Motivate Customers to Share Information

When customers qualify themselves, you ask them to share information. Sometimes, they consider this information confidential. For instance, customers often consider topics such as funding and their roles in the decision-making process to be private information. A customer's biggest disincentive to share information is the fear that it weakens his or her negotiating position. It does when you mention specific products before customers state their goals.

Customers know how the game works. They quickly realize that any information they supply you with always ends up helping you to position your products as the right choice for them. You further diminish their faith in you when you offer specific products as remedies to their problems with little or no knowledge of their goals. It is time to change the rules to benefit both you and customers.

Trust replaces tension when you let customers know that you too share their destinations. Customers gain more control, not less, when your questions seek to make their goals more measurable. As specifics about their goals emerge, their resistance to share information about their purchasing considerations (referred to as filters) decreases. Also, the more transparent it is to customers how goals and filters affect their purchasing decisions, the more they will feel that they have been treated fairly and the more willingly they will share information. (Dr. Martin G. Groder discusses the concept of transparency in his book Business Games: How to Recognize the Players and Deal with Them. ^[1])

Contrary to past selling philosophy, you give up manipulation so that you and customers gain control. Otherwise, you end up with sales calls running out of control on emotions and chance rather than on clear thinking and planning. You do not wrestle with customers in order to manipulate details to fit your products. Instead, you share control with customers to ensure that your combined focus is on achieving their goals. However, this control is different and positive. It is a version of management by objective (MBO) followed by you and your customers. Where do they want to end up (their goals)? Moreover, are you able to help them get there?

Customers view requests for information not as attempts to jockey products but rather as a means to better define what it takes to achieve their goals. They have no reason to conceal information. You have not mentioned any specific products or services. At the predetermined perfect time, you will—when "yes'' answers are foregone conclusions.

Once customers' goals are firm, they know that disclosing the specifics of their filters also makes good business sense. They do not want to try hitting moving targets either. The more detailed the information, the more it eliminates uncertainty about their goals. These details put them and you in better control over whether they can achieve their goals. You know the requirements your products must satisfy. Customers realize that the more information they provide about their goals, the more requirements that any yet-to-be-specified products must meet.

You are now both in a position to determine whether customers can achieve their goals and whether you can help them in their pursuit. You both decide whether further efforts will be time well spent.

Therefore, start your sales call by focusing on customers' goals, not specific products, so that customers have no reason to conceal information. When customers know their measurable goals, they feel in full control—and so do you.

Example

Ellen Conley sells various types of high-tech telephone systems. Mike Wells, the customer service manager of a large mail-order house, asks Ellen to make a presentation about some of her company's telephone systems. He tells her that he wants to reduce customers' wait times before they speak to a representative.

At the beginning of the sales call, Ellen confirms that Mike's interest lies in reducing waiting time. Ellen, like most product-focused salespeople, asks Mike what price ranges he is looking at so that she can know what products to present. Ellen also asks Mike when he would need a new system to be functional. Ellen, again like most product-focused salespeople, is working backward. She is allowing price and delivery to become the systems of evaluation (SOEs) that determine the product selection, not Mike's measurable goals.

Mike is hesitant about telling Ellen exact amounts or dates. He does not like transferring control over which products he can choose from to a salesperson he hardly knows. Tension mounts as Ellen and Mike enter the brinkmanship selling mode. They both jockey for control over when details about prices, budgets, and deadlines surface. Let the dueling begin.

Ellen can motivate Mike to share details by making his goals measurable. For instance, she could ask Mike about the financial impact of reducing wait time. She might end up with an SOE using sales dollar lost per minute of wait time to justify price, not just a budget figure. Her questions will now reference Mike's deadlines and budgets to his goals rather than to her products. The key point is to understand the customer's measurable goals before trying to flush the person out with product presentations.

^[1]Martin G. Groder, Business Games: How to Recognize the Players and Deal with Them (New York: Boardroom Classics, 1980).