Ciceron Blog Archives

From Death Machine to Enlightenment

Oh, wait a second! Ms. Prospect just hung up on Chicago Sales Guy! (No lie. It just happened.)

It's taking everything in my power not to jump out of my chair and yell, "Hey, Chicago-boy! You've just been punked by Ms. Self-Informed-Due-Diligence-Prospect. And you didn't know it because you were taught how to sell cars old school. You thought you were in the business of selling cars. You're not. To that self-informed prospect, you're in the business of negotiating a pre-sold deal. You're in the business of providing Ms. Prospect a few other options that may fit with her lifestyle. You're in the business of showing her how easy it is to bring your car in for routine maintenance or getting into a new car once her lease has expired.

Chicago-boy, you needed to ask Ms. Prospect a lot of questions about her lifestyle and what she values. You needed to reinforce that the car she selected online is the perfect car for her -- and I bet she just can't wait to come in and take a look at her new car."

But Chicago-boy didn't do any of those things. And I'm not his boss, so I'm going to blog about him. Sucker!

In Freakanomics, author Steven Levitt would call this situation, where the Internet flip flopped the power position, a mistaken assumption of "asymmetrical information." In the case of Chicago-boy, he made the incorrect assumption that only he had access to some very special information about the Ms. Prospect's new car that she did not. He assumed that at some point he'd have the opportunity to throw out that ethereal zinger that closes the deal. Here are the facts of the transaction: Ms. Prospect most likely utilized better information than the sales guy because she tapped into an entire realm of persuasive content that was non-branded, non-salesy, and thoroughly authentic. The content that persuaded Ms. Prospect to pick up the phone was most likely generated by a consumer like her in the form of a product review, evangelist blog, or online message board.

Chicago-boy and countless other sales people like him failed to recognize this reality. In fact, sales people are too often detatched from the reality of their prospects' buying decisions. In this case, Ms. Prospect had already envisioned herself driving that car to her office, to her cabin hauling weekend supplies, to her child's baseball game. So when it was time to do the deal, Chicago-boy didn't listen, didn't ask questions, or interpret what his role was.

This scene plays itself out every single business day. And not only in consumer goods like cars. In fact -- and I'm researching this right now -- it may be that in most business-to-business sales processes, where decision timeframes are longer and more expensive, B2B consumers are more deeply engaged than B2C consumers with non-branded yet highly persuasive consumer generated content. Recent research studies have indicated that the higher the pricetag, the more online research is conducted during the consideration phase of a purchase. If this proves true -- which I expect -- then if your sales people aren't talking less and listening more for these subtle yet incredibly powerful signals, there's a better than likely chance that they might be hearing a dialtone rather than enthusiastic buyer on the other end of the line.