You remember Fight Club starring Brad Pitt. What was the 1st rule of Fight Club? You don't talk about Fight Club! This is also true in sales. The first rule to consultative selling and increasing sales is to stop selling. Don't talk about your company or the products and/or services you offer.
You’ve probably heard the expression “it’s not about you, it’s about them”. For many in sales, this is easy to understand but it’s not clear how to execute. What the heck does one talk about if you can’t talk about the product/service you’re selling? Here’s the secret to not breaking the first rule of Fight Club.
1) What pain does your product/service solve?
If your answer is along the lines of streamlining this or that, more effectively does this or increases productivity, etc. Keep digging. Why would another company need that? There are typically 3 areas in which a sale falls into:
Makes money
Saves money
Reduces risk
Keep asking yourself why until you get down to one of the three listed above.
2) Become a subject matter expert in your industry. You’ll need to rely on this expertise so you can talk with your prospects about strategy. When you offer strategic advice and not about your product/service, you’ll gain trust and credibility. When they trust you they will tell you more about their problems and the REAL issues (which fall into one of the above 3 buckets).
3) Stop selling. Put your product/service and quota to the side and genuinely try to help the prospect solve a problem through your expertise. Keep trying to solve their issues without breaking the 2nd rule of Fight Club. While you offer a product/service that solves their problem, you will not need to bring it up. The prospect will ask on their ownif you’ve sincerely tried to help them.
This can be used in any example. Let's take an extreme example and say you're selling cake batter to a catering company. Why does a company need new cake batter? Perhaps wedding bookings have been down or their competition has a reputation for beautiful and tasty wedding cakes. Give advice on improving their current cakes and give ideas on how to increase bookings in other ways. You will gain trust with the prospect and they will be open with information about how one wedding cake collapsed an hour before a reception and several bookings were cancelled because of it. They might eventually disclose revenue is down 20%.
If you don't break the first 2 rules of Fight Club, the sale will naturally happen on its own. You may find the prospect doesn’t have a problem you can solve. While not the outcome you wanted, there was never a sale to be made in the first place. At least in this case the lost prospect is a great source of referrals.
In subsequent posts I'll discuss how the rule of Fight Club is applicable in all stages of a sales process.
