Why We Use a Selling System

1Session at a glance

2Open (0:00, 4 minutes)

• Draw the seven steps on the board in order now and leave them up. The concept block fills them in.
• Say what it buys on Monday: everyone in the room is in client conversations, and the system is how you know what the next question is instead of guessing.

3Concept (0:04, 22 minutes)

What a selling system is (4 min)

• Define it before using it: a selling system is the process by which an opportunity is taken from the first contact to a finish, where the finish is either a signed agreement or a closed file. Both are finishes. Say that twice.
• Give the parallel the technical seats already have, because it does the explaining for you: a bottom-up check on a network fault is a system. It does not tell you what is wrong. It tells you what to check next and in what order, so two people working the same fault take the same path. A selling system does that for a conversation.
• Name the two properties that make a system worth having. Effective, meaning it reaches the outcome. Efficient, meaning it reaches the outcome without spending time, effort and money it did not need to spend.
• Land it: the value is that you always know where you are and what the next question is.

What happens when nobody is running a process (5 min)

• Set it up as behavior rather than as a personality: the buying side of a conversation has its own habits, and they are reasonable from where the buyer is sitting. A buyer who is shopping wants information, wants a number, and does not want to commit before either.
• Walk the four moves the room will recognize, slowly, and ask for examples out loud after each: they take the meeting; they collect as much free advice as the meeting will yield; they ask what it costs; then they go quiet and use what they have.
• Be fair about it. None of that is bad faith. It is what a person does when no one has agreed what the meeting is for or what happens at the end of it.
• Then the consequence, which is the point of the block: every one of those four moves is answered by one of the seven steps. The meeting is answered by an up-front contract. The free advice is answered by questioning. The price question is answered by the budget step. The silence is answered by agreeing the decision up front.
• Name the point where it goes wrong, because the room needs a name for it: the moment you agree to produce a proposal, an assessment or a presentation before you know what the problem costs them, what they can invest, and how the decision gets made. Sandler's name for that point is Wimp Junction. Use the name once and then use the plain description.

The seven steps (7 min)

• Go through the table in section 3 of the Learner Guide one row at a time. For each step say the one thing it decides, not what it is called.
• Make the room say the sequence back before moving on. Bonding and rapport, up-front contract, pain, budget, decision, fulfillment, post-sell.
• Draw the line that matters most and say it plainly: steps three, four and five are qualification. Steps six and seven happen only if qualification finished. A proposal written before those three are answered is priced on assumptions we made ourselves.
• Point at the board and map the stalled opportunity from the open onto it. In almost every case the room will place it at fulfillment, and the missing steps will be three, four and five.
• For the non-sales seats, map an internal example onto the same seven: a client asks a technician whether they should replace their firewall. Rapport is already there. The up-front contract is agreeing what the answer will cover and when they will get it. Pain is what the current one is costing them. Budget and decision are whether there is money and who signs. Fulfillment is the quote. Post-sell is the part where it does not get cancelled two weeks later.

The four results (3 min)

• Ask the room what a good outcome of a sales conversation is, and let them answer yes before you go on.
• Then give the four: a yes, a no, a referral, and a clear and well understood future. Four, and a yes is only one of them.
• Do the arithmetic on the no out loud, because this is the block people resist. A no in the first meeting costs one meeting. The same no arrived at after an assessment, a proposal and three follow-ups costs the meeting plus all of that, and it arrives months later. Same answer, and the difference is everything we spent getting to it.
• Define the fourth one, because it is the one that gets skipped: a clear and well understood future means both sides know exactly what happens next, who does it, and by when. Not "I will follow up next week".

Staying out of the way (3 min)

• State the rule plainly, without the slogan: do not get between the client and the decision you want them to reach. The more you push toward it, the more they resist, and the resistance is a reaction to the pushing rather than to the offer.
• Give the example the room has lived: a prospect who was warm in the meeting goes cold after the third follow-up email. The follow-ups did that.
• Say what to do instead in one line, because it is the whole of session 05: ask rather than tell, and let them arrive at it.
• Do not teach negative reverse selling here. Name it as a term they will meet in session 05 and move on.

4Show (0:26, 10 minutes)

1. Open the stalled lead in Nutshell. Read the activity history out loud, in order, with dates. Do not editorialize while reading it.
2. Ask the room which step it is on. Take answers before giving one. Expect disagreement between fulfillment and decision, which is the useful argument to have.
3. Answer the three qualification questions from the record. What is the problem costing them, what can they invest, and how does the decision get made. Read what the record actually says for each. Where it says nothing, say "we do not know" and write it on the board.
4. Place it honestly. An opportunity with a proposal out and no answers to those three is on step four, not step six, whatever the pipeline stage says.
5. Name the next action. One question, to one person, to move it one step. Not a follow-up. Write it down and put it in Nutshell as a task while the room watches.

5Do (0:36, 13 minutes)

1. Everyone picks one. A live opportunity, or a client conversation they are in the middle of. Nobody sits this out. A technician uses a project a client is thinking about.
2. Write the three answers. What the problem is costing that client, what they can invest, and who decides and how. Write the real answer or write "do not know".
3. Place it on a step. The rule is that you are on the earliest step that still has an unknown, not the latest step you have reached.
4. Write one question. One question, for one named person, that would fill the first gap. Not a follow-up message.
5. Three people read theirs out. Presenter picks, including at least one non-sales seat.

6Check (0:49, 7 minutes)

1. A prospect has had the assessment and the proposal and has gone quiet for three weeks. Which of the seven steps is this opportunity actually on, and what tells you?

   Answer

   Whichever of pain, budget or decision is still unanswered, which in this pattern is usually all three. The proposal going out does not place the opportunity at fulfillment. You are on the earliest step that still has an unknown, and the silence is the evidence that one of those three was never answered.

2. A client says "send me a quote and I will look at it". What does agreeing to that immediately cost us, and what would you ask first?

   Answer

   It costs the time to write the quote, and it spends our only real leverage before we know whether the work is wanted, funded and decidable. What to ask first is any of the three qualification questions: what happens if they do nothing, what they had in mind to invest, and who else is involved in a decision like this.

3. Name the four outcomes that count as a result, and explain why a no in the first meeting is a better result than a maybe that runs four months.

   Answer

   A yes, a no, a referral, and a clear and well understood future. The no costs one meeting. The four-month maybe costs the meeting plus the assessment, the proposal and the follow-ups, and ends at the same answer. The cost is everything spent between the two.

4. A prospect is warm in the meeting and cools off after three follow-up emails. What is the most likely cause, and what is the obvious answer that is wrong?

   Answer

   The follow-ups themselves. Pushing toward the decision produces resistance to the pushing.

   The obvious answer is that they were never serious, which is wrong often enough to be worth naming. It is comfortable because it puts the cause outside the room. The test is what was agreed at the end of the meeting: if nobody agreed what happens next and when, the follow-ups were the only tool left, and that is the fault to fix.

5. A technician is asked by a client whether they should replace a five-year-old firewall. Where does that conversation sit in the seven steps, and what is the first thing to establish?

   Answer

   It is at the up-front contract and then pain. The first thing to establish is what the answer will cover and when they will get it, followed by what the current firewall is actually costing them in outages, risk or time. Answering the hardware question straight away skips both and turns the conversation into free consulting on a purchase nobody has qualified.

6. Why does a system make a conversation easier to review with somebody else afterwards?

   Answer

   Because both people are naming the same steps. "It stalled at budget" locates the problem and says what to do next. "It went badly" does not. Shared names for the steps are what let two people debrief an opportunity in two minutes instead of retelling the whole story.

7Close (0:56, 4 minutes)

Work before the next session

• The practice steps in section 8 of the Learner Guide: one live opportunity placed on a step, with the three qualification answers written out or marked unknown.
• The seven steps in order, from memory.
• Chapter 1 of the Sandler Foundations workbook, in the reference folder, for anyone who wants the source.

Next session

02 - Bonding and Rapport. How people decide whether to trust the person in front of them, the four behavioral styles and how to spot each one in the first two minutes, and why our own vocabulary is the fastest way to make a client feel out of their depth.

Open items to settle

• Which Nutshell stage names map to which of the seven steps, so the pipeline and the system agree with each other.
• Whether the three qualification answers get a place in the Nutshell lead record, so they are visible without reading the history.

8Sources

• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations, chapter 1, Why Have a System: chapter PDF.
• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations: full workbook PDF.

The seven steps, the four results and the term Wimp Junction are Sandler's. The worked examples, the four buying moves and everything about how this applies at Hermetic are ours.

9After the session