. Sales reps were also engineers who could be involved in installations; they might show up for a call after walking on a roof in the hot sun. Joel had a better idea: If you were going on a sales call, always change into a dress shirt with the company logo. It was a classy look that was comfortable and professional, but not intimidating. The shirt always reminded customers whom the sales rep represented.
Realizing that most people didn’t want to know about the guts and wires of a 2,000-watt photovoltaic system, he also did not give a dry explanation of the technical specifications. Unlike Eric’s numbers-and-schematics approach, Joel developed an interactive presentation. He would guide customers through it at their own pace and they would ask questions whenever they were curious. When they seemed to skip past something he thought was important, he would use a conversation motivator like certainty/uncertainty to get them to pause: “When I first got into this business, I didn’t realize how significantly it impacts the system performance.” Joel’s technique secured both intellectual and emotional engagement.
By virtue of using the interactive approach, he got haptic communication working for him. Both he and the customer would sometimes be touching the same screen, or at least pointing to the same thing on the screen. Even without actually coming into contact, there was an energetic connection that moved the relationship forward.
Joel also got his customers moving outside whenever possible. In the presence of the sun, he could make his points about solar electric power most effectively—and the warmth of sunshine conveyed a subliminal good feeling. He needed to discuss the slope of the roof and shadow cover from trees, among other things, but the very fact that he got the prospect taking a walk with him helped in moving toward a sale. One of the steps to developing rapport that we discussed earlier was getting your customer talking and moving, so the walk to the outside of the building was part of reinforcing the connection.
Managing Threats to Your Expertise
Among the many events that could bring your expertise into question are these:
• You are now fielding questions that are peripheral to your core area of expertise. You have answers, but they aren’t as solid as before.
• Someone new joins the meeting and he’s a know-it-all or a contrarian—or maybe a genuine expert with information to match yours. For whatever reason, he starts to challenge you.
• You wade into a technical area of your knowledge and default to jargon and terms of art that the other person doesn’t understand. In terms of your developing relationship, this is like a train running straight on a track toward its destination only to be diverted in a different direction. The person has lost touch with your expertise because he lost touch with you.
Your basic strategies for handling these situations are to remain composed and use conversation motivators to get the other person talking and refocused on your core message. These are measures that you have considered in advance of the meeting and are prepared to take whenever they are needed.
Stay Calm
You are the expert, so maintaining a confident demeanor is essential. That’s easier said than done, however, if you feel as though you are under attack or have sabotaged yourself.
It’s possible that your body may start feeling signs of fight, flight, or freeze. These are automatic, so they are difficult to hide and control. Your blink rate might increase because your eyes are dry and your breathing might increase a bit. Your muscles might tense up. You might even feel as though you’re starting to sweat, which results from your metabolism speeding up. Earlier in the book we looked at some of these signs and how to manage them. For starters, in an effort to recapture your expression of confidence and composure, try to do the following:
• Deliberately slow your breathing. A great technique that no one in your meeting will probably notice is called pursed-lips breathing. The advantages and steps to doing it come from the COPD Foundation, the organization devoted to helping people coping with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They emphasize that this technique not only slows your breathing down, but also improves the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. We’re talking about your brain functioning better! They describe the process to do pursed-lips breathing as:
1. Breathe in through your nose (as if you are smelling something) for about 2 seconds.
2. Pucker your lips like you’re getting ready to blow out candles on a birthday cake.
3. Breathe out very slowly through pursed-lips, two to three times as long as you breathed in.
4. Repeat.2
• Get up and walk around. Do not hesitate to say, “Excuse me just a moment. I’m going to go grab some water. Can I get you something?” You will benefit greatly by doing something physical. We have a colleague who saw her boss do this in a sales meeting and thought that what she did was a bit odd—but it worked. The woman stood up and, with apologies, said her back was bothering her. She said, “Please just give me a moment.” She was not gone more than a minute, but the time gave her an opportunity to collect her thoughts and re-center herself.
• If you feel you have to stay in your seat, command your muscles to relax. Drop your shoulders, and sit up straight so your neck is stretched out. Open your hands. Put your feet flat on the floor. Now here are a few ways to use what we have called adaptors to help you really “adapt.”
Press your thumb into the palm of the other hand. Move it around.
Press your palms together. You don’t have to do it for long, but it should give a sense of security and calm.
• Put your brain into an analytical mode. What is the other person’s body language telling you? Do you detect any signs of tension? Aside from either challenging your expertise or appearing to be uninterested in it, is he doing anything physically, deliberately or inadvertently, that’s triggering a stress response in you?
In her book Lessons From the Edge, Maryann gave a number of tips from world-class extreme athletes about calming down quickly in order to perform well. One of them works surprisingly well, but the catch is that you can’t do it in front of your customers. If you find that you have become so nervous that your muscles are tense—so tense that you are concerned about not projecting a confident appearance—then you could use this tip that, though effective, we admit sounds weird. Go the restroom and make a horse sound with your mouth, or just shake your head until the muscles in your face feel totally loose. We are aware of how this advice sounds unconventional; however, research has shown that facial muscles control the degree of tension in the entire body. If you’re struggling with the physical signs of venturing beyond your comfort zone, just give it a try.
Alternatively, here is something more socially acceptable: smile. The easiest way to relax the muscles in your face is to smile.
Conversation motivators can rescue you and put you back on track to do a commanding expertise sale. As a refresher, they are: direct questioning, offering incentives, enhancing emotional appeal, boosting ego, deflating ego, easing fears, creating certainty or uncertainty, and silence. Among the things they can help you do are reroute the conversation back to where your presentation is strongest, insert a relevant and engaging story, recap the good parts, introduce something game-changing, and add a brilliant or surprising fact.
Here is a sampling of how the conversation motivators can help you accomplish each objective:
• Re-route the conversation. Open with emotional appeal to get the discussion back to where you want it. You could start with “I want to make sure we don’t lose sight of your major concerns.” Follow with a small ego boost: “You conveyed your primary need very clearly.”
• Insert a story illustrating an important point. Ease fears that may have arisen about your ability to meet his needs by citing a clear success. “Let’s focus on how this worked recently. Last year, Maxwell’s financial advisors improved their bottom line by twenty percent after implementing this program.” You have succeeded if the short story sparks questions related to the customer’s own needs. Paul Smith is a best-selling author and expert trainer on storytelling techniques. In Sell With a Story, he gives 10 solid reasons to tell stories in the context of your selling:3 “Stories help the buyer relax and just listen.” This is because storytelling does not sound like a sales pitch, yet it can convey valuable information about your product, service, or idea.
“Stories help build strong relationships.” People who know you default to trusting you and they can know you better through stories rather than facts.
“Storytelling speaks to the part of the brain where decisions are actually made.” As we noted earlier in the book in covering preferences as a major driver for buying decisions, people often make subconscious, and even irrational, decisions and then try to justify them later with facts. Stories can influence people emotionally to want to say yes to you.
“Stories make it easier for the buyer to remember you, your ideas, and your product.” This is a simply a matter of anchoring. It’s generally easier to remember facts if they are embedded in a memorable story.
“Storytelling actually increases the value of the product you’re selling.” Your ability to tell a compelling story about how your product or service affected a company inflates the perception of its value.
“Storytelling highlights your main idea by moving it to another context.” This is somewhat analogous to sending your sales team into the woods for two days in an experiential learning program. They understand teamwork in a new way because the context for displaying teamwork was so different from their office in Chicago. In other words, the story you tell positions the message in an unusual way.
“Stories are contagious.” People repeat a good story.
“Storytelling gives you an opportunity to be original.” If your prospect has been doing her job for more than 10 minutes, she has encountered various pitches, tactics, and obsequious remarks. A story from your own experience, giving genuine insights into your expertise and product offering, will be refreshing and memorable.
“Your buyers want more stories from you.” This isn’t just about the facts of your business, but also about who you are and what your company priorities are. Just as it’s important for you to tune into the motivators we covered in the chapter on relationship selling—practical, moral, social, spiritual, and historical—it’s valuable for your prospect to hear stories about how they figure into your business. Not all of them, necessarily, but the ones that you’ve determined will help you forge a connection with that prospect.
“Storytelling is more fun than delivering a canned sales pitch, for you and the buyer.” Storytelling is humanizing. As long as the story fits the prospect and the circumstance, it’s a winning way to present your case.
• Recap the good parts. Ask a summary question to get started. This is a question designed to allow the other person to have an opportunity to revisit what she has said and clarify key information. For example, if she challenges you on some feature of your computer security program, you could say, “Let me see if I understand how your thoughts on that issue tie in with what you said earlier. When you talked about the security breach....” In this way, you can try to move back to a point in the conversation where your expertise was shining.
• Introduce something game-changing. Admitting a gap in your skill set can be an incentive to your customer to trust your expertise even more than before. Always be honest and forthright about what you know and what you do not know. You can take the conversation to a whole new level by saying something like “If I partnered with someone from Maxwell Company on this, you would have the best of both worlds.” You are likely to see expressions like surprise and curiosity. The focus can then shift back to precisely what unique expertise you bring to the project.
• Add a brilliant or surprising fact. If you are a little out of your element, get back to your core strengths with a fact that can anchor everyone’s attention. Make it something that connects directly to the customer’s needs. You are using the “certainty” motivator here and you know you’ve succeeded when the other person’s body language mirrors yours in terms of energy and confidence and you have reestablished good eye contact. The body language reflects a sense of shared certainty.
Tips to Buy Time
Your body language can buy you time if you are struggling with an answer, or want to ask a question, but have not thought it through yet. It can also help you keep momentum going while you contemplate which conversation motivator might be useful at the moment.
• Use a gesture to suggest you’re thinking.
• Take few sips of water.
• Use a regulator, like a nod, to encourage someone else in the room to talk as you contemplate what you want to say.
• Get up and go to a different part of the room to fill your glass of water.
Summary Points
• Expertise selling is one component of your strategy, and often an effective path to get from an influencer to a decision-maker in the company.
• Expertise selling is an intellectual exercise, so it’s important to let the customer feel as though she has the space and time to contemplate what you are asking or asserting. Your body language should reflect that. Don’t crowd the person, either with your movements or with an overly energetic tone of voice.
• If your expertise has come under attack, remain composed and use conversation motivators to get the other person talking and refocused on your core message. Prepare yourself to use these measures in advance of the meeting.
• By the time your body has automatically responded to a perceived threat, it has already modified your behavior. It’s vital to know how to counter the physiological effect of fight, flight, or freeze.
• Conversation motivators can rescue you from a situation in which your expertise is questioned. Use them to reroute the conversation back to where your presentation is strongest, insert a relevant and engaging story, recap the good parts, introduce something game-changing, and add a brilliant fact.