Selling With Noble Purpose, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 12Three Places Where Differentiation Goes to Die

When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.

—Criss Jami, American poet, philosopher, and essayist

There are three high‐stakes places in the sales process where sales teams run the greatest risk of becoming commoditized:

• Call openings
• Presentation/proposals
• Negotiations

There's a general unspoken expectation that salespeople will handle these three areas in a traditional way. That's why you want to do the opposite.

These three seemingly self‐explanatory moments in the sales process are opportunities for true differentiation. The way your team handles these moments tells customers whether you're unique or just another sales team.

You may be reluctant to get into the weeds of your sales team's talk track. Yet, these moments are where your purpose can come alive most for the customer. Let's look at each one of these moments to see how a traditional approach takes you down a transactional path, and how you can help your team avoid that trap. I'm going to get very specific here because:

• The traditional approach is the exact opposite of what works.
• The differentiation you've worked so hard to create will die here if your team acts like everyone else.

Call Openings

I see a lot of well‐intentioned sales calls go south because of the opening—and, oddly enough, it's usually just the last few seconds of the opening that send it south. You probably already know that leading with a one‐way product ...