23 January 2012 1 Comment

The Rise of Cynicism and Suspicion (and what to do about it)

Do your eyes roll whenever you get yet another email or see yet another ad claiming they can “bring you a flood of clients”, “double your conversion” or “take your business to the next level” (I’m not even sure what that last one means, but I see it a lot).

Me too.

One of the side effects of being subjected to so much more advertising than before is that we’ve grown immune to it. In fact, I’d go so far to say that we’ve grown allergic to it.

Whenever I see an ad, or hear someone making a claim about the wonderful results I’m going to get from their product or service my immediate reaction nowadays is just to disbelieve it. The bigger the claims, the more suspicious I get.

And I’ve seen it from the other side too. I’ve written emails and sales letters where I’ve meticulously crafted benefits statements to describe the wonderful things people would get if they bought the product or service. Only for them to be outperformed by simple, descriptive text saying “here’s what it is, here’s what you’ll get from it, here’s how to buy it”.

Cynicism and suspicion are the kryptonite of traditional benefits-driven sales copy.

So what can you do instead?

There’s a terrible temptation when you see how much your competitors are hyping their offerings to do the same yourself or try to “one up” them. But I’m finding that, in the main, my potential clients respond better to simplicity and straightforward descriptions.

That’s not to say you don’t talk about the benefits. But don’t use hype-filled language.

Better yet: demonstrate rather than claim.

Give examples of what they’ll get rather than telling them how amazing it will be. Rather than saying they’ll get a “flood of new customers”, tell them about how John the plumber got 27 new enquiries in 5 days as a result of the marketing you did for him.

And there’s one specific technique that seems to work well to highlight benefits without raising defenses. It’s to tell stories.

By illustrating your points with an interesting story you get your readers or listeners into “pay attention” mode rather than “shields up” mode.

I give some examples of how to do this in face to face discussions in my Selling with Stories article.

Or for a real masterclass in using stories to build deep client connections and cut through resistance, join me this Thursday for a free webinar with copywriter Daniel Levis who’s made a real art out of “selling more by selling less”.

Register for Free Sell More By Selling Less Webinar

See you on the webinar!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , , , ,
21 June 2011 Leave a Comment

It Never Happens to Me…

If you’re like me and you subscribe to a zillion email newsletters and blogs, you probably hear the following type of stories fairly regularly:

  • “Jane got chatting to the guy sitting next to her in the dentist. The topic got around to business, they exchanged cards, and a few calls later she had a new client.”

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  • “I met Bill at a conference. We got talking and I mentioned an article I’d written on cost reduction. Later I sent it to him and followed up with a call. He was interested and after a brief meeting he hired me to help them reduce their indirect spend by 20%.”
  • “John was at a party a few weeks ago. The conversation turned to what everyone in the group did for a living. John shared his “elevator pitch” and two of the people there followed up with him later – one becoming a client within a few weeks.”

Now I don’t know about you, but whenever I read these stories, or hear similar ones from people talking about their experiences, my immediate reaction is “how come that never happens to me?”

When I go to the dentist, the topic never gets round to business. When I meet people at parties, the conversation usually turns to football, not marketing.

So how come these folks in the stories seem to have so much success turning social situations into business? Is there a secret they’re not sharing that they do and we don’t? Some amazing technique we’ve not heard of?

Well, there is a secret. But it’s not a clever technique.

You see, what the stories usually omit is that the people they’re talking about initiate conversations EVERY time they’re at the dentist (or the doctors, or at the hairdressers, or in a queue for tickets, or…). Only one in twenty turns into a business discussion – and that’s the one you hear in the story. Of course, one in twenty is one more than you get if you don’t initiate any conversations at all.

When they’re at parties, the conversation doesn’t always turn to business. It’s just that they go to more parties than us, and they’re the ones bringing up business.

In short, they turn more social situations into business than you or I because they put themselves in more social situations than you or I, they proactively talk to more people than you or I, and they bring up business more than you or I.

The rather simple logic is that all other things being equal, if you want to win more business, you’ve got to do more business development.

Or to paraphrase the old joke: it’s no good just praying to win the lottery – you have to give your deity of choice a fighting chance by actually buying a ticket.

Filed Under: Business Development Mindset Tagged With: ,
8 September 2009 5 Comments

Selling With Stories: Answering Tough Questions

18 months ago I posted a very popular article on Selling With Stories where I described how stories and anecdotes can be used to great effect by professionals to provide more meaningful, resonant descriptions of what we do and how we work.

Stories are also particularly effective when we’re asked those tricky questions that clients like to throw at us when we’re pitching for business.

Faced with “what would you do if…” and “how would you handle…” questions, there’s a great temptation for professionals to try to demonstrate their expertise by trotting out management, legal, accounting or other theory for how situations should be handled.

But that’s not what clients actually want to hear. They want the confidence that you have handled these situations and that you will be able to deal with them in practice, not in theory.

The best way to handle these questions is with a short story or anecdote about a client situation where you faced such an issue and were able to address it.

When I sold and delivered large consulting change management programmes, I had a series of stories about overcoming resistance, stories about programme management, stories about delivering results and stories about culture change. Each of these gave me credibility when a client asked how we could address the organisational obstacles to change, or how we could make sure they really achieved the benefits they were looking for from the programme, etc.

Some stories are reusable for multiple situations. One of my overcoming resistance stories about a senior executive in a client organisation who had been overlooked for the CEO role and initially wanted to obstruct any initiative launched by the CEO also doubled as a story about how to address executive politics.

Sometimes the story doesn’t even have to be of a great success to be effective. About 5 years ago I won a rather nice multi-million Euro sales process implementation project for the consulting firm I was working for. We’d had a tricky relationship with the client and found out later we were in last place coming up to our final presentation. The turning point came when the senior client executive told us that all previous sales process projects he’d known had failed because the consultants hadn’t engaged with the front-line staff. I was able to tell a story about how I’d learned the hard way in a previous project where we hadn’t involved the key salespeople and first line managers early enough and so had struggled with implementation until we eventually got them on board. It wasn’t a story about a great success we’d had – but it told the executive that I’d been in that situation before and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. We won the project, and in a debrief meeting later the client told us that had been the key moment when they knew we had the right practical experience to work with them.

These “early lessons” stories can be even more effective than success stories as they’re highly believable, don’t come across as pompous or “show offy”, and really send a clear message that because of that hard lesson you’ve known what to do right ever since.

Of course, the “early lesson” type story has to be set a decent distance in the past – it can’t be a mistake you made the previous week!

Most professionals should be able to create a list of tricky questions they often get asked and prepare example stories to address them. They’re best not replayed verbatim as stock answers, but stored away as an easy-to-recall memory to build on.

And using stories to answer tough questions is not only more believable – it’s much more interesting than a dry theoretical answer too.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: ,