My children used to come home from elementary school and
tell me that “denial” was a river in Egypt. Groan as much as you want, but it’s
also one of the major reasons why Do Nothing Inc. wins so many of your sales
deals.
As a Sales Engineer, you can talk, present, demo, whiteboard
and architect your solution until you are blue in the face, but if the customer doesn’t acknowledge
that they have an issue that needs taking care of – it’s going to be a long and
pointless meeting. We like to speak about the great things that our company,
our product and our solutions can do for the customer, but if the customer doesn’t accept they have a pain – nothing will
happen.
I believe that customer denial is worse than customer
inattention because it doesn’t matter what you say –it’s not important to the
customer. So how do you get the customer’s attention? The standard SE practice
of linking business pain to your technology solution and proving that you are
uniquely qualified to do this will not work. Yet that is what usually happens –
and the salesperson and SE keep going down the path of logic, business reason
and all the aspects of selling solutions. The more the customer resists – the harder
they push. The more the customer resists – the more people they speak with to
make that customer change her mind. But
if the customer is in denial then it just won’t help.
Back to getting the customer’s attention – what does work? Easy – you talk about two things.
1.
You talk about someone else’s pain who the
customer can relate to.
2.
You forget about the customer’s pain and focus
on the beautiful gains instead. But – do it along the lines of discovering what
other things the customer will be able to do (or fund) once they address the
pain you don’t want to talk about.
Sound a little confusing? It is – welcome to denial. More on
how to make the Nile flood and create fertile selling grounds in the next post. (You knew
that pun was coming…)
