Uncovering Your Prospect's Expectations

0:04 Thank you for joining us on the Winning and Selling podcast. I'm Bill Hellkamp of Reach Development Systems and with me is Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute. Have you ever had a misunderstanding with the prospect? They committed, signed the agreement and you started working together. Only to discover they had completely different expectations about what you'd be doing. These misunderstandings often stem from unclear conversations and clever commitments.

0:30 Expectations and obligations aren't explicitly defined. It's easy to disappoint and fall short of delivering the desired outcome for both parties. What are your expectations of this episode? Let's dive into meeting them as Bill and I explore uncovering prospect expectations and other serious situations on Episode 652 of the Winning and Selling podcast. We are in the one thing by Gary Keller, the Part 1 intro in Chapter 4. We're getting into the meat of it now.

1:01 I just love books that have seven chapters of here's the setup. They all seem to do it. We've read so many of these books now that it's like, OK, I trust you, let's just get into it here. Now we're going to get into it. Part 1 is 6 chapters long. It's chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, something like that. Anyway, it's 6 chapters long after this intro. This is called the lies. They mislead and derail us. What he's talking about is aphorisms or ideas or things we believe because they sound good.

1:39 So he uses the words got truthiness. Truthiness. They're truthy sounding, but in reality, they don't work. He calls it the six lies between you and success. And interestingly enough, Scott, if our listeners want to go back and dig in the archives a little bit, show 576. So that's 75 shows ago, or more. We did one called dangerous lessons and it was about aphorisms, things like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and you need money to make money and things that again sound good or become an excuse for us to fail.

2:20 Right. Right. Well, the six dangerous lessons or the lies that mislead and derail us are everything matters equally. That's chapter 4. We're going to talk about that today. Multitasking, which Scott believes he can do. Again. And I don't believe can be done. So I'm going to guarantee the author will see how that goes. A disciplined life, which is about can I self discipline myself and his contention is we're not disciplined enough to discipline.

2:49 I know right. Chapter 4, 5, 6, chapter 7, will power is always on will call. I think this is an amazing chapter. So be ready for that one. Number five, which will be chapter. I don't know. I'm getting lost here. A balanced life. A balanced life. We aren't going to be out of balance. And this is what I've heard from my mentors is you're going to have to be periodically out of balance. Right. Exceed. Yeah. And then big is bad. I don't really remember what that one is. So I'm looking forward to. So those are the six. What do you think about those?

3:24 I think that they're all going to be very interesting chapters and discussions. And I hope that we've got some listeners that are following along with this book. This chapter has got some really nice illustrations in it. So I'm looking forward to going through that with everybody. Well, chapter four is really where the rubber starts to meet the road. Now, after an intro to what he's going to talk about in part one. And that is everything matters equally.

3:47 And he says, we must make the hard decision as to where we will spend our most valuable and limited asset our time. And a lot of this is about to do lists and the parietal principle. So what do those two things look like together? So his contention on the to do list Scott is that if we make it a checklist, everything sends to matter equally. Right. And now you and I have always said, do a do a prioritized task list that has your A priorities, your B priorities. And then the C one shouldn't really even be on the list. But they're there because sometimes they have to get done.

4:25 And so I think he's saying, if you just do a checklist, everything's valued the same. If you do a prioritize checklist, he calls it a success list. And he says, get rid of everything that isn't going to measure your success. So I thought that was interesting. Yeah, I think the question that I like to ask salespeople is how is your productivity being measured? How do you measure your own productivity? And what are you focused on as the most important thing that you need to do every single day? And I'm grateful that I went through a Franklin Covey class on October 6, 1997. And I remember that because I got my Franklin Planner and I started using Franklin Planner on that day.

5:05 And we all looked official with our Franklin Planners. And that was like a status symbol. Oh, man, you get a nice, do you have a leather cover for your staff? Do you have the cover cardboard one? Classic, the leather, plastic. And you know, which was a half a sheet of paper folded in half. And I had a special punch made out of metal. It wasn't that plastic one. Oh, yeah, yeah. You had to have a good punch because you had the nine holes or whatever.

5:27 I'd be printing stuff off and putting in that. Frank, I mean, probably made a million dollars on punches. Yes, he probably did. And he sold a lot of paper. One of the things he had to do is go through ABC and look at all the things you've got to do that day and rank it as ABC. And like you said, see, probably not even on it. But here's the question that I was like, yeah, salespeople, we got to do this. And then you've got a goal list. So what is on your goal list? These are how your productivity is being measured. Your to do list are activities that may or may not have an impact on your product.

5:57 And sometimes we get distracted on those to do list and avoid our goal list. Well, you and I have talked a lot in our classes about the four quadrants. Quadrant two is the important, not urgent. And that is often where success is made for salespeople. It's making those phone calls prospecting in some way to develop new customers, whatever you want to do, whether it's going to meetings or prospecting or phone calls or letters, getting the word out that you're available to do business with.

6:26 And many salespeople will let that all. I'm supposed to do five a day. Okay, well, I didn't do five. I'll do 10 tomorrow. I'll do 15 on Thursday. I'll do 20 on Friday. I'll do none of them. And we'll start next week over at zero. So, right. Right. If you're taking any medication, vitamins or minerals, you can't take them all on Sunday and hope them all work out over the week. That's right. That's right. Took that whole bottle of aspirin from back now. Better for two hours. Right. So, so here's the neat thing is the second part. Now, we've all heard about the Pareto principle. He explains it. I don't need to go into detail. But basically what the Pareto principle says is 20% of your activities will result in 80% of your productivity.

7:10 He says, let's do the extreme Pareto. 20% of your 20%. So, what's the 5% that you should be doing? Wow. And then if I take 20% of five, that's one. Yeah. Well, what's the and that's the name of the book? Right. The one thing. So, he's trying to get you to really do the things that are most important to his, to your future. And he wrote a book. And when he was, you know, trying to, trying to break his business out of the, the rut of all the other real estate companies.

7:44 And by writing a book, it made a change. And that was the one thing they did to really shoot themselves, the Keller Williams real estate program into the stratosphere. Right. So, your thoughts on the Pareto principle. Do you believe it? I think I believe it. It's not a myth. I think that's very accurate. And it's the 80, 20 rule. And I can see it happening without really being conscious of it. And it just seems to be a natural law where it just works out.

8:11 And I'm glad that it does. And unfortunately, sometimes I feel like I do 80% of the work and I only get 20% of return sometimes. So it reverses itself. I can reverse itself because that we can do 80% that other if we're spending our time on that other 80%. Then there's only 20% of the returns left. So, so we have to be careful that we're not doing a lot of busy work.

8:31 I remember Jordan Peterson talked about they've done studies on, on companies and who gets the most work done. And he says it's not linear 80, 20. It gets worse and worse as the company gets bigger. For a company of 10,000, a hundred people, something like that, are really doing the most work and getting the most productivity. And then there's hundreds of people around doing nothing at all basically. I think Elon Musk showed that when he took over Google, not Google, when he took over Twitter and fired about half the people who had more productivity after he got rid of most of people that like to play ping pong.

9:09 Yeah, exactly. It's easy to hide with a big company like that. Oh man. You know, you're just keep my head down and try not to get fired. So, right. All right, let me go through the five or four big ideas he closes the chapter with. This is just a focus and we'll get into your topic. Go small. Focus on being productive, not on getting your list done. Go extreme. Put the core activity on the top of the list. What's your one thing and get into that.

9:34 Say no. Knowing what is most important will inform you what to say no to. We didn't talk about that, but that's great. And then don't get trapped in the check off game. So just checking something off your list can make you feel good. But if it wasn't a crucial task, then it was really a waste of time. So focus on being productive. Put the core activity on top. Say no to things that don't match your core activity and don't get trapped in the check off game.

10:01 I love that check off game. Too many people I meet too often I meet sales people are checking the box. Oh, I did it. My heart wasn't in it. I didn't really care about the outcome. And I just did it checking it off. And I can make five good phone calls or I can make five phone calls. Right. And your time and your life and the results are much more important than just checking it off. And it's too often sales people do that.

10:22 So next week we're going to continue with the book The One Thing with Gary Keller. We're going to be covering part one chapters five and six. Let's get another professional viewpoint and listen to a sales tip from Anthony. Enjoy and learn from the sales tip from Anthony by Anthony Enorino, a highly respected international speaker, best-selling author, entrepreneur and sales leader. Hey, it's Anthony Enorino and I want to talk to you about the work that sales people don't do. So you might be working at home most of the time and maybe you come into the office.

10:55 And if you take a look around, you're going to find that people are sitting in front of their laptop, but they're not doing any cold outreach. They're not doing any follow-ups. They're not doing the research to get ready for a meeting. And if you want to be an exceptionally good sales person, what you have to do is you have to do the work that other people avoid. If they avoid doing cold outreach, then you should do more cold outreach. If they don't follow up, you should double the time that you do following up.

11:28 If they're not doing the research, they're not preparing for meetings, all of those things. If you see them doing that, what you need to do is do exactly the opposite. If you want to be successful, do the work that other people refuse to do. See me at thesalesblog.com or come out and say hello at LinkedIn. See you soon. So this sales tip, interestingly enough, timing is always wonderful. It seems to be an echo of the one thing.

11:58 And he talks about how many sales people spend their time doing non-essential work. Right. And so as you say, not only non-essential, but if I don't put my heart into it, I'm not going to do the essential work well. Exactly. We need to get emotionally involved in some situations and have a large commitment to what we're doing and be attached to the outcome. Excellent. And our topic today is uncovering prospects' expectations.

12:24 And I wanted to expand on this topic, which is one of the 10 questions that we presented some time ago. And I want to stress one way to disappoint somebody. The only way to disappoint somebody is to not meet their expectations. Do we always know what the expectations are of us and of others? And I say, no. I say, I don't think we really know sometimes what the expectations are. And I think about my day selling real estate. Did the sellers know everything that I was going to do between the time that they signed the listing agreement?

12:53 And when we sat down at closing and we delivered the check? No. Did I ask them? No. Was the true value of my service completely understood? No. Did your service have any value? Well, I think it had value based on what they thought I did. But there are so many other things that I did that they didn't know about. Is that okay? Yes, that's okay. But sometimes when we get into negotiating and defining the expectations, sometimes we need to create value and then claim value.

13:25 Yeah, that's what I was going to say. We need to get the credit for it if they're not seeing us do it. And when you know the expectations and you deliver on them, you're creating value and you're claiming value. And I think some of the folks were listening to Trump on inaugural night and he was doing some executive orders and he was talking about TikTok. And he said, you know, if I signed it and ban it, it's worth nothing. If I support it, it's worth, he made up a bunch of numbers, 300, 500,000, et cetera.

13:53 And he said, and if we do that, we should own it. The United States should own half of it. And he said, when we create value, we need to claim value. So he's using these terms and these are sales and negotiations term. And they can be very similar between sales and negotiations, create value and then claim value. And the expectations are creating the value. And most of us are selling services. And even if we're selling products, there are services that are involved within the product.

14:17 So I want to go through seven areas that we can think about, apply on really getting the clarification on the expectations, creating the value that we want people to buy. And then claiming it, showing that it's a just and fair price for them to pay. So the first one is, do your research and preparation. Find out more about your prospects business and bring some of those challenges to light and how you work with other companies to be able to solve them.

14:45 But you can't create a solution unless you know a problem they're having, otherwise you're being asumptive. So involve the key stakeholders and the other people that are involved in the decision to find out what would be most valuable to them. And then you can claim the value and deliver on the expectations. So you have to create a tailored approach based on why people are buying from you. I think too many companies or salespeople, they get a sale and they don't even know why they got it.

15:18 And so therefore they can't deliver value because they don't know what that person valued. We have a number of companies that we work with Scott that they get quotes. Oh, we're doing a quote. We're doing a quote here. We're going to quote, get us a quote. And they won't even ask the question, what are you going to base your decision on? Right. What do you get for two or three quotes that you get? And so they don't even know what to talk about with that customer.

15:43 They just hand them the quote and hope they win it. Yeah. Right. Exactly. A quote is not a proposal. A proposal talks about value. And the situation as to why the quote is required or necessary. And then it has value. The next one, number two is active listening during initial conversations. So ask a lot of open ended questions. What challenges are you facing? What results do you want to achieve? What are some of the ways that are getting in the way of that?

16:08 And when we repeat back and we paraphrase it and the prospect hears it from us and it's their words, it creates a great impact. I love the question with somebody, you know, with Bill and I, we do sales training for directors of sales and marketing or vice presidents or business owners. And I like the question, you know, what do you know that needs to be done that you don't want to do? And sometimes when we're talking to the right people and they want to assign stuff to us that we love doing, I love that question.

16:39 What do you know needs to be done, but you don't want to do it. You want to have somebody else do it. So, you know, I discuss all the time and we're talking about that quadrant to. Yeah. That's where consultants live. We live in quadrant to doing the stuff that is important, but it's not urgent. And we can take it off their plate for them and get it done. They know it has to be done, but it doesn't have the urgency until they hire someone.

17:01 And then the urgency is created and we help foster that urgency and cause that situation to be solved. Yeah. And during that conversation, if, you know, we're responsible for the outcome, we are the sales person. We are leading the conversation. If there's any uncertainty or incomplete information, then we need to ask for the missing information. We're the professional guide of this conversation and we know to sell is to serve and we're the professional sales person guiding the expectations of the prospect through the process of them buying, making sure that it's the best solution.

17:37 And really listening to their responses and not being so quick to respond and really find out more about the meaning of what they're talking about. So Bill, you said a question the other day when you're interviewing a salesperson. What was that question again? I think in a lot of interviews, I just say, how do you mean that? And it causes them to paraphrase it in a different way and give me a lot more additional information than what, and it's better than what do you mean?

18:04 Or what do you mean by that, which can sound challenging or aggressive? Right. Right. Those short questions sometimes will lead to long answers. And when you don't define it so much, you're going to get the interviewer, the candidate's answer their perspective on well, how they interpreted that question. So I love that. One of the tools I found most effective following this is a letter of understanding. I learned this from software salespeople. They always do a letter of understanding. It said, here's what I heard you say. Here's what your needs were. Here's what we said.

18:33 Here's what we agreed to. And it's really interesting that when you send a client, you send a prospect, a letter of understanding after that discovery meeting, how many things you might have gotten slightly wrong. Right. And they address them back to you. No, you missed something. This wasn't quite what I said, or I need this kind of capacity, or I need this to be done in this timeframe. And it really causes them to start to take control of the sales process and it gives them a feeling of control to be able to change and edit things.

19:04 So a letter of understanding is a great tool for salespeople to use and is very seldom used by most salespeople. Well, when we work with the group, we're talking to a contact sales manager and we're going through an outline of what a full day training session would be and we're understanding their expectations and they weigh in on that. No, we need to expand a little bit on that. Or that's not really really important. Or I'd like to be able to include this. And we're understanding what's most important to them and what their priorities are and we want to make sure that we cover when we're all together.

19:35 That's right. So that's the presentation and active listening and again, making the prospect part of the proposal so that they can feel like they're agreeing to something that they want. The third step and the most important step is create value. So this is where you do your customized discovery. This is where you're tailoring your interview, your conversation to address specific goals that they have, specific objectives that they have.

19:57 And I think most importantly right now, I've talked with companies about their goals and their objectives and I have solutions for them and it's a perfect fit and everybody says yes. And the next day they say, well, I'm sorry, our priorities have readjusted right now. Something else is bumped up as critical at this time. And now what you've proposed and what we've agreed to needs to be put on the back burner. So our priorities are adjusted.

20:18 And we need to always be aware of our companies and our prospects priorities because they will be adjusted. So tailor those interview questions, uncover the priorities and during that create value show proof, give evidence of examples of how you've worked with other companies in the past to be able to deliver on their expectations of your solution sticking to the problem that they once had, but no longer have. I found that customized discovery is not difficult. It doesn't mean 10 different questions for every customer. You have to think it all through. It means seven to eight questions are the ones that you know to ask.

20:53 And then through thinking through the appointment, thinking about their needs and what they expressed in setting the appointment, you create two or three new questions that are focused, but it doesn't mean you have to start from scratch every time. You're going to get good at this if you really prepare for your discovery every time. All right. And then the next step, number four is you claim the value. So you created a customized discovery. Now you create customized solutions. So tailor your solution to address their specific pain points.

21:25 And here you can continue to show proof, show the evidence that you've done to achieve this without showing them exactly how sometimes salespeople get into wanting to share how the watch works. And I'm guilty sometimes I can over deliver content. That does tend to teach during our appointment. I do. I have to send him a note. I got to have a sign, a symbol instead of a note saying you're teaching. I've got to have a symbol that says, you know, that too.

21:53 It's like a kick in the shins or something like that. But you know, it's fun because we do love what we do. So it's easy to get involved in that. But I think these next few steps that you're talking about is really the proposal is when you're presenting the proposal. And one of the big mistakes I see people trying to do Scott is to solve the problem in the discovery interview. And when we try to do that, we do two things. One, we might give away accidentally. And that's all I tell Scott don't teach.

22:22 Right. Which I had to learn the hard way to. But we might give away accidentally the solution for free. And what even if we don't, we devalue the solution. We devalue the problem. Oh, that was easy to fix. Look at I just sat here for 15 minutes and asked you questions. And now I got a solution for you. Right. Right. So so we're saying you're kind of stupid for not figuring this out earlier. Yeah. And then we're saying, Hey, this this solution that I'm going to give you, it's worth 15 minutes a time that took me to think of it.

22:51 And so what we say is save your solution. Say, look at that. This is a complex problem. I want to really talk to some of my key people or Scott and I want to sit down and have a discussion about it. Look back at what we've done before and try and help you find a solution. And then when we come back with a proposal that reiterates what's going on and gives them a solution, it has more value. It's something important. It's not just a quote we threw back at you via email. It's something important. And then during that discussion, we can do these next three things that you're talking about claiming value and the other ones that you're going to talk about.

23:29 It's almost like we're creating that anticipation, that excitement. Let me, you know, give me a couple days. Let's schedule another call. It's today is Wednesday is scheduled on Friday, whatever. And you know, there's that anticipation. They're looking forward to it and that that builds up excitement. And then you deliver it. And they're like, wow, this is great. This is exactly what I was looking for. We hear that all the time. The value goes up. Yeah. This is exactly what we were looking for. Right. That's what we hear when we present our proposal because we're doing all the things Scott's talking about.

23:56 And the listening and the questions. And then number five is once you get to that presentation, you have to be able to make sure that you set clear benefits and limitations. So discuss early on what the goals are and make sure that it's aligned with what success looks like for them that you can deliver. So we need to know what success looks like. And I think sales people need to really think about being transparent and clearly outline what your product or service can and cannot do.

24:23 It's when we leave something out that the prospect is expecting that creates disappointment to. And I think sometimes when you withhold information, that may be considered lying. And that might be an ethical question. We talked about it on the last episode of Steve Keating is withholding information lying. And when we do that as a salesperson, we withhold information. We're not being transparent about telling them stuff that they're expecting that our product may be not do or maybe there's an upcharge if they do want that.

24:51 And they're okay doing that. But we need to be clear on that and make sure that everybody knows what it can and cannot do. And if we don't, it's going to come in and bite us in the butt. It will. And you'll be the one responsible. You know, we've got a number of clients that we've worked with in the last four months that are still dealing with the COVID echoes in product development and in product producing the right amount of product.

25:14 And that's an echo of not being able to get raw materials for a couple of years. And all those things are still echoing. And you've got to be really clear to your client to that person buying it when you're going to be able to get that product delivered to them. You know, Scott and I, we only have limited time to teach. And so we have to be really clear. When do you want this delivered? How do you want it delivered so that we can give them a good process back?

25:44 Right. And we only know that by asking those questions and having that conversation. Number six is clear documentation. So after you've had the conversation, after you've talked about some of the benefits and limitations, you know, document your deliverables, create a timeline that you're going to work with in a success matrix in the scope of work with any agreements that you need to make. And how is this happened? Okay. So you want it operational by this date. That means you work it backwards. You say, okay, we need this by this. We need that by that.

26:14 Okay. So we need the next Thursday. We need to be able to have a meeting and talk about our first step and get all of that in order to meet the timeline that they want. So make sure that you document stuff. It's in a timeline. Everybody knows what it is. And when they delay what they've agreed to, they are delaying the launch, the outcome, you know, the implementation. of the product or service that they want. We're not at fault. We're following their timeline. And we heard that in our last class got. Oh, we want this.

26:46 We're going to need this in six weeks, but we're going to take five weeks to make the decision. Oh, my. And then we want you to deliver it in a week. Right. If you ask those questions around that, then you can say, why don't you make the decision in a week and then we'll have five weeks to deliver it to you and we'll get it to you on time. But I can tell you the truth, the truth you talked about. If you delay your decision for five weeks as you did all, and then you expect me to do it in one week, we will not get it to you on time.

27:12 And so by doing that timeline that Scott's talking about, you can have those challenging conversations before everybody's pissed off instead of after. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I use that a lot when I was selling websites when I worked at Thompson Reuters says, when do you want to have your website up and running and then work the timeline backwards? The last one, number seven is follow through post commitment. So check in regularly, schedule meetings and review the progress and the application of your solution to the challenge and address any new needs that may arise with the prospect.

27:44 You know, maybe there is more to solve. And here's where you can upsell. If you've defined the expectations, you've delivered on the expectations. They they paid the fair price for the expectations and through that application and the conversation. They find out that they want more. Now you can legitimately upsell and ask for more money. However, if they feel that you did not deliver on what they agreed to, and they want more, they may be at the upper hand and have some leverage on you.

28:16 And you may be throwing in that more for less or no extra money. Yeah. When you're not meeting expectations, yes, the chance for them to say, well, look at you didn't do what we said. So we'd like that 10% discount on the next order or whatever it is that they want to talk about. So exactly, exactly. And how many times do we go into an engagement with a client making sure that we meet all of their expectations and that first phase and then afterwards, we can talk about phase two.

28:46 And that's an additional revenue to us for additional work, but we're not back feeling something that we didn't do in previously. So that's the most important part of that. So seek the feedback from your prospect constantly. Make sure that your expectations are met. Adjust accordingly as needed to achieve those expectations. And now is the time to ask for a referral and an introduction to another qualified prospect. So get that testimonial. Get that in writing email that you can put on your website or your email signature or brochure that you have or a handout or a workbook.

29:23 Include all those customer testimonials from credible companies and people that really demonstrate. Here's how I delivered on their expectations. That's right. Yeah. And companies love to feel that they got the value out of whatever you agreed to. And you have to always show them that, remember you asked for this. Here's where we gave that to you. You asked for this. Do you see evidence of that happening? And when they tell you that they saw evidence, man, that's powerful.

29:52 Right. Right. It is. Yeah. Sometimes you need to be able to know where you're going, lead them into the direction that you're taking them and then tell them where you took them and show them where you are. And they're like, oh, yeah, I could see that. You're right. But you don't leave it to chance. Right. You have to leave that vision to chance. Yeah. You know where you're going. That's right. So we've got some questions and I'll just throw out a few of them. No, you're not going to throw out a few of them, Scott, because you don't have time.

30:20 They're going to have to go to the website. They're going to have to go to our show page and get these questions. And Scott's got 16, 18, 16 different questions that you can ask in each of these categories. And we're going to have it linked to our website so you can go there and get it. But we've really talked too much about the other part to go through the questions. And they're great questions. Yeah. Scott's a great question. Askers. Thank you. But I'm going to make you go to the website to get that. Right. We'll have it there on the show notes. Episode 652.

30:48 That's right. All right. Well, let's go into our golden nugget. And that is from Bob Hawk, who was a former prime minister of Australia. He said, the things that are most important. Don't always scream the loudest. And I think things like setting expectations. They don't scream loud until after you haven't met them. Right. That's true. And if you didn't know them, you can't meet them. The the perito principle, the most important thing doesn't always scream loud. It's as a matter of fact, it's that quiet thing sitting in the background.

31:22 Urge, not urgent, but important that if we don't do it, we're going to be in trouble. Right. Right. So make sure you're listening to everything. Well, sometimes a customer will only say things once. Oh, great. And it will be a major expectation. And if you miss it, you're in trouble. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. So you can find our show notes. Episode 652. Next week, our book club is the one thing by Gary Keller, chapters five and six. And our topic is the weekly sales meeting. Please subscribe and share the podcast with your colleagues and on your social media. This is episode 652.

32:02 Go out and get better one skill at a time. Joyful selling.