Ingrained Habits

During one of my MIL courses, one of the participants, a veteran interior designer, came up to me at the break and asked if she could ask me something.

"You encourage us to try to close 'in one round,' but in my field that's just not realistic..."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because someone who's interested in designing their home, office, restaurant or whatever isn't going to buy my services without first getting a sense of my style and my work in places I've already designed. He's definitely going to want to visit a few relevant places, and I have no choice but to give him names and addresses, or go along with him on a visit or two, which obviously won't happen during that same meeting!" she said.

"Would you mind if I brought this up in the workshop?" I asked, and she agreed right away.

When we came back from the break, I shared the details of her situation with the group and asked:

"If the client asks, on his own initiative, to see places we've done, and we have no interest in delaying the close, what's the technique called for here?" And the group, which had already covered the chapter on handling objections, called out the name of the technique in unison.

"Exactly right," I said, "but I'd bet my head that the lady who asked the question is the one who brings up showing the places she designed in the first place!"

"No way!" she shot back. "I just complained to you that it only delays the close. Why would you think I'd start such a pointless, unwise move myself?"

Since I make a point of not arguing with students, certainly not in the middle of a workshop, I settled for saying, "You don't have to accept what I'm saying, but I have no doubt you're the one who brings it up."

A week went by, we'd all forgotten about it, and we got to the simulation exercises.

That same interior designer volunteered to play the role of the salesperson.

The script she was handed said: "You've been invited to a meeting by someone considering hiring you to design a café. Please conduct the conversation in a way that allows you to close the deal."

The guy playing the buyer opposite her had this in his script: "You're about to open a new branch of Kapulsky (an Israeli café chain; you can guess when this took place...). You were referred to this interior designer with a warm recommendation, and you're considering hiring her for the design work. Please conduct the interaction with her and make your decision based on how the meeting goes."

The exercise began, as most of them do, with both sides "acting out" the scenario, but after a few minutes, as expected, they got caught up in the situation and started behaving naturally, just as they usually do.

At a certain point, the "client" asked the designer a rhetorical question: "And I understand you've designed quite a few restaurants and cafés!?"... And without hesitating she answered:

"Absolutely, and I can show you some of them, too..."

I looked around the group. I was sure everyone had noticed what had just happened, but I was disappointed to find that no one had.

So I turned to the interior designer and asked, "Do you remember what you asked me at our last session?"

"Yes," she replied, repeated the question and added, "And for some reason you claimed that I'm the one who brings it up..."

"Right," I told her, "and now you can see it on video..."

After I played the relevant clip for the group, she turned to me, stunned: "How did you know??? And how do you explain it??? I know it doesn't move me forward, it holds me back, and I do it anyway!"...

"When you were just starting out as a designer," I answered, "most clients asked, quite reasonably, to see places you'd designed as a condition for hiring you. Over the years, you internalized that condition as an integral part of the interaction. Today, when some clients come to you through a referral and you can absolutely manage without it, you still expect the client, like the ones before him, to ask to see places you've designed, and if he doesn't, you do it for him..."

By the way, I'd known about this phenomenon for years before that designer ever started selling, so I had no trouble at all guessing that this was what was going on...

The moral:

A great many salespeople project their own decision-making style onto their customers... If I'm an organized, rational person who insists on checking things out in advance, getting recommendations, building comparison tables and so on, then surely the customer in front of me will act the same way...

Well, the customer in front of me isn't me. His decision-making patterns aren't necessarily the same as mine. The right and more effective way is to size him up, identify what makes him tick and tailor ("personalize") the sales approach to him. And the fact that some of the customers before him acted a certain way in certain circumstances is no guarantee that this one will do the same.

The tendency to repeat the same sales patterns and moves over and over, without going deeper and getting better, is sadly not rare around here either.