How to NOT create champions
I shopped this past weekend at a big box store and finally figured out the core reason I hate self-checkout. I almost always leave the experience feeling clueless and incompetent. There’s always an exception or problem, I can rarely figure it out without help, it’s hard to get an associate's attention, they seem annoyed to be bothered, and overall it takes a lot of extra energy. It all adds up to a negative emotion as I leave the store and a renewed commitment to buy everything online.
My ‘feeling clueless’ experience made me wonder if we’re not guilty of this in B2B sales. We’re constantly striving to get to the next step, to cultivate a champion, to create urgency and action. But instead of making it easy for them to commit, our strategies may actually de-motivate our buyers.
Three ways that we make it harder for our buyers to be our champions:
Being too smart - we focus on being really smart about the problem, our solution, and the approach. And we are - we solve these problems every day, and they do it once a year at most. But do we overwhelm and even patronize buyers with by moving too fast through discovery and not giving them time to learn?
Asking too much - we push them to engage in our process and do a lot of work too early. An example is emailing the detailed discovery document and asking our potential champion to ‘fill it out so we can provide a great demo experience.’ I’m sure they are thinking, “It’s not my responsibility to help you give good demos.”
Being too needy - the project is really important to the seller and is not important to the potential champion - at most 5% of their job. Leaning in too hard turns them off.
Three things we can do to make it EASY for buyers to become champions.
Clarity - collaborate to understand their problems and provide insights. The best way is to ask questions that help them understand their problem better and teach themselves new ways to think about their challenges. A good test - in call prep, do you spend more time on questions you will ask than on the slides?
Empowerment - view yourself as a ‘buying facilitator’ instead of a seller. Provide resources that help - templates for business cases or ROI, solution descriptions, business process refinements, deployment plans, and change management recommendations. Anything that makes it easier for your potential champion to navigate their internal process.
Hope - this is a high bar for software and most business solutions. However, if you aspire to sell big deals, you have to create a sense of possibility and hopefulness in your champion. Some of my largest, fastest-moving wins had a first call that concluded with the buyer saying, “I never thought it would be possible to fix this problem, but you’ve given me hope that there might be a way.”
As we’re late in the year and in our sales cycles, and you’re considering tactics to push deals over the line, consider whether you are creating barriers or fast lanes for your buyers mentally and emotionally.
