“Make sure diagnosis first, then prescription. Make people feel special. Help them with the right solution for their situation, and you will find yourself closing so many more deals, especially in this new era of what buyers are looking for.” – Jason Cutter in today’s Tip 1465
Are you committing sales malpractice?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Jason Cutter. Jason is the CEO of Cutter Consulting Group, a mindset and scalability expert focused on developing Authentic Persuaders®. Even though his bachelor’s degree is in Marine Biology, he knows what it takes to be successful in sales and build profitable teams. Here he is:
Jason Cutter: Are you committing sales malpractice? My guess is that you are, based on what I see with a lot of people in sales, especially because a lot of companies try to sell to me as an owner of a consulting company.
So what is sales malpractice?
Well, if you were a medical professional and committed malpractice, that’s when you do something against the oath that you’ve taken or something to harm your patient. Now, in this case with sales, we don’t have an oath. There is no actual professional standards that everybody is held to, but there is a way to harm your potential consumers and your buyers.
Now, how does this usually happen?
Well, it comes down to this. Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. Something I learned very early on in my sales career. Once again, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. What does that mean? Well, it means that if you are giving the prescription, the solution, before actually diagnosing what the problem is, the goal, the need, the pain, the desires, challenges that your prospective buyer is facing, then you are committing sales malpractice.
And a lot of people in sales do this. They have drunk the KoolAid, they have read the brochures, they’ve gone through a product training with their company. The company feels like what it has created is the best thing ever, and everyone will need it and want it. Even if the world already has something similar to it, the company thinks it’s amazing. And of course, that’s how companies are started. And that’s really the basis of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Then what happens is you, the salesperson, get hired onto that company and believe that the company says that everything that’s being offered is amazing, especially to an ICP, especially to the right people, or maybe sometimes everybody.
Now, the challenge is that if you go into that approach to every sales conversation, every sales meeting that you have, what happens is you think you have the perfect solution. It would be like being a person who sells hammers and thinking everybody needs a hammer and seeing all of the problems in the world as a nail. Well, if you have a potential customer who has a screw and needs a screwdriver, but you’re still pushing the hammer and the benefits of the hammer, then you’re committing sales malpractice.
In the world of B2B, I see that all the time where somebody literally doesn’t care what that prospective buyer wants, needs, or has space for, budget for, cares about, will actually make their lives better in some way. And they’re just on a mission to sell what they have to sell. Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.
Now, how do you resolve that?
First thing is admit that you have that problem. The first step is always the most difficult in admitting that you have a problem. And realize that, hey, that approach doesn’t work to stop prescribing the same solution to every single person without even diagnosing anything. There is a process that most people should be following, which is discovery and asking questions and finding out the wants and the needs and doing some analysis, and digging deep, no matter what process you prescribe to, is it value selling? Is it spin? Is it Challenger? Is it Sandler’s Pain Submarine? Is it authentic persuasion? Whatever that is that you’re doing, you have a process theoretically, but are you actually utilizing it? Are you figuring it out? Are you diagnosing the issue and then prescribing the solution?
When I sit through demos or I work with companies and look at their demos, their slide decks, their presentations, they are literally prescribing the same thing to everybody. And a lot of times they don’t care what the inputs are. They don’t care what was actually discovered on the discovery portion. They’re just going to do the same thing over and over again.
The challenge with that is that you’re going to miss the mark and you’re going to try to sell hammers to people who need screwdrivers. And then the other part is you make people feel not special. That will make your prospects feel like you sell the same thing to everybody in the same way, and you will treat them like the other people trying to sell to them, treat them as well, and they will just tune you out. They won’t call you back. They will ignore your outreach, and they won’t sign up because they don’t see why they should care because you think it’s a one size fits all solution.
So make sure diagnosis first, then prescription. Make people feel special. Help them with the right solution for their situation, and you will find yourself closing so many more deals, especially in this new era of what buyers are looking for.
Scott Ingram: To connect with Jason, and for a full transcript of this tip, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1465. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!