SHiFT!

Selling, like life, is all about timing. This book is about timing and understanding the events that trigger timing (Trigger Events) and harnessing them to close more sales sooner. It’s about mastering the art and science of getting in front of the right person at exactly the right time—which we call the Window of Dissatisfaction™— and then doing the right things when you have timing.

Knowing that Trigger Events result in highly productive sales efforts and deeply loyal customers will help you to close sales sooner and take home a much bigger commission check. Once you understand this timing—and it’s easier than you think—you can learn to take the right action based on the decision-maker’s buying mode. You can enjoy a much higher close ratio than you’re experiencing right now, on bigger deals that close much more quickly, so you can move on and start selling to someone else more quickly.

The secret to being successful in sales is perfecting your timing. That means getting in front of the right person at exactly the right time. To do that, you must understand the power of something that has a dramatic impact on the sales cycle, which most salespeople don’t spend enough time understanding. It’s called Path Dependency.

PATH DEPENDENCY

Path Dependency is what happens when decision-makers have done the same thing in the same way for so long that it’s easier for them to keep doing the same things the way they have always done them. Most of the time, when you are selling, this is your competition—unless there is a compelling reason to change and a Trigger Event that makes them want to change right now.

All salespeople face the same competition: the prospective buyer’s predisposition to keep doing exactly what they are already doing. When decision-makers have Path Dependency, the investment of time, money, energy, or attention they’ve already made in something prevents them from taking a different approach.

Just think of the way you type using a standard QWERTY keyboard (which is named after the first six letters in the top row of a keyboard). Most people have been trained to type using that keyboard layout. Why is that? We all type that way because, on the earliest manual typewriters, the keys kept getting stuck when people typed too fast. The QWERTY keyboard was actually designed to keep the keys from jamming the mechanism! The problem is that people wanted to type faster.

The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard solved that problem. It allowed people to type faster without the keys jamming. However, people had invested so much time in learning to type with a QWERTY keyboard that they did not want to forgo the investment they had made or reinvest their time, money, and effort in learning something new. This is the power of Path Dependency: almost everyone is still typing on the QWERTY keyboard to this day!

The real challenge, and the real competition, is that buyers think they don’t have a problem. They’re happy with the Status Quo. They are too busy doing what they’re already doing (i.e., taking care of things they’re used to taking care of) to look at what you have to offer. Initially, it seems as though, no matter what you do, you just can’t get their attention. That’s the effect of Path Dependency. Once we are used to doing something, it’s a lot easier to keep doing what we’ve always done.

Think of it this way: You have a car that you like driving, and have had generally good experiences with it over the years. On your way home from work one night, the transmission breaks. You have the car towed to the local garage, and the next day, you learn that it will cost $400 to fix the transmission.

Do you buy a whole new car or do you pay $400 to fix the transmission? If you’re like most of us, you’ll pay to fix the transmission. Why? Because buying a brand new car is a big undertaking, and it connects to a lot of variables you don’t particularly feel like dealing with right now. Plus, you already have a good set of experiences with the car you’re driving. So you fix that one.

In fact, if something else goes wrong with the car in several months from now, you’d probably still pay to repair the vehicle rather than buy a brand new one. Sometimes, it takes a pretty dense combination of things going wrong for us to start thinking about the major commitment, such as selecting, financing, and purchasing a brand new vehicle.

Your true competition is not a competitor who provides a similar product or service. It’s the path the buyer has become used to traveling. And yet, what would happen if that person decided, for whatever reason, that the Status Quo was no longer sufficient? What would happen if you could get in front of the decision-maker on the day this happened? How would that affect your ability to make a sale and build a rewarding long-term relationship?

SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY

If you want to improve your close ratio, you might upgrade your presentation and closing skills.

If you wanted to increase your total opportunities, you might upgrade your prospecting skills.

If you wanted to increase your deal size, you might target different customers or sell different products and services.

But if you want to improve all these things at the same time, you would have to improve your timing. You could probably use some assistance with understanding and upgrading your timing strategy. This means you will need to SHIFT your focus, and SHIFT your tactics, so that you can SHIFT your results.