The Prospect’s Buying Manifesto:
The Great Shakedown

The most significant change in the selling landscape in the last 10 years has been the way prospects buy; sadly, not the way salespeople sell. It is just as important to understand and master the prospect’s buying process as it is for salespeople to master a systematic sales process.

The prospect’s buying system in the majority of cases is far superior to and more sophisticated than the strategies sales organizations utilize to sell. When we did research, we found that most salespeople were not even aware of the fact that prospects had a clearly defined and disciplined buying process. Those who were experienced enough to know, didn’t have a systematic sales process to balance it, counter-act it, or supersede it.

The prospect’s system is masterful; it is efficient, effective, nondiscriminatory and plays no favorites. It demands unquestioning obedience; it gives them an unsurpassed moral authority and rules with a sense of entitlement. What they leave so often in their wake is carnage of empty promises and shallow commitments.

The prospect's manifesto’s goal is to put salespeople in perpetual limbo. Their objective is to gain and compile all of salespeople’s information: pricing, terms, proprietary and creative ideas, free consulting, expertise and solutions. Then they play their cards very close to their chest and give very little in return. Once they have what they need, they maximize their time and minimize salespeople’s time. Now that they have all your valuable information, they now can position themselves as savvy, informed, and educated consumers of what you sell. They proceed to stall you, mislead you, and take you down the primrose path. They then put you in the unenviable position where they pit you one against another, they squeeze you on price, they have you going down dead-end alleys, and then they deliver their “piece de resistance”; they leave you hanging out to dry as to what will happen next, all along doing it with a smile. Sound familiar?

The most important question at this juncture is, how was this created and who is responsible for this albatross and cluster fest? The undeniable answer and hard truth is, we are. If this is to be corrected, the sales profession, whether wholly right or wrong, must take full responsibility. To put a charitable spin and balance to this, we’ll say that neither the seller nor the prospect is in the right and both are wrong and at fault. There are no value judgments here.

To level the playing field, sales organizations will have to have a thorough and complete understanding of the intricacies and motivations of the prospect’s system so they can at least level the playing field. Since salespeople do not have a Bill of Rights or a Geneva Convention, at a minimum they have to establish a system of self-preservation.

The following will be a dramatization, for entertainment and educational value, of the prospect’s manifesto. Through all the fury of it, you will see some real hard truths in the four steps of the prospect’s buying process. This will be an unedited and “R-rated” version.

STEP 1 The Preemptive Strike

Have you ever experienced a prospect who was a little less than forthcoming; they shade, color, or stretch the truth? You guessed it. In the first step of the prospect’s system, they lie to salespeople. So why do prospects feel compelled to do this preemptive strike? There are quite a few answers and motivations.

First of all, it is a defense mechanism. It is a way to protect themselves. They also get leverage and a sense of being in control by getting the upper hand. But why do they feel this is so necessary? Well what do they inherently know about salespeople’s motivations and the lengths they will go to make a sale? They know perfectly well through experience that salespeople also will seek control and leverage by lying. How do you know when a salesperson is lying? When their lips are moving. And generally what are their lips moving with, or what is coming out of their lips? Salespeople’s lips are reverberating with the same perceived lies that prospects hear from most salespeople… quality, service, reliability, value, and performance. So the ugly truth is out! Prospects lie to salespeople because they perceive that salespeople lie to them.

When salespeople get out their feature and benefit machine gun, lock and load and proceed to “featch and preach”, they lose all credibility. The problem is, prospects instinctively know that not all companies can lay definitive claim to these corporate pie in the sky selling points.

For example: a prospect meets with four different companies, arguably unique and competent in their areas of expertise. All claiming, in lock step, the exact same value proposition. What are they to do? They invariably choose on an emotional, non-logical level the company that they’re most comfortable with. They unconsciously decide that the three other competitors were less than trustworthy or forthcoming. Or worst case scenario, possibly they weren’t to be trusted at all and they were stretching the truth.

The point is, what salespeople work so hard to achieve they actually prevent. They attempt to create authority and credibility with their value proposition and it does the exact opposite. They discredit themselves and their offering. It also reinforces the worst stereotypes prospects have of salespeople. Salespeople are shackled with being in the position of being guilty until proven otherwise.

The first lie salespeople hear is: “John, it’s good to meet you”. This is after they have seen four other salespeople selling entirely different products and services, not surprisingly, all touting the exact same features and benefits. Some of the other lies are: they claim they have a limited budget when they don’t; they claim they have an unlimited budget when they do not; they claim they are ready to buy when they are not.

To up the ante, they goad and tempt you with the following: “John, the gods must be listening, your timing is perfect. I have a hot deal - just handed down from the ‘powers that be’. Your company, by the way, comes highly recommended. We need a complete proposal by Friday.” John knows a shoo-in when he sees it. Being an accommodating “Johnny on the spot” salesperson, he burns the midnight oil, pounds out a proposal during an all-nighter. To demonstrate his selfless commitment to the cause, he exceeds his prospect’s request and gets in it two days early. Fast forward six months, 17 unreturned phone calls, 13 unresponded emails: he finally shames his prospect into taking his call. Although he realistically doesn’t expect the royal treatment, he is shocked and humbled by his prospect’s “non-response”. “John, we are very busy now, we’ve gotten your calls and emails, and we’ll contact you when we are ready.” All along, the salesman was just doing his job and following up in what he believed to be in good faith.

Or, they want to test your mettle and they bait you: “We have a preliminary sample run in our Lincolnshire plant. Although I can’t commit as of yet, the person who gets this one… it’s a definite “maybe” for the global rollout of 20 other plants around the world!!!” Then they put out the carrot a little further and ask, “So, how can you help us and how can we be partners?” From day one salespeople are trained to be information sellers. Their companies reinforce this edict by spending untold time educating them on the minutiae of differentiation and the justification of their premium product. And since the salespeople are so ingrained in this selling mentality, they believe it is their “God-given right” and “destiny” to give out as much information as possible and to deliver it as quickly as possible. Now this perfectly sets up sellers for Step 2 of the prospect’s buying process.

STEP 2 No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

They reduce salespeople to “free consultants” by pilfering and misappropriating their information. They want to know everything about your company: pricing, conditions, terms, specifications and creative solutions. They coldly demand it upfront and unfortunately, they want to give you very little in return. Salespeople with unbounded excitement respond perfectly on cue, by assuming the “Rambo” position, whipping out their “feature & benefit machine gun”, recklessly spraying and praying, and hoping some of their valuable information will stick.

So why do prospects want your valuable information? First of all, you can be used as a “whipping boy”. They can use your information to go to their existing supplier and beat them up on price. Secondly, because of their unwavering faith in the good nature of their prospects, salespeople are only too keen to engineer a unique custom solution, not thinking in advance that when presented to their competition by their prospects, the solution can be easily modified or outright duplicated. Salespeople are dangerously putting themselves into a collaborator’s role by unwittingly aiding and abetting their competition. This easily happens when the prospect goes to their preferred vendor and presents your exact ideas to the competition and asks them if they can do it. You can probably guess what the response is. The competitors briefly pause, and without further missing a beat, know it can be duplicated and state to the prospect, “We not only can do it, we can do it faster, better and cheaper.”

Thirdly, when all the stars are aligned properly, prospects can take your creative ideas and replicate them internally without having to bother to outsource it with any outside suppliers.

The last reason they want your information is to use you for column fodder. Prospects realize your solutions are intricate and complex and can be best analyzed and deciphered when information is provided to them on a common platform. Once they are able to spreadsheet you and load your data into Excel, they can now compare apples to apples and reduce you to a common denominator.

 

Salespeople who have “happy ears” and who misallocate their information and lose leverage and control in the sales process personify step 2. They reduce themselves to unpaid consultants by doing wasteful samples, demos, tests, and proofs of concepts. Lots of salespeople eventually leave sales because they can’t economically support this “free consulting habit”.

STEP 3 The Gift That Keeps On Giving

They lie again. They color, white brush and lie to salespeople as to what is going to happen next. They have had you do the proverbial jumping through hoops, but they may not be done with you fully. They want to keep you in their hip pocket just in case their other options dry up. Prospects are masters at creating blind alleys, knowing salespeople have it imbedded in their DNA that a good salesperson never quits and to even think of doing so is a crime against the advancement of humanity.

At this point, prospects fuel the engine of false hope for salespeople by proclaiming with the straightest of faces:

“It is a definite maybe, in all probability, there’s a strong likelihood down the road, in the near and foreseeable future; if nothing changes and everything remains the same, barring any unforeseen circumstances, under optimum conditions, we are going to form a special committee, a task force, and a sounding board, which will convene a review subcommittee, who will confer with a special blue ribbon commission, who will ultimately get a green light from an advisory board so they can approve a feasibility study, a quick field test, a trial evaluation and beta test. Then, it’s just a quick run up the flagpole for a rubber stamp of approval from the CIO, CEO, COB, CMO, and CFO. And we’ll most assuredly get back to you pronto with the good news.”

Salespeople hear angels singing in the heavens and since this is music to their ears, they call their plant manager to order the raw materials from India so they can fast track this phantom order.

Or, what also happens after a wonderful lunch at their prospect’s favorite steak and seafood restaurant, the prospect announces to them rather sheepishly that a competitor has entered in the 11^th hour and they are beholden to get a bid from them. The other bad news is that they are lower. They don’t even tell the salesperson directly; they use hand signals to make their point. But to make the salesperson see how much they value their relationship, they again remind the salesperson how much they and their spouse really enjoyed that ski trip that you provided last year.

At this point, because of the salesperson’s absolute state of panic, and the now doubtful annual President’s Club trip to Hawaii up in the air, they don’t even think of asking how much lower do they need to be, they immediately excuse themselves from the table to call their boss and tell them that they need a lower price. When asked how much lower, the salesperson tells them the thing they always fear the most, “I don’t know, just do your best”. In circumstances like this, we find prospects smoking salespeople, salespeople smoking sales managers and sales managers smoking senior management. It is a vicious loop of misinformation and a total clusterfest.

There are four outcomes that result in STEP 3:

1. Immaculate Conception A miracle, or some call an accident… a sale is made. After all the groveling, all the revising and all the discounting, alas… there is a happy ending. A sale is made. Yet there is an unintended tragedy here; it reinforces bad behavior and habits. If you continuously fall victim to the prospect’s system and you change nothing, I guarantee you, you will continue to enjoy some success. I call this successful outcome random negative reinforcement theory. You get enough to just make it worth your while, but you never get enough of what you really want. This false sense of security of a few random sales falsely reinforces that the system works.

2. Double Jeopardy/ Bait and Switch Your prospect wants a new quote, or a reconfiguration of specs or terms. They grant you a conditional order on the stipulation that instead of 1000 units you quoted on for X, they want 500 units with the X price.

3. Certificate of Merit They write a glowing letter to your company praising your wasted efforts and encouraging you to participate next year with the promise of even greater potential rewards.

4. Delusion They are done with you, but you are the only one who doesn’t know it.

STEP 4 The Final Insult: VM, EM, OT, IM, DOA, SOL

The final insult is the prospect’s pieces de resistance. With cordial ruthlessness out of the goodness of their heart, they give you free and unlimited access to their voice mail (VM) and their email (EM), they’re out of town (OT), they’re in meetings (IM), they’re missing in action (MIA), you are dead on arrival (DOA) and SOL. In other words, game over, checkmate.

How does this final blow feel to salespeople? The many choice adjectives and expletives are not fit to print here to describe this used and abused feeling. Suffice it to say, salespeople have put their heart and soul into the deal, they have invested their company’s resources and time all for naught. Now salespeople are forced to face the consequences of their misguided efforts. So they humbly and sheepishly saunter over to their manager’s office, quietly close the door and proclaim, “I met all their expectations, I even exceeded them. I showed them how I could save them 50%. I showed them where we could improve their quality… what more could I have done? Where did I fall short?” The sales manager stands up triumphantly and with all the enthusiasm they can muster says, “Welcome to sales in the new millennium. Keep swinging kid, the numbers are in your favor. Don’t lose sleep over it." But wait, there is more! In a final gasp and act of desperation, seeking redemption, the salesperson throws a hail mary and goes back for round two, with the same prospect, to be lead down the same primrose path, with the same disastrous outcome. Many salespeople die a slow death of a thousand cuts.

This process that prospects use and salespeople unconsciously support is enough for most God-fearing salespeople to get religion. Instinctively knowing there must be a better way, a better industry, a better product or a better company, they finally quit their “old world” distributor job and get a job in the hottest industry in the economy… biotechnology. Only to learn 6 months later that the same demons that dogged them in their old job continue to chase them in their new job.

To stay ahead of the curve, they cycle through jobs and industries at a rate of one every 9 months to become professional journeyman or itinerant salespeople, trying to elude the realities of a buyer strategy that they can’t seem to conquer. They are in hell, fighting and kicking and screaming to stay there. As Scott Peck stated so eloquently in his book, A Road Less Traveled, “most people live a life of quiet desperation.”

Don’t let this theatrical dramatization get you down. The prospect’s manifesto is like lancing a boil. All the pus has to be let out before you get relief. There are practical strategies to overcome this occupational hazard. The good news is this process is self-created and it can be neutralized. And when you can’t win the game, you can at least make a decision to stop playing it. In other words, you can choose to “stop the madness”.