There’s very little worse than getting caught in a commodity trap, the primary reason being that when this happens, you are in a price war. And that sucks. It’s a race to the bottom where the prize for the winner is shitty margins and loss-leading products.
When we see this our first order of business is to help our customers, to quote Joe Calloway, “Become a category of one by transcending commodity and defying comparison.” We do that by focusing on the UDS – Unique Dragon only they can slay. If we can find a problem that your customer has that your product or service is uniquely good at solving, then we don’t sell your solution, we sell the problem. If they see the dragon they need to slay it.
Your sales team are converting, but they are doing it eventually. Your sales cycle is in low gear and turning slowly. This is caused by the fact that your customer want’s your product, but they just don’t want it right now. They see the dragon, but it’s pretty far away. Your sales team’s job is simple here – they have to bring it closer. I start every sales meeting with a very simple question (we call it the dragon hunter), “Why was this the right time for us to have this meeting?” This question is sales gold. Not only does it get them to explain the problem that they have, it gets them to explain why they have it now. Duke Ellington said it best when he said, “I don’t need time, what I need is a deadline.” If you can get a deadline from your prospect your sales cycle is guaranteed to be shortened.
Frustrating Inconsistency
This last one is the real head-scratcher. Your top salespeople (often the owner of the business or a select few others) are able to sell with no problem at all, yet the rest of the sales team seems to struggle. This happens when your top people intuitively know what questions to ask but have failed to codify their unfair advantage into a sales narrative used by your entire sales team. You have a sales deck, but it’s just show-up-and-throw-up features and benefits.
Sales is jiu jitsu, it’s not a once way street. Conversational presenting is the critical skill that’s needed, and understanding the story arc you need to take is everything.
At Missing Link when we sell, we manage this story arc by first identifying which of the three dragons above our client is struggling with (we actually ask them to order them from greatest to lowest priority), once we have that we know which unique dragon we have to help them slay the most. At the end of this they invariably sign-up for our Story Seller program. and if you have read this far and the above resonates, you should too. We offer a 100% money-back guarantee completely at your discretion after the Story Seller session, if we haven’t crafted your narrative to your satisfaction, keep the narrative and don’t pay us. If you’re keen, please book a call with me directly right here
Sales is hard, but often we make it unnecessarily harder than it needs to be by offering a cure for the wrong disease. If you can identify which of the above you’re struggling with, you’re off to the races. If you can’t, give me a call – this is a dragon we are uniquely positioned to help you slay 🙂
