How to Sell to Humans

This is what happens when you get lost looking for the ladies’ toilets at a car dealership: eventually, you end up outside and you come back in through the showroom. Now, if it’s a busy Saturday, nobody will notice, particularly if you are walking with purpose and not making eye contact.

If it’s a sleepy Tuesday morning at your dealership, the sales team will sense your presence before you can even cross the threshold. You might, as I did, hear one of them shout, “fresh up coming in”.

An up in the car business is a person who might buy a car. A fresh up is a  person  you haven’t yet met. They are the best kind of up. Everyone likes a fresh up. When you ask where the toilets are and then tell them your car’s in for service, they more or less run away. From fresh up to stale croissant in  three seconds.

Do you feel like an up? How about a prospect?  Perhaps a lead?  If you wear Spanx tomorrow you might even be a hot lead. You could be a suspect, and I don’t mean the police kind. Do you feel like one of those? Are you an opportunity? Maybe you’re a deal.

What about when you actually buy something? Do you feel good about being closed? Do you like being sold? What about being signed? Do you feel like a star football player or a disposable razor?

Yet in B2B sales meetings across the land today, we’ve called our customers all of these things and more. This is the Inside Voice language of business. We close deals, we tag prospects, we spot opportunities and we sign accounts.  We retarget leads, spam contacts and bill accounts.

We have thousands of slides and workflows and automation tools that work in this sanitized, clinical lexicon, which is fine as long as it stays there. But we know that sooner or later our Inside Voice oozes out and starts to become our Outside Voice.

The other day, I called our phone company to whine about the internet service, and the agent asked me for the service number on the dry loop. I beg your pardon? She meant “what is your phone number?” That’s an Inside Voice working its way out.

Good sales people, of course, know better than to use inside words in the presence of customers, but I worry that we’re losing sight of the fundamental humanity of the people whose budget we want to turn into our revenue.

When we forget that the people on the other end of the transaction are, well, people, we forget other things too. We forget how to design products and experiences for humans. We forget how to help them in the way humans need to be helped, and we build technology walls to keep them from talking to our humans. When we forget about the humans, we make it much harder to be useful, competitive, innovative and profitable.

I propose we start by changing that Inside Voice. Let’s borrow from theme parks and quick service restaurants and call them guests or customers or patrons. I’m partial to patron because there is a slim chance I’ll get some opera tickets out of it.

Let’s replace the idea of contacts, accounts, connections and leads with the reality of people and companies. These are organic things. When we focus on those and  stop asking ourselves how we can help a prospect buy something and instead ask how we can help a person do something, it all becomes human.

When we ask ourselves what problem we are going to solve for people, instead of how much revenue they represent, it becomes human.

When we look at customers and see conversations, not transactions, it becomes human.

When it becomes human, it becomes much, much harder to invent systems that punish customers for asking for help or information, and it becomes hard to be rude and, yes, a little harder to ask for more money, but much easier to justify why they should give it to you.

So take all that money you are pouring into your referral program and your sales training and your horrifying IVR and do something revolutionary: act like one group of humans trying to help another group of humans get shit done.

Related Posts

Stop Letting Your Customers Talk to Strangers
Ask Customers What They Want to Say, Not What You Want to Hear

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter