Don’t Overstate the Capabilities of Your Solution

Selling with Insight: Don’t Overstate the Capabilities of Your Solution, with Matt Dixon, Global Head of Sales Force Effectiveness, Korn Ferry Hay Group

Build a foundation of trust

This is one of those things that every salesperson will encounter at some point or another, which is the client conversation where what the client is looking for is not exactly what we can do, or maybe it’s something we’ve never done before. And it really comes back to this idea of building a foundation of trust with the client. And what your most experienced salespeople will tell you, what your best insight salespeople will tell you, but is hard for a new seller – especially a new seller who’s got a big scary number they’re trying to get after, maybe they’re far from goal – to admit and to tell the client, is the way you build that foundation of trust is not pretending that you can do things, or your product or service can do things, that it can’t.

You’ve got to be humble. You’ve got to admit mistakes or shortcomings and actually recommend other options, whether that’s some other product or service that your company sells – maybe even something that a competitor’s product or solution does better than yours. And that’s a real way to cement that trust. That’s a scary thought, right, this idea that I would pass on a lead or sales opportunity to a competitor, but think about the outcome if you pretend that you can do what the client is really looking for and you fail. No better way to destroy that trust and never earn a return trip to go sell anything else to that client than failing to deliver and basically overstating the capabilities of your solution.

Bring insights back to the home office

Now, for a salesperson, leadership really does rely on us as salespeople to bring those insights back to the organization. There’s no other way we can learn about what clients are asking for – things that we can’t deliver on right now. If we think about that value wedge, the overlap between what the client is looking for and what we can deliver, there’s also the competitor in there, right. There are things that we share with the competitor, but there are also overlap points between the competitor and customer that we can’t touch. There are things that make our competitors unique as well. And we’ve got to be an ear to the ground for marketing, for product, for the R&D team, for senior sales leadership. When we hear those needs, when we hear customers asking for the things that we can’t deliver but our competitors can, we’ve got to act on that insight. We’ve got to move quickly, and we are the ear to ground, we are the voice of the market for the organization. We’ve got to bring those insights back to the home office.