Sales feels icky because most of us are doing it backward. We’re so eager to get to “yes” that we sound like eager children seeking approval, throwing features and benefits at prospects until they either buy or run away.
But what if the entire sales process could feel more like helping a friend solve a problem? What if, instead of pushing your product, you could help people figure out what progress they’re actually trying to make in their lives?
This is the core of our book, demand-side sales – an approach that flips the traditional sales lens from “who will buy my product?” to “what progress are people struggling to make?”
Why getting a “No” before a “Yes” is a good thing.
“Most of the time, if you watch a bad salesperson, or a very new salesperson, they’ll just spout out every feature and benefit that the product has.
The problem there is more basic, every time you give them a feature and benefit, you can cause a new struggling moment. Every time you do that, you can be pushing yourselves back in the timeline”.
Here’s something that will flip your thinking: a no is way more important than a yes.
Think about it. When you really start to understand how people make decisions, they eliminate things first before they choose something. The moment someone says yes, you realize it’s actually very hard for people to say yes. But getting to no? That helps you shape the playing field.
Those no’s are the boundaries. The “I don’t knows” help you shape that field of play so you know where you can go and where you can’t go. Most of the time, people have to say no first before they can say yes.
Try this: In your next sales conversation, when someone gives you a “no,” don’t try to overcome it. Instead, use it to understand their boundaries. Ask “What would need to be different?” You’re not fighting the no – you’re using it to understand their decision-making process.
Progress is a system, not a feature
Here’s where most salespeople get it wrong. They think people buy for one reason. But progress is way more complex than that.
Progress is a set of things; it’s not any one thing. Many people say people bought their product for one reason.
In actual fact progress is 1) a combination of a situation you’re in – it’s the context that’s causing you to feel some kind of pain. And 2) it’s the outcome – or, in other words, what you expect to feel/achieve when you make that progress.
But here’s the key part: progress has to have tradeoffs. It has to have pushes and pulls, and anxieties and habits, and it has to have hiring criteria and firing criteria. This is what we call the four forces of progress.
You can learn more about unpacking the four forces of progress here.
As you start to look at how people make decisions, you realize that at some point, if they can’t make tradeoffs – they can’t make the progress. If they don’t have something pushing them, they can’t make progress. If they can’t overcome their anxieties, they can’t make progress.
Making progress is a system and we, as sales people, need to understand the critical components of that system.
Take non-profit schools, for example. What causes parents to take a kid out of one school and put them into a new school? Two parents might have very different opinions about the progress they’re trying to make for their child. If you’re working for a school in this instance, your job is helping them align on what’s possible and what’s not.
Try this: Before your next meeting, map out the four forces for your prospect:
What’s pushing them away from their current situation?
What’s pulling them toward a new solution?
What anxieties do they have about changing?
What habits do they have to give up?
Remember – if any of these forces are missing, they can’t make progress.
Why feature-benefit selling always backfires
When you start shouting features and benefits at people, you come from a place where you think that’s what people want to hear. But it’s the context that determines the features they really want to hear about.
Here’s a situation that is more common than you think: you tell your prospect five features they really don’t want, you keep pushing. And, all of a sudden they’re backed into a corner – they’re suddenly negotiating for a price because the product seems over-engineered.
They’re thinking “I don’t need this and this and this, how about a 20% discount?
Every time you give someone a feature and benefit they don’t need, you cause a new struggling moment. You’re actually pushing them back in the timeline.
But here’s the thing – you still need to do features and benefits. You just need to tailor them to their context and their outcome.
Try this:
Let’s say you work in software. Look at your current sales pitch or demo.
How many features are you mentioning that your prospect doesn’t actually need?
Try to understand it from their perspective – what concerns are you creating?
What new anxieties are you introducing?
Every feature should connect to their specific struggling moment.
Become a therapist, not a closer
In business, you often have a buyer and a user, and they want different progress. You need to help both make progress, and understand that if you don’t satisfy both, your product won’t be successful.
As a salesperson, you need to be a therapist. You need to be able to understand the progress that the buyer wants and the progress that the user wants. You also need to understand the tradeoffs for each.
This is especially true when you’re not just selling to one person. Take teachers and nurses – they’re both selling, but they’re helping people make progress. A teacher sells a lesson to a student, but the student has to make progress.
Try this: Map out everyone involved in the decision. What progress does each person want to make?
Where do those goals conflict? Your job isn’t to convince everyone your product is perfect – it’s to help them navigate those conflicts and understand what tradeoffs they’re willing to make.
The foundation you really can’t skip
Here’s the hard truth: it’s very hard to apply demand-side sales to companies that have not done the heavy lifting of finding the Jobs.
You need to understand the Jobs to be done your customers are hiring your product to do. It’s non-negotiable.
Most companies think they know why customers buy, but as Peter Drucker said, “what companies think they know about their customer, and why they buy is mostly wrong.”
The reason why customers buy is rarely known by the company.
This means talking to customers divorced from your product. Understanding the why.
And yes, it’s hard to do yourself because you have biases. Even the experts in this transcript hired someone else to help them find their own jobs to be done.
But once you have the Jobs, sales becomes about helping people find their progress instead of pushing your product and closing the sale. Closing the sale doesn’t make progress – they make progress when they use the product to solve a problem they actually have.
Reframing the sales process using demand-side sales is available as a podcast.