When you think of a salesperson, there are stereotypes that might come to mind…and none of them are too great. You’ve got your “Wolf of Wall Street” wannabes or the used car salesperson who’s trying to up-charge you at every opportunity. But that’s not what the reality looks like. We learned about how sales professionals […]
When you think of a salesperson, there are stereotypes that might come to mind…and none of them are too great. You’ve got your “Wolf of Wall Street” wannabes or the used car salesperson who’s trying to up-charge you at every opportunity. But that’s not what the reality looks like.
We learned about how sales professionals are actually in the business of helping serve their customers from Todd Caponi, the expert in approaching sales with transparency (no seriously, he wrote two books on it). After years in roles like CRO of PowerReviews and ExactTarget’s sales leadership team (helping it to a successful IPO followed by a multi-billion dollar acquisition by Salesforce), he’s now sharing what it means to approach sales as a service as part of his work with his company Sales Melon.
Why it’s important to treat sales as a service
Before we get too far, let’s address first things first: why is it important to shift the sales mindset to define it as a service profession? Well, the sales industry has a big trust problem. Like, a really big one. Only 3% of buyers trust sales reps. Seems a bit harsh, right?
But on the flip side, if you can earn a prospect’s trust, you’re golden. 94% of consumers report that they will remain loyal to a brand that’s open and honest. As a salesperson, you’re the human side of your company’s brand. If you can create a trusting relationship with a prospect, then they’ll be much more likely to buy from you.
So how do you build up that trust? Well, treating sales as a service profession is a big part of it. That means fostering collaboration with the buyer and helping them through the process, instead of just dumping information on them and hoping it’s enough for them to say yes.
And it’s not just important for closing the deal. Taking a service-based approach during the sales process can help you retain the customers you gain. 53% of customer loyalty hinges on just the sales experience.
Clearly, the way we approach sales is super important. So we talked with Todd to get some more insights into how framing sales as a service profession is better for the customer and the seller.
Too much information means the sales experience is a valuable service for buyers
LUSHA: What do you mean when you say that sales is a service profession? How can salespeople provide a service to prospects?
TODD: You hear the phrase, “buyers know more nowadays” all over. Buyers can do their own homework; what are they going to need salespeople for? In fact, that quote is from Thomas Herbert Russell in his 1912 book Salesmanship. It’s been a concern for over a hundred years, when the proliferation of mail order catalogs had people predicting the demise of the sales profession.
Obviously, the opposite happened – the selling profession flourished and grew. Fast-forward to 2015, and Forrester issued their annual state of sales report that predicted 1 million B2B sales jobs would disappear by 2020. With e-commerce and buyers being able to go online, do all their own homework, and procure things themselves, what did they need sales people for? But again, wildly the opposite happened.
So when I look at why the profession has flourished in spite of all the information out there, my belief is that the salespeople that are surviving and growing are providing a service to customers. Because all this extra information hasn’t made it easier on buyers, it’s made it harder. Who wants to do all that homework?
When a salesperson comes to the table and says, “Listen, here’s what you’re gonna like, here’s what you’re not gonna like,” and does it from an honest, transparent, truthful place, that helps buyers decide whether your solution is the right one or the wrong one as quickly as possible.
As a service professional, your job is to help the prospect achieve their outcomes – and in some cases, achieve outcomes they didn’t know were possible. When we do that, that’s when the sales profession flourishes. That’s why a million B2B sales jobs didn’t go away. It’s a need that I think salespeople will continue to fulfill.
Buyers look for transparency in their purchasing experience
LUSHA: You’ve mentioned that transparency is key to the “sales-as-a-service” mindset. Why is it so important?
TODD: I think that transparency is the true formula for what service in a sales profession means. It really starts from when I was working at PowerReviews. We had done a study with Northwestern University that looked at buyer behavior when a website’s acting as a salesperson. The study came back with two data points that eventually convinced me to quit my job and write a book– which is nuts, I know.
The first data point that changed my life was this idea that almost all of us go to the negative reviews first. We skip the five-star reviews and read the fours, threes, twos, and ones. We need the negative first.
The other data point that changed my life is that an average review score between a 4.2 and a 4.5 is optimal for purchase conversion. A product that has negative reviews right under it sells at a higher conversion rate than a product that has nothing but perfect five-star reviews. As a matter of fact, a product that has nothing but perfect five-star reviews sells at about the same rate as a product that has an average review score of a 3.25.
So I looked at that and I thought, why does that happen? And would it apply to B2B or human-to-human selling? Do we need the negative first? If all we’re hearing is perfect five-star speak, does it actually make purchase decisions harder? The answer to all of it was yes.
How a transparent, service-focused sale sets you apart from the competition
LUSHA: How has a service-oriented approach helped you build customer trust and win over the competition?
TODD: My favorite sales quote of all time is from a guy named Arthur Dunn who said, in his 1922 book Scientific Selling & Advertising, “If the truth won’t sell it, don’t sell it.” That’s the lens that I’ve always brought to sales.
When I was the CRO of PowerReviews, Calvin Klein had called as an inbound lead the same day I had just flown into New York and had a whole afternoon cancel on me.
So I called my VP of sales and asked if he could let Calvin Klein’s SVP of e-commerce know that I’m in town if he wanted to grab coffee. I head over to the office and the SVP hands me the HDMI cable for his monitor and tells me I can plug in my laptop for my presentation. I thought we were having coffee, but he was ready for a pitch.
Before we got too deep in the presentation, I told them about an add-on our competitors just released that wasn’t even on our roadmap. I literally pitched the competitor’s add-on as though it was ours. If it was going to be important and we weren’t a match, I wanted us to figure that out right away.
You could feel the whole vibe of the room change instantly. Instead of it being a vendor and customer, it was a bunch of people at a table trying to figure out how we were all going to spend our time most wisely and achieve our outcomes as quickly as possible.
10 days later, they decided to move forward with us. The SVP said, “When I told the competitor, they immediately went into a pitch for their new add-on. I had to stop them and tell them I’ve already heard all about it from PowerReviews’ CRO.” And a sales process that normally would take six months took 10 days to come to a decision.
The clear benefits of transparency in the sales process
LUSHA: What benefits can salespeople expect from practicing transparency as part of an to sales as a service profession?
TODD: When salespeople say, “This is why we’re awesome and why our competitors suck,” we make it really hard on buyers to make decisions. When we lead with transparency, we disarm the buying brain, we build trust, we set proper expectations.
When we present our solutions as what Tyra Banks calls “flawsome” – which is to embrace your flaws, but know that you’re still awesome– it speeds up sale cycles and increases win rates. It helps you qualify deals “in” initially, but more importantly, it helps qualify “out” deals that you would lose anyway– and do it faster. And then it makes it hard on your competitors to message against you too.
So transparency is this idea of helping the buyer make a great business decision for them as though you were standing in their shoes. If you were standing in their shoes, trying to achieve their outcomes, would your solution be the optimal outcome? And if so, how can you help them to reach that decision? Do the homework for them, find the pros and cons. Not just what features you don’t have, but what are the risks? What are the things that competitors do better than us? Let’s address that upfront.
That’s transparency. Revealing the flaws, being a business partner and a consultant and advisor. And again, sales is the science of service. It’s providing a service to customers.
Key takeaways
- Sales has a trust problem – being transparent and service-oriented can set you apart from the competition.
- Transparency is a key part of building trust with prospects and approaching sales as a service profession.
- Being transparent during the sales process helps customers reach their decisions faster and prevents your competitors from messaging against you effectively.
- You can read more about building trust with your prospects and other essential sales tips on Lusha’s blog.
