Is the way you sell anchored in the last century?

The difference between companies that win in the marketplace, versus those that don’t, has as much to do with the WAY you sell as it does with the value of what you sell.

Look around … there is still a lot of selling that is being done the same way it was in the sixties.  Pressure, scarcity, urgency and a reliance on some rehearsed “closing techniques”.

You’ll also see a LOT of late 20th century selling – consultative selling, solution-based selling, relationship based selling, direct-response selling and so on.

The problem with these “last century” approaches to sales is that they are all well understood by the prospect and people are just not as vulnerable to these techniques any more.

So, how is selling in 2022 different to the old ways of selling?

The prospect can get instant feedback on how well your product works and what you’re like as a company – the ever-evolving internet means that there really are no secrets.

There are also not many surprises.  Prospects can find out a lot of information about how they need to solve their problems and they can do this WITHOUT speaking with you.

On top of that everyone is time poor, the world feels unstable and uncertain and people have become much more discerning about what they really need and what they can do without.

In the early part of the 21st century, the Challenger Sales methodologies emerged – the idea that you need to stretch the thinking of your prospects and challenge paradigms to expose gaps in what the prospect thinks they know about the circumstances your product addresses.

More recently, in a world that has shifted wildly over the past few years, the Challenger Sale has evolved into sense-making … helping your prospect make sense of what seems confusing, chaotic, uncertain.

In our world of visual models as a method of selling, we are tapping into the deeper conversation of profound value.  When we combine challenge with sense-making, we dig down into a deeply profound level of sales conversation.

There’s little doubt that sexy sells, BUT profound will outsell sexy every day of the week.  In this topsy turvy world, people are looking for those people who have a profound understanding of what is REALLY going on.

Here’s the problem though … when you go deep, it is easy to complicate things – and that is where visual models come into their own.

When we take a deeply profound message of value, and frame it with powerful visual models, the entire sales conversation becomes a superpower.