Article - How to Make More Effective Sales

READ: 5 mins

AUTHOR: Robert Craven

The latest research findings:

Summary

• Most sales methods deal with better conveying information from the supplier outward at customers.

• ‘Sense Making’ largely focuses on helping the customer cope with an overabundance of seemingly high-quality information.

• Sense Making engenders greater customer confidence, reduces customer skepticism, and most importantly, yields a far greater likelihood of the customer purchasing an upgraded, premium offering from a supplier.

• Adopt the role of teacher or curator. Everyone loves a teacher, no-one loves a salesperson.

I recommend that you take a look at How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense of Sense Making By Nick Toman (June 27, 2019). You will see that much of this article is quoted from this source.

Sense Making

Previous Gartner research on B2B customer buying behavior had shown that customers often felt awash in too much information.

However, the latest research (1,200 B2B purchase interactions) highlights a new phenomenon: customers are awash in an abundance of good information seriously hampering their ability to make a purchase decision.

Source: How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense of Sense Making

Source: How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense of Sense Making

Gartner was able to isolate three distinctive information-sharing approaches:

• Giving

• Telling

• Sense Making.

Source: How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense of Sense Making

The Sense Making approach “engenders greater customer confidence, reduces customer skepticism, and most importantly, yields far greater likelihood of the customer purchasing an upgraded, premium offering from a supplier”.

Source: How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense of Sense Making

How does Sense Making differ from Challenger sales?

Stated simply, Challenger and Sense Making operate independently.

Challenger, on one hand, is based on a supplier-out view, capturing how the best sales reps explain what makes their offerings uniquely valuable. The critical distinction of Challenger is to lead TO your solution, not WITH your solution, by reframing how the customer thinks about their own business. Challenger, in this regard, is about powerfully sharing your capabilities with the customer.

Sense Making, by contrast, is based on a market-in view from the customer’s perspective. When Sense Making, sellers essentially move their chair to the customer’s side of the table, jointly ‘look out at the market’ with the customer, noting the variety of good – if conflicting – information and possibilities, and admit it may seem like a mess, but to fear not.

Sense Making requires specific skills that differ materially from the primary Challenger skills. These include:

• diagnosing customer purchase challenges

• understanding the competitive market exceedingly well

• planning and patience for appropriately sharing information

• customer collaboration, and

• the ability to rationalize and simplify complex ideas.

Source: How Challenger Sales Organizations Should Make Sense of Sense Making

If anything, Sense Making incorporates a dramatically heightened awareness — even empathy — for the customer’s purchase process.

This means having a good grasp of the likely frustration that a purchase process can inflict on a customer and their organization, and well-honed instincts to spot when customers are getting confused or are on the wrong track. Of course, there is a good dose of organizational support required to enable these skills.

So what?

Sense Making focuses on helping the customer cope with an overabundance of seemingly high-quality information. This, I believe is where a “They Ask, You Answer” approach (Marcus Sheridan, 2020) comes into play.

You can use video (or at least, excellent content) to answer the questions you know that potential customers are asking:

• How much?

• What might go wrong?

• What are the other options/solutions?

• Who else can I buy from?

• What is the competition like?

• What do your existing customers think?

Everyone trusts a teacher but few trust a salesperson.

You can combine Sense Making with taking on the role of teacher to help and support your buyer in the sales process.

While video isn’t the compulsory solution, I do believe that taking on the role of the teacher is crucial. You can move from Giving (“I can get you a lot more information on that”), to Sense Making (“there is a lot of information – let me help you make more sense of it”). This will improve the quality of your relationship and improve your success rate.

Finally

Sense Making instills customers’ confidence in the information they are using. It also drives down skepticism of the seller and their claims. 

This creates a strong sense of control on behalf of the customer.

A Sense Making posture is more commercially distinctive than the use of powerful sales messaging.

Sense Making can help the customer to process your information against the competition’s.

To summarise, Sense Making largely focuses on helping the customer cope with an overabundance of seemingly high-quality information. On the other hand, most sales methods deal with better conveying information from the supplier outward at customers.