CREDABILITY – Showing superior knowledge and experience
At the core, in regards to sales, this is the ability to listen to the customer/client with responses and ideas that show you understand. Having comprehensive content and a compelling presentation is helpful but unless the customer/client feels you are listening with a knowledgeable and experienced mind, you will fall short on earning the credibility you need to close business and develop a long-term relationship.
Three things you must exercise to earn CREDABILITY:
History – You cannot have a credible conversation with a customer/client if you don’t have adequate knowledge of their history and the history of their industry. Learning industry history is our job as sales people and, today, the information is more readily available than ever before. I’ve seen too many first sales calls be last sales calls because the sales person lacks understanding of history specific to the customer/client. This leads to inadvertent comments that lose them credibility from the start.
In 2008 Microsoft, along with all technology companies were starting to sell the benefits of cloud computing and solutions to help customers. We were meeting with a senior executive of a global company that built servers. Product managers came to talk about the benefits of Microsoft’s cloud solutions. On the sixth slide, a bullet said Microsoft was the ‘first to offer cloud technologies to address the needs of collaborative computing.’ The following dialogue ensued.
Customer: “You don’t really mean the first do you?”
Product Manager: “Yes I do. There really has been nothing like this before.”
Customer: “Have you ever heard of RJE, VPN, X.25, Apollo Rings… just to name a few?”
Product Manager: “I think I read about them in school but that’s old technology.”
Customer: “Why don’t you dust off your school books and come back when we can have a real conversation.”
I knew the customer executive well and accompanied her back to her office. She said, “Rick, I know that kid is probably smart and Microsoft probably has something that could help us. That said, you personally know me better than to put me in front of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Even if he’s right he can’t help me if he doesn’t know the past.” I was accountable and I failed that day.
Right things vs being right – No doubt, you’ve heard and probably used the term, “The customer is always right.” You also know that this isn’t always true. Even so, in sales, it’s critical that we focus our actions and engagement on doing the right things, for the customer and our employer, rather than on being right. It’s also important to recognize times when the customer just wants to be right and treat it appropriately.
Using the cloud-computing example, the customer executive wasn’t completely right when she said they were already selling cloud computing especially in the ways the definition had evolved by 2008. However, it wasn’t productive for any of us to focus time on being right. Instead, our systems engineer and sales person built a short presentation on the evolution of cloud and collaborative computing. It laid out the challenges at each stage in history, ending with a summary of what Microsoft had done to address those historical challenges. The presentation was all of five pages.
Rather than being right and the customer being wrong, we presented the right things in a way that allowed the customer to expound on her areas of expertise, to learn and to challenge us when she thought our historical representation was wrong. (This is an example of selling from the same side of the table, which I blogged about earlier. Same-Side-Of-Table selling) The discussion went well because we focused on the right things versus on being right.
Knowing Why – When presenting your products and/or services, you are addressing customer problems or proposing business enhancements. It’s easy to present WHAT you are selling. However, while WHAT is important, it’s even more important that you be able to explain WHY your offering will solve problems and enhance the customer’s business.
Again referring back to the cloud computing discussion, in the second meeting the majority of our discussion didn’t come from the slide content but instead came from answering questions, on both sides. The customer executive asked many clarifying and challenging questions focused on WHY we thought our technology would work. We not only answered her questions but also asked WHY she was skeptical, WHY she was reluctant to change and WHY she was not satisfied with her current level of business.
In the end, we won that piece of business and over a 15 month period we helped that customer enhance their server business by changing not only WHAT they were selling but in helping their teams to know WHY the Microsoft solution worked.
Doing what’s necessary to earn credibility early in the sales process is critical to success. Knowing your history, refraining from focusing on being right and knowing WHY your proposal will work, are three keys to earning that CREDABILITY.
©2014 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
