This article is based upon an interview with Jeff Thull, who has designed and implemented business transformation and professional development programs for such companies as Shell Global Solutions, 3M, Microsoft, Siemens, Citicorp, IBM, Raymond James, and Georgia-Pacific. In addition to being president and CEO of Prime Resource Group, he is the author of Exceptional Selling: How the Best Connect and Win in High Stakes Sales (Wiley, 2006).
Thull can be reached at:
Prime Resource Group
Telephone: 800/876-0378 or 763/473-7529.
Web: www.primeresource.com.

What is High-Stakes Selling?

If selling is how you make your daily bread, any sale is a high-stakes sale. From the customer’s viewpoint, however, a high-stakes sale is one where the problem is difficult to describe, the solution is complex to define, and the potential impact of a wrong decision is enormous. The situation, for the customer, is similar to gambling with large sums of money without being able to control the outcome. Under the circumstances, some customers are cautious and often unwilling to buy, feeling that making no decision is better than making the wrong one. Other customers may react in the exact opposite manner, making an impulse purchase that ends up costing millions but either doesn’t fix the problem or, worse, exacerbates the problem.

In these situations, the sales professionals must take the lead. They must provide guidance to clarify the exact dimensions of the problem, help the customer evaluate a range of solutions, and assist the customer in assessing the potential outcome of whatever solution is implemented. This sounds like consultative selling, but it’s really more than that. In truly high-stakes situations, a salesperson must act more like a physician than a consultant. In this role, the sales rep asks questions about the customer’s symptoms in order to help the customer diagnose their problem. Then, based upon the rep’s experience, the rep must uncover and explain the root causes of the problem and propose either a single solution, or a range of solutions, to their problem. The sales rep will likely coordinate additional resources, such as technical or application expertise to guide the customer.

The Diagnostic Selling® Model

There are three “eras” or generations of business-to-business sales models:

1. Presentational/Persuader. The agenda was purely the seller’s. The training focused on presenting, handling objections and, of course, closing. This assumed that the customer understands their problem, and the role of the sales rep was to clearly explain how their offering improved the customer’s world and then proceed to take the order.

2. Consultative/Problem Solver. Salespeople were taught how to listen, ask questions, build trust, and understand the customer’s needs, which are defined as the difference between what the customer has and what the customer wants. The role of the salesperson was to understand those needs and then propose a tailored solution. A key underlying assumption is that the customer could self-diagnose their needs and describe their desired outcomes.

3. Diagnostic/Source of Business Advantage. The third generation sales model doesn’t assume that the customer has a complete understanding of the problem. In fact the customer may not recognize the problem. In this case, the role of the sales rep is to ask questions about the customer’s business situation, locate the root problems that are causing that business to run less effectively, and then propose ways to work together to address the root problems. The sales rep will likely propose a solution that the customer would not have been able to put together and would not have thought to ask for.

While the diagnostic sales model can be applied to virtually any business-to-business sales situation, it’s particularly useful for high-stakes selling, because it provides the customer with a gradual decision-making process that effectively clarifies the current situation and builds the credibility of the salesperson, thereby lessening the risk and ensuring a greater predictability in the final outcome.

How Diagnostic Selling Works

A “presentation focused” sales rep, even when highly professional and successful, is essentially imitating a carnival pitchman. Similarly, a “consultative” sales rep is essentially imitating a management consultant who provides extra expertise and perspective that, in an ideal case, would already be located inside the customer’s firm. (That’s why consultants are sometimes colloquially referred to as “hired guns.”) By contrast, a “diagnostic” sales rep is acting like a physician. Because this is an unfamiliar concept, let’s imagine that three different types of sales reps are actually doctors. The conversation might go something like this:
Presentational:
Patient: I’m actually feeling quite well.
Doctor: That’s good. Let me tell you about this bottle of snake oil; it will keep you at the peak of health and I have a special introductory offer…
Consultative:
Patient: My stomach hurts.
Doctor: How badly does it hurt?
Patient: It hurts really, really bad.
Doctor: What do you think is causing the pain?
Patient: I ate too much last night; I think I need a strong antacid.
Doctor: I can help you with that. Here’s a prescription for you.
Diagnostic:
Patient: My stomach hurts.
Doctor: In what way and at what times?
Patient: After I eat pizza, I get this burning sensation.
Doctor: Have you noticed an itchy mouth or any hives when this occurs?
Patient: Well, now that you mention it, yes I have both.
Doctor: It sounds like you may have an allergy. What kind of pizza have you been eating?
Patient: Actually, it’s been pepperoni the last few times.
Doctor: We’ll run a few tests, and if it’s from the pepperoni, a change in diet will take care of your stomach problem.

The Characteristics of Diagnostic Selling

Diagnostic selling is fundamentally different from the other two types of selling, in that there is NEVER an assumption that a sale will actually take place. Because the purpose of the initial meeting with the customer is to diagnose whether there is a problem that needs solving, the possibility exists from the start that there may not be a problem to solve, or the problem may not be a priority. For example, a company that’s experiencing slowed sales as the result of a slower economy may be doing everything right – or at least as well as can be expected under difficult circumstances. In this case, the diagnostic sales rep would simply help the customer see that there’s nothing essentially wrong and that the difficult times must simply be weathered.
Needless to say, this would not be the outcome if the sales rep were accustomed to selling under the presentation or consultative model. In those cases, the customer would be pressed to buy something to fix a problem that may not exist. There certainly is a chance for a sale, but there is a bigger chance of annoying the customer and preventing future business and referrals.

Another characteristic of diagnostic selling is that it requires sales reps to have a deep understanding of the customer’s business, the economics in which that business operates, and the ability of the rep’s own offerings to become elements of a solution that will enhance the customer’s business. In fact, just as a doctor knows more about determining a patient’s health than the patient, a diagnostic rep must often know more about determining the health of the customer’s business than the customer knows.
Ultimately, the sales rep becomes more of a project manager for the customer’s team than a representative of an outside firm, coordinating all aspects of the relationship while guiding a quality decision process.

Customer Benefits of Diagnostic Selling
Customers who are in high-stakes situations do not have the expertise or perspective to figure out what’s wrong and what needs to be done. They require and count on outside expertise. In many cases, they may actually have problems that they may not be aware of because they’re compensating to ameliorate the symptoms. The archetypal example of this is the proverbial company that sees limitations of old processes or technology as normal and has learned to live with performance limitations. Such companies need to be brought slowly to a deeper understanding of the actual challenges that they face and what can be done to help them run more efficiently.

Another benefit of diagnostic selling is that it provides a way for customers to comprehend complicated solutions by connecting elements of the solution to the reality of the symptoms they are experiencing. One of the great ironies of our technological era is that the more complicated a product, the more undifferentiated it becomes in the mind of the customer. For example, one must almost have a PhD in computing to understand the differences – on a feature/function level – between the offerings of competitive software vendors. To most customers, they all look the same. However, from the diagnostic viewpoint, every customer has unique symptoms and unique problems, which may require a solution that combines process, software, services, and so forth. In other words, the diagnostic model, by focusing on unique symptoms, provides a doorway by which customers can manage the inherent risk in a high-stakes situation. – Geoffrey James

Quick Tips for Your Next Sales Meeting
High stakes selling requires a diagnostic selling model rather than a traditional selling model. Here’s a summary comparison:

All customers should buy: Only certain customers should and will buy.

Never take “no” for an answer:  Walk away from inappropriate opportunities.
Persistence pays: Persistence in pursuit of an unlikely customer wastes valuable resources.

A good sales rep can sell anything to anybody: A good sales reps weeds out poor prospects and focuses on high-gain opportunities

Customers know what they need; it’s my job to deliver it: Customers can be unclear and even wrong about their needs; your job is to figure out what’s needed.

Never walk away from money on the table. Always walk away unless you know you can help the customer’s business.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again:  If you don’t succeed in finding a way to help the customer, try again with a different customer.

Sales Manager’s Training Guide

At Your Next Sales Meeting

Below are 13 practical steps to help your sales team move from a consultative sales model to a diagnostic sales model in order to help customers deal with high-stakes situations. This sales meeting should take about 40 minutes.

1. Prior to the meeting, write three paragraphs, each describing a customer situation, one to a page. The first and second descriptions should present the symptoms that a customer is having as the result of a hidden problem, the solution to which might involve your company’s offerings. The third description should provide a set of symptoms that are completely unrelated to your company’s offerings. At the bottom of the first scenario write, in longhand, “So, what are you here to sell me?” Now make a third as many copies of these pages as there will be attendees at the team meeting.

2. Also prior to the meeting, prepare a slide show based upon the table provided in the “Quick Tips for Your Next Sales Meeting” segment of this article. The presentation should show each “traditional” attribute and then click to reveal the “diagnostic” attribute.

3. Open the meeting by explaining that you’re going to lead a role-playing exercise that will help team members better diagnose customer problems. Explain that the result of such questions will be to better target sales efforts, resulting in more sales and more profit per sale. Ask the team to participate fully and emphasize that nobody will be judged on their acting ability.

4. Break the meeting into groups of three. Have each group decide who is A, who is B, and who is C. Tell them that A will be the observer, B will be the sales rep, and C will be the customer.

5. Gather the C’s together. Hand them the first scenario. Tell them to read the scenario carefully because they’re going to play that customer. Without letting the A’s and B’s see, point to the question written in longhand and tell the C’s that they should open the discussion with that question.

6. Conduct the first role-play. Listen to the conversations. Chances are that the there will be a lot of product talk, simply because the conversation was opened in that manner. After about three minutes, stop the role-play and gather the team together.

7. Open the floor for discussion by asking the A’s to assess whether the sales call conversation was productive. They will probably respond in a mixed manner. Then ask the C’s to assess the extent to which the conversation centered around the symptoms described in the scenario description. In most cases, the conversation will have been about searching for the right product rather than searching for the right problem.

8. Explain the basic concept of diagnostic selling. Then use the slide show you prepared in step 2 to illustrate the differences between diagnostic selling and the way that some members of the team may be tempted to sell. Remind the salespeople to think like doctors. In other words, “I have a solution for heart disease, but I want to ask a few questions to see if you are experiencing any symptoms that might suggest our solution would be a fit.”

9. Break into groups of three. This time A’s will be the customers, B’s will be the observers, and C’s will be the sales reps. Hand out the second scenario to the A’s and conduct the role-play. You may want to wander around the room during this segment of the training sessions to assess whether the sales reps are asking diagnostic questions about the symptoms, rather than talking about products. Let the role-play proceed for about five minutes. At the end of this step you should be 25 minutes into the meeting.

10. Open the meeting for general discussion. Ask whether the second role-play seemed more effective, in terms of selling, than the initial effort. In most cases, the answer will be decidedly positive.

11. Rotate the roles and repeat the exercise with the “noncustomer” (scenario three). Let the role-play proceed for five minutes or until everybody concludes, on their own, that this is not a potential customer (whichever comes first.)

12. Gather the team together again. Point out that, if the third conversation had been focused on product, the rep might have wasted hours on a prospect that really wasn’t a potential customer.
13. Ask the team members to incorporate diagnostic questioning into their sales efforts and report the results to the other team members at the next meeting. 

Quick Tips for Your Next Training Session
 

.In addition to providing a detailed model for high- stakes selling, Thull’s book, Exceptional Selling, contains many nuggets of wisdom, which he labels “Key Thoughts,” scattered through the book. Here are our 10 favorites for you to share with your team:
1. Salespeople are guilty until proven innocent.
2. When you’re feeling pressure, you’re doing something wrong.
3. Do not answer an unasked question.
4. Do not allow the customer to self-diagnose.
5. One opinion does not make a consensus.
6. Always protect the customer’s self-esteem.
7. You have competitors; your customers have alternatives.
8. The purpose of a proposal is to reinforce decisions that have already been made.
9. Remain professionally involved and emotionally detached.
10. When in doubt, do the opposite of what a salesperson would do.

Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How can I best use my sales presentations in a high-stakes selling situation?

A: You can’t. Presentations, and other “push” methods of selling, are not appropriate and are more likely to raise resentment than move the sale forward.

Q: Our product is the best; shouldn’t it be easy to sell?

A: Not necessarily. If your product category is complex (and it probably is if there’s a need for a sales rep), the differences between products are likely to seem very minor to those who are not very familiar with them. You may be utterly convinced that having a fifth generation bell-whistle makes your product indispensable. Most buyers are simply to get all glassy-eyed when you talk about it.

Q: People listen to doctors because they respect them. Why should customers listen
to my diagnosis?

A: One of the reasons that doctors have credibility is that they’ve moved to a diagnostic behavior model rather than the old “hammer and tongs” approach that was typical of physicians in the Victorian period. The way to create credibility is to show that you understand the customer’s business problems through the questions you ask and provide value to the customer’s decision-making process. There is no shortcut.