The One Up Sales Conversation

The Modern Sales Approach

The (One-Up) sales person is the guide to the (One-Down) client to get better results.

Legacy solution. Sales conversations that focus on finding a problem that fits your company’s solution. “Why us” and “Why our solutions” 

Modern approach. Sales conversations that provide insights on what your client needs to do to improve their outcomes. “Why change” and “why now.”

There are three areas you need to know about your client:

1. Their industry. Understand how their business operates, the challenges they face and what they’re doing to optimise.
2. What your contacts believe. What assumptions (true or false) are they operating under and what do they value?
3. Navigating the company. Know how things get done in their organization and by who.

And you must combine these elements together to provide insights that will help your client achieve their goals.

The new sales conversation has no room for anything that doesn’t improve your client’s ability to decide for their company and their future results.

The One-Up sales conversation

Each meeting with your client should be spent helping them improve results and make the most of the time you have.

Try this challenge:

1. You can’t mention your company’s name.
2. You can’t mention any clients you’ve worked with, or hint at results.
3. You can’t mention your product, service or solution.
4. Avoid personal conversations – being liked is not your objective.
5. No questions about pain points or challenges. Everyone asks those.
6. You only have 25 minutes.

The point is to stop talking about yourself, or jumping to solution mode, and instead put the client at the centre of the conversation. Find out what they value and what’s their focus right now.

💡 Tips

• Be a strategic partner. Keep clients updated on trends that are important.
• Provide context. Explain why your insights matter in order to help clients recognize the reasons they’re struggling.
• Differentiate conversation. Help your client see things differently and provide a lens through which to view decisions and future results.
• Needs-based journey. Fill the gaps in your client’s knowledge by identifying their needs and providing new information, insights and recommendations.

Insights and information disparity

Maintain information disparity. Always have information your client is not aware of or hasn’t recognised. Find areas where your insights and experience can solve problems and improve client decision making by sharing your knowledge with them. (i.e. “I know something you don’t know. May I share it with you?”).

Information access. Buyers learn from their own research. While they may collect significant information, they still need your insights and experience to make good decisions.

In the past, salespeople used information disparity to take advantage of their customers; today, we create a parity of information that generates an advantage for our clients—all while helping us earn the right to their business.

Supporting client discovery

What information is your client missing and what uncertainty does that create?

Discovery is to help clients learn more about themselves. You may need to challenge assumptions and the way things are done. Your message is not “why us” but “why change”

Here’s how a modern discovery session should be structured. The goal: give your client an interesting experience and create “aha” moments.

• Executive briefing. Explain your clients world and demonstrate you have a good understanding of their challenges, industry etc. You help others with those same problems and see patterns every day.
• Explore change. Have a conversation about what changes they need to make to improve results in the context of their environment.
• Pivot. Transition from discussing the forces impacting your client’s results to asking for a meeting to share what you’ve learned about improving results (what’s (not) working in your client’s market and industry).
• Build rapport. You’ve created value, now you can spend time on building a personal relationship.

How to help your clients discover

You need to see things that are invisible to your client and unavailable to your competitors. You must reveal something important to a client who is struggling.

1. Their Assumptions Are Outdated. One of the primary ways you correct your client is replacing their false or outdated assumptions. An insight-based approach allows you to replace those assumptions, updating them to current reality.
2. The Nature of Their Mistakes. Your clients don’t set out to make mistakes when making decisions. Much of the time, the mistakes are the result of their being One-Down but still buying from a One-Down salesperson from a One-Down sales organization. You can help them learn something about themselves by providing the insights and information that enables better future decisions.
3. The Conversations They Need to Have to Move Forward. Your vantage point provides your decision-makers and decision-shapers with a view of the sales conversation that improves their future results by ensuring they have certain crucial conversations.
4. Who Needs to Participate in a Change Initiative. You can help your client pursue the change they need by ensuring they build consensus, bring the right people into the conversation to ensure they can successfully decide for their business, and craft the cohesion necessary to execute their new initiative.
5. What Has Changed and Why. When you teach your clients what has changed and why, you are teaching them something about themselves, namely how they need to change to be able to succeed in their environment.
6. The Better Results Available to Them. One of the reasons some companies are not producing better results is that they don’t know those results are possible. When you show them that better results are available to them, you not only teach them something about themselves but also compel them to change.
7. The Obstacles to Improving Their Results. Everyone claims to want better results, but sometimes your clients need you to directly point out the obstacles they are going to need to address to be able to improve their results. Most One-Down reps would prefer not to make these known.
8. The Forces That Will Impact Their Business. You will find that insights about the forces that will impact your client’s business do a good deal of work, helping them discover where they are in space and how to prepare or respond to those forces.
9. New Opportunities Available to Them. Most of the time, your clients are head down, doing their work. Because they are not looking up to see what’s changed, there are often new opportunities available to them that they have not yet recognized. Help them discover these opportunities by sharing them with your contacts.
10. The Potential Negative Outcomes of the Status Quo. The status quo is increasingly dangerous in a complex environment. The longer a client goes without changing, the more certain it is that they are falling behind, something you need to help them discover through the sales conversation.
11. What to Start Doing Now to Improve Their Results. In a later chapter, you will learn that some of the most important advice and recommendations have little or nothing to do with your company, your product, or your service. You can help your client discover what they need to do to improve their results.
12. What to Stop Doing Now to Improve Their Results. Occasionally, your client will need your help to discover what they need to stop doing. I once had a company cold call me to tell me to stop doing something—and following their advice ended up massively improving my results.
13. What Should Be Compelling Change. This is a big one, and you will recognize that it is a large part of both this book and the One-Up approach. What makes you a good strategic partner is being proactive, especially when your guidance prevents your client from harm by helping them change before they are forced to.
14. How to Evaluate Different Approaches. In a later chapter on triangulation strategy, you will learn how to help your clients evaluate their choices of partners and their strategies to deliver value, including the concessions your clients don’t know they’ve agreed to until they harm their results.
15. Insights That Are Unavailable to Them. Some of your insights are not available to your contacts because they lack your experience. You can learn much by helping your clients improve their results, and all that you learn will help you help your client discover something about themselves.
16. What Is Working for Other Companies. Your client isn’t able to go to other companies and ask them to tell them how to improve their results. You, however, can be a deep well of insights about what is working for other companies.
17. What Is Not Working and Why. Sometimes things that once worked well are no longer effective. Your client may need to learn that their preferred methods are ineffective now. When you can explain why, you help them make a new discovery about their company and their need to change.
18. How Best to Pursue Change. Your client may want and need to change but not know how to go about pursuing the change they need. You can shed some light on what your client will need to do to take a run at a real change initiative.

Maintaining your One-Upness is both your obligation and your best tool for professional development. It’s important that your clients can count on you to know the things they need to know, making you a source of knowledge and insights.