Don’t go to war against your prospect; fight on their side of the battlefield to win for you both, while they claim victory.
As an entrepreneur, when sales are the lifeblood of not only our business, but our already seemingly risky career, converting a prospect into a customer can feel like a high-stakes war. Arriving at the battle lines armed with this heightened anxiety, adrenaline, and an undercurrent of desperation, we have to be incredibly careful and strategic about just how much we let our feelings influence our marketing and sales. It’s no surprise that desperation repels, but sometimes going too far the other way with false bravado does just the same.
If you want to make a sale, you’re going to need to make a connection with a prospect, which is pretty hard to do when you’re on sparring sides. However, there’s a brilliant tactic you can strategically employ to turn the tables and make your client your biggest cheerleader. The shift has nothing to do with your product, service, nor pricing, but rather everything to do with your salesperson’s positioning. Once you see it, you can’t unsee just how well this tactic works — and why you perhaps should have been using it all along.
Recently, I was at a Turkish coffee roaster and tea house with a beautifully eclectic menu. The options for add-ins were vast, from rose petals to star anise to cardamom and more. However, they had a few pesky little rules I didn’t quite appreciate or understand.
Simply put, they were trying to constrain and control my order, thus limiting my ability to create the ideal exotic tea concoction. From an inventory and financial management standpoint, I get it: If they let all the customers go willy-nilly with their orders, managing their inventory, costs, and maintaining their desired margins based on their current prices could be a challenge.
That said, from a customer perspective, I don’t quite get it, as I’d much rather have the “make your own tea” experience, even if they were to upcharge me a few bucks for the inconvenience and potential profit degradation. To my and my fiancé’s surprise and delight, the barista leaned in, looked around, then whispered to us: “My boss is kind of a stickler for the menu, so I’m not really allowed to do that, but I will; just don’t tell her.”
In that instant, the barista had leaned across the counter and transitioned herself from being on the side of the “house” to the side of the customer. Not only that, but she also created a common enemy (her boss) that made us cling to her generous service, grateful that she’d bent the rules just for us. You can bet she received an outsized tip, but you can also bet that if this were a sales tactic, rather than a risky act of behind-the-boss’s-back kindness, it could have worked just the same.
In fact, I’m sure it has, many times, with me none the wiser.
When someone risks their job for you, you feel an instant bond. When a stranger or new acquaintance does so, the act of generosity is so strikingly unexpected that it feels far more significant and appreciated than a favor from a friend. For some unbeknownst reason, this person is treating you like “the chosen one”, and you feel suddenly indebted. Perhaps the employee is doing this to bolster their tip, but this is a tactic entrepreneurs can use or train their salespeople to leverage 100% intentionally.
When you make the customer feel like the chosen one, the customer loyalty and appreciation spikes, and they shift from having a guard up to feeling honored for the privileged of your products and services. That’s exactly the shift you want. Prospects shouldn’t be adversaries, and converting them into sales doesn’t have to feel like a war for victory and control.
Instead, with the right strategies, you can tap into trust-building psychology and indicate that you’re on their side of the battlefield. In other words, once you stop fighting to overpower them and claim your own victory and instead assist and defend them in their triumph, you eliminate the power imbalance that complicates marketing and sales.
If you thought puffing out your chest and deepening your voice to command your customer’s attention and respect was the secret to sales, you may be mistaken. While appearing insecure and tentative won’t help you close a sale, coming off showboating, narcissistic, and power-obsessed won’t either. Too much power, control, and ego smells fishy; these traits that go a step beyond calm confidence tip customers off to the fact that you may not be on their side.
In fact, the distrust invoked by that inherent power imbalance is the very reason selling as the entrepreneur, CEO, or founder can sometimes be more difficult than a hired salesperson. To be blunt, no one trusts a biased, power-hungry, money-grubbing business owner, and sometimes a marketing or sales message from the horse’s mouth can come off this way.
A successful salesperson knows how to make the prospect feel that you two are on the same level playing field, and that may require altering your positioning or customer-facing sales strategy entirely. If you can genuinely put the prospect’s wants, needs, and happiness above your own desire to convert them into a sale, you might be surprised how much more effective your sales are. In other words, the less sales-focused you are when selling, the more effortlessly you may convert.
One of the biggest downfalls of financially-motivated founders is the involuntary temptation to close a sale at all costs. When we approach a sales conversation like a lion, eager to lunge in for the kill (the prospect), our self-interested motive just may show, and that alone can poison a prospect. Strategic salespeople (and entrepreneurs) know when to put their ego aside, banish any remnants of “commission breath”, and hoist the customer onto the pedestal they desire.
In three simple steps, if you can identify a common enemy, make your customer feel unique and special, and strip away any power imbalance that challenged their trust, you can “win” a sale, and leave your customer feeling like they were the winner all along.
