When you are about to meet a key Client at some crunch point in a pursuit or sales campaign, and you've sat down and thought through all your key messages, and how you would answer critical questions, have you ever had the experience of saying 'I hope they don't ask us......'
....and then you go to the meeting and somehow the question you most feared arising is the one they always ask. What happened? Why did they zero in on the one topic you hoped they wouldn't raise? And why did we do so badly when it came to the response? There are lots of terms for it, 'transference and counter transference' or 'emotional leakage', are ideas that deeply resonate with my experience. The fear that we built up about the question, leaks into the room in terms of our body language, the topics we raise or avoid, our response to other questions, our authenticity in the moment of stress and somehow it inexorably leads to the Client finding our weak spot.
Think now for a moment about how great sportsmen prepare. A downhill skier waiting at the start gate, a Formula 1 driver sitting in the car on the grid, a sprinter before going into the blocks. What are they all doing? Not imagining crashing, slow starting, or losing. They have a powerful visualisation of what is about to happen and how they will come out on top. They virtually experience not only what they are about to do, but how they will feel, how they will respond, how it will sound when they undertake the activity and when they succeed.
They don't allow failure to enter into their minds because if it does, it has an equal chance to influence how they behave
So what about us in our sales campaign? We know we have a potential issue if the Client raises a question? How can we stop this being a failure that will drive negative behaviour in us? It comes down to having the right intent, and not seeing the Client raising an issue as a failure, but as helping them to reach the best decision.
The problem for most of our teams is they chase the transaction, not the relationship. Despite lots of words about 'Trusted Adviser', what they typically want to do is advise the Client to buy them and their products or service. And it becomes self defeating when we know the Client has good alternatives and we worry we are not necessarily the best choice. With the right intent - and I'm suggesting the right intent here is as I've just stated - to help our Clients reach the best decision in their interests, whether that's to work with us or not - then all discussion becomes positive to that intent. If we use this to visualise the Client meeting we take failure out of the equation. In terms of the transaction we may not get a short term success, but visualise the relationship, how we and the Client will work together where we are the best decision, and you will act differently.
Building and sharing this kind of intent across a team, can take some real effort, but work out whether you value relationship over transaction is a good start. Even think about some of the costs of winning the wrong deal - those ones where you knew you had some issues, didn't raise them, but they came back and bit you or the Client became aware of them after the contract was signed. What did that do to your relationship, reputation in the market and your team engagement?
Getting the right intent, visualising success in helping your Clients make good decisions and the trust that creates with you and your team, is the foundation to higher success rates, higher profits and better long term growth