Sell Your Soul
How to be more human in sales.
The robots have won. I am not talking about the singularity or the AI overlords rising to prominence and using us as their energy source. I am talking about the sad reality of sales today, we’ve programmed and standardized the human out of the deal, out of ourselves. This is not a screed against technology, if used properly technology can enhance the human element of sales. This is a call to arms for the individuals that have Sales, or Account Executive, or SDR, or ISA, or any variation of a standard sales title to reinsert themselves into the deal, to show that it is when we employ our virtues we win, not when we simply employ tactics and gimmicks.
Before we dive in, I want to be clear that there are some baseline factors that need to be present in order to effectively sell (with) your soul. They are as follows:
- You are selling something that delivers actual value to your future clients
- You believe that what you are selling delivers actual value to your future clients
- You can show to your clients that what you are selling delivers actual value
If what you are selling meets these three conditions, then you do not need to sell your product (if you sell a service, that is your product). I am not saying that we can eliminate your sales teams simply because you have a product that can demonstrably deliver value, it’s actually quite the opposite. The internet has empowered buyers to learn everything about your product they need to know, in minutes, from their phones. Sales are no longer the holder of information, and sales no longer can rely on the tactics of the past that relied on the client’s lack of access to information to win by delivering value through information. The bottom line is if you have an offering worth buying from a practical, analytical, thinking-brain perspective then you need to sell to the irrational, emotional, feeling-brain.
How do you do this? Sell your soul.
This is not a call to spirituality or endorsement of any theological system, for my purposes, the definition of ‘Soul’ is simply you. It’s all the pieces of your personality, values, beliefs, virtues, and feelings. It is the authentic representation of who YOU are, what YOU believe, and what YOU are passionate about. These aren’t areas you cater towards or construct in service of selling, these must be the standard operating system of you. If you aim to contrive a version of yourself that is inauthentic in an effort to win deals, you will fail. Buyers can smell inauthenticity from a mile away, and the second they get even the faintest whiff of it, the deal is dead. This may sound simple, but it runs counter to most of everything you have ever been taught about sales tactics. In order to succeed you still need a process, and that process will vary based on your product, industry, market, and other factors. What will not vary is how you engage with your buyer, the human.
To illustrate how to sell your soul, I will structure a deal with the process I have my team follow and highlight how to sell your soul at each stage:
Qualification
During qualification, you must remember that like any human interaction, the process is not one-sided. If your approach to qualification is to mimic the ‘Contact Us’ form on your website, your prospects will disqualify you. The goal of the qualification call is to understand how they feel about their current state and how they want to feel. Armed with this information, qualification is extremely simple and requires answers to only two questions 1. Will taking them from how they feel now to how they want to feel be compelling enough for them to take action? 2. Is your product capable of getting them from how they feel now to how they want to feel?
I know what you are thinking, but what about BANT? Or BATNA? Or whichever acronym you choose for qualification criteria. Yes, those frameworks still work and yes you need to have good data to execute an effective sales process, especially when you have a different team executing qualification and the rest of the deal, but again, don’t be the robot. I also assume many of you reading this saw my questions, scoffed and said some version of “yeah right, I need to make 150 calls a day to qualify and set 2 meetings, I don’t have time for this.” If you haven’t rage clicked out of this article yet, thank you, and now let’s discuss how to get the answers to these two questions.
Will getting them from how they feel now to how they want to feel be compelling enough for them to take action?
If you haven’t caught on, this is about establishing Need. With the knowledge of how they feel today, and how they want to feel tomorrow, answering this question is as simple as asking your buyer “we’ve established that this is how you feel today, and this is how you want to feel. If our product could deliver that feeling is there any reason you wouldn’t purchase?” If you have connected with them and gotten to the route of the emotional problem and understood their desired emotional solution the answer should be an emphatic no.
The reason this is so powerful is that we are focusing on the emotional brain, the feeling brain, the part of the brain that drives actual decision making. You are no longer getting bogged down in the muck and mire that is the thinking brain, concerned with ROI, case studies, implementation timelines, existing contracts, and every other technical nuance that slows down a deal. Once you understand the emotional motivators of your buyer and aligned your process to it, you’ve elevated the conversation out of the analytical swamp and into the realm of action.
Is your product capable of getting them from how they feel now to how they want to feel?
This question is one that requires discipline, maturity, and honesty. Can you confidently and with simplicity see the path from how the buyer feels to how they want to feel with your product? If the answer isn’t “yes!” then it is always no. Remember, we are meeting an emotional need, this doesn’t mean your product needs to check every box on a feature requirement list or have the stated “deal-breaker” feature your buyer says is a non-starter because you aren’t delivering value with features, you are delivering value with outcomes, specific and powerful emotion outcomes.
An example here is within my current team is we are often (very often) told by buyers that “automated drip texting and mass texting” are deal-breaker features. Many of our competitors have this feature and it’s near the level of standard in our space. If we stay at the analytical thinking-brain level, the “list of boxes to check” level, we would never win any of these buyers, but in reality, we almost always do. How? Because we understand the emotional need, the emotional pain of our buyers, and we have a very compelling offering that enables our buyers to alleviate the current stress/pain/anxiety and move to a state of confidence/ease/fulfillment. If you are selling only to the thinking-brain, every conversation is riddled with landmines, if you are selling with soul, selling to the feeling-brain, every conversation is an opportunity to forge stronger partnerships.
Discovery
Discovery is the opportunity to take the conversation around the buyers’ emotional goals further. The focus in discovery is less on widening the scope of the need, and more on increasing the depth of the need, you’re aim is to go “an inch wide and a mile deep.” To best illustrate this I will use a real-world example.
During qualification, you have determined that the buyers’ goal is to double their business this year. In discovery, an AE needs to understand what this means to the buyer, do they want to double their business so they can buy a Bugatti? Or are they interested in expanding their team to create jobs and better serve their community? Or did they read on a blog somewhere that they need to double their business each year to be competitive, to survive? Each of these is a feeling-brain motive, but each is very different. Appealing to the feeling-brain of someone who wants to ball out is going to require a connection and approach that is upbeat, motivational, strong and confident, whereas appealing to someone whose concern is that they need to double to survive will require finesse, understanding, and assurance.
Without this deeper understanding and discovery, you are taking big risks with every buyer because bringing a subdued assurance to a highly motivated “baller” will alienate them just as bringing overconfidence and brashness to a weary business owner will alienate. Not having a feature is an easy objection to overcome, alienating a buyer is a near death sentence. This does not mean you should be inauthentic or not represent yourself in an honest fashion (remember your buyers can smell BS), it means that you need to be self-aware enough to understand when to highlight and enhance the different features of your personality, your communication style, and your soul so that they are appropriate to the buyer. Remember that the deal isn’t about you or your product, it is about meeting the needs of the buyer.
Evaluation
With your feeling-brain, mile deep discovery complete, there is still a need to address the concerns of the thinking-brain. This is to point at which you discuss technical questions, features, workflows, and any other analytically driven inquiries. The evaluation stage is not simply turning on a trial or pilot and letting the buyer conduct their own examination, you must guide and advise throughout the journey. Structure the evaluation such that you are demonstrating how the product will move them from their current emotional state to their desired state. This does not require a trial, nor does it require a demo, these tools can be helpful, but know they are tools in the tool belt, not requirements for a deal.
If you have done the upfront work of building a connection with the buyer and showing them the pathway to their desired emotional state, evaluation is simple. If you have skipped a step, now is the time to circle back and sure up your foundation. If you have built trust but no “emotional need,” you’ve ceded control of the deal and now must work to establish it again. If you have established the “emotional need” but do not have the trust and rapport, using the evaluation to demonstrate that you are invested in their success will be your final opportunity to win the relationship, which is a prerequisite to winning the deal.
Commit
If you are not diligent in the commit stage, the sales cycle can extend out, buyers can get cold feet, and competition can creep in. Go back to the foundation, you’ve established the current state, the desired state, and the validated solution. These are your tools, you are now empowered to restate everything you’ve done together and ASK FOR THE DEAL. If there is hesitation or they object, circle back to the need, dig into the emotion and make it clear that inaction is a choice to remain in the current undesired state and forgo the feeling of achieving their desired goal. You’ve built the relationship and made the process about them, asking them for the deal is asking them to act in their best interest, to trust you and take those final steps and plant the flag together.
Close
The deal is closed, your work is done here. Ensuring you finish the journey and have a smooth transition with the buyer as they cross the chasm and become a client. My team takes care to ensure the transition is not simply smooth but enjoyable, and that when a buyer becomes a client they are met with a welcoming embrace from our Onboarding and Customer Success teams. The feeling-brain is excited at this point so you must take extraordinary care to ensure that the first moments of being a client create the positive emotional association with your team, product, and company as this will be the foundation for a long (retention) and fruitful (upsell and referrals) relationship.
If you drop the ball post-close, you significantly increase the risk of your new client becoming a former client, which is risking much more than just that one client. You are risking future growth of that client, future referrals from that client, and creating a detractor that can influence and hurt your brand.
*You might have noticed that the description of each stage gets shorter as you progress through the Sales Process. This is not an accident, this is representative of the importance of selling with soul and the amount of work necessary to do it well will take throughout the cycle. The reason I can describe the ‘Commit’ stage in one paragraph while ‘Qualification’ commands six is simple, by the time you reach ‘Commit’ you’ve already done the work, and once you’ve sold your soul, the journey with the customer becomes simpler, faster, and more effective.
The Wrap
I am not offering you a trick or gimmick, there is no “magic question” or singular repeatable phrase that you can walk away from this article with and add to your sales quiver. Selling your soul is an approach to communication, connection, and people that if practiced will make you a more successful salesperson, both on the leaderboard and in the hearts and minds of your clients.
Sales isn’t a battle between two opposing sides, it is a journey with partners invested in achieving a singular goal.
Make the focus of your selling showing buyers how they will feel when they achieve their goals and you will close more deals, drive more referrals, and love what you do.
