The Sales Conversation (Part 7)
Watch This Before Your Pitch
In a world in where your product, brand, and service are the same as everyone else’s, it’s only your sales process that differentiates you.
The Challenger Sales Model
Just Give Me The Main Points
Eliminate your desires: Don't appear too needy or desperate during an interview.
Showcase your expertise: Focus on one thing that you do really well and impress the interviewer.
Announce your intentions to leave: Withdraw at a crucial moment to avoid being manipulated by hiring managers.
Overcome status games by counter-acting power plays from hiring managers.
Framing is everything: Use the SPIN methodology to frame conversations around metrics that directly address problems worth solving to impress hiring managers.
Key Insights from Oren Klaff’s Pitch Anything
From Oren Klaff’s Pitch Anything:
I want nothing. Eliminate your desires. It's not necessary to want things. Sometimes you have to let them come to you.
Focus on what you do well. Be excellent in the presence of others. Show people one thing that you are very good at.
Announce your intentions to leave the social encounter. Withdraw. At a crucial moment when people are expecting you to come after them, pull away.
The Sensei
The Sensei feels confident and projects that outward, even though he knows that he's never going to be perfect and doesn't know everything there is to know about his domain of expertise. In fact, somehow, he feels confident even though he understands 90% and doesn't understand 10% - now, he will never understand the final 1%, but he still goes out there because, heck, dunning-kruger - either I do it, or the confident idiots will mess it all up!
Counter-Acting Status Games
People will sometimes use their status (social rank) to intimidate you. If you don’t counter-act these power games immediately, you won’t be in a position to demand as much money as you want.
Here’s how to respond to the three major types of status games that hiring managers and HR will play on you:
Time: people will exert their social rank over you by telling you that they don’t have enough time for you. Counter-act this by letting them know you don’t need as much time as they have.
Power: people will exert their social rank over you by using their authority to make decisions. Counter-act this by using small defiances and light humour.
Analyst: people will exert their social rank over you by attacking you with technical questions that aren’t always relevant. Counter-act this by using emotional stories that break their logical and reason-based frame of mind.
Framing Is Everything
There’s a concept in business called the North Star Metric. The North Star Metric is the calculation that drives the company. In the case of Facebook, their North Star Metric was daily return average use. They wanted to optimize for people returning every day and using the platform on their way to monetizing the app. If you bring the people, the advertisers will come.
The North Star Metric is a way of framing things. When you frame something, you cut out the parts of the image you don’t want. Same thing in business. Arguments are won and lost based how people define success or frame the conversation.
So, when you’re talking in an interview or in a sales situation, you want to use the SPIN methodology to rank order a client’s problems in terms of cost saved and impact generated. Once you’ve done that, you can determine the most important metric achieve today. By the need to a framing the conversation in terms of a metric or measurement that you can directly influence which addresses a problem worth solving that generates costs savings and earnings impact, you’ll give yourself the highest chance of probability.
