Insight Into Insight Selling
By Lou Schachter and Rick Cheatham
 
While many organizations say they want to sell with insights, our research indicates doing so slows down deals and creates new organizational problems. And customers don’t like the most common approaches.
 
There is a role for insights in professional sales. Customers want salespeople to offer a compelling vision of the future and a point-of-view on how the customer’s company needs to prepare for that future. They want that vision anchored in a deep understanding of the trends that are shaping the market, the major industry challenges, the performance of the top competitors, how each player positions itself, and how new entrants are reshaping the competitive game. The salesperson must be able to explain how their offering best prepares the customer for that future.
 
Customers in our research base say they want salespeople to offer these insights not with arrogance but with humility. Instead of approaches where the salesperson challenges or provokes the customer, what customers want is a salesperson who asks smart questions first. Yes, they should have done their homework and obtained all publicly available information elsewhere. But executive buyers in particular want to be engaged in a conversation about what the future could bring. They do not want a salesperson telling them they must do a certain thing if they want to succeed going forward.
 
There are other issues with selling approaches that over-rely on insights. First, insight-driven selling drives longer sales cycles, slower funnel velocity, and lower hit rates. These insight-driven sales often have no budgets allocated to them, require extensive stakeholder deliberation, and result in “no decision” outcomes.
 
Second, insight selling is difficult to execute. Only a small percentage of salespeople have the capacity to create insights, even after training. As a result, many companies have their marketing departments create the insights, and they train their salespeople to customize those insights for each customer. Marketing-driven insights, however, have to be generated constantly to be current, and marketing’s natural distance from the customer can make their insights less relevant. Getting this right is possible, but it is a large and expensive undertaking.
 
The way to use insights well is to keep everything simple. Sales leaders defining strategy should stay focused on the salesperson and the customer. Insights have to show that:
·     The salesperson understands what’s important to each buyer at each customer organization and what results they want to achieve.
·     The salesperson can help the customer get to those desired results faster.
 
Insights can open sales cycles, but they rarely do more than that. Making insights the central driver of your sales process runs the risk of making you over-reliant on a set of rep behaviors that many buyers aren’t interested in engaging with, and ideas or trends that rapidly become outdated requiring you to invest more in an insights team likely housed within marketing. The right way to use insights is to show your buyer that you understand them and their business and can therefore help them allocate their resources in a way that will help them achieve their results faster.  
 

Lou Schachter and Rick Cheatham lead the sales practice at BTS, a global professional services firm supporting world leading businesses. They are the co-authors of SELLING VISION: The X→XY→Y Formula for Driving Results by Selling Change (McGraw-Hill; hardcover; March 11, 2016).