MIDTERM PREP 

- Daniel P Pink:

o 3 rules for improvisational theater: describe the rules and how they apply to
selling and give examples P 186-196
In sales, being able to improvise easily is a plus as it helps them generate ideas, incorporate
change and communicate more easily during sales presentations”
Light structure behind the apparent chaos of improvisation in the form of 3 rules that will help
you move others:
1. Hear offers
= leaving our own perspective to inhabit the perspective of others by Listening (not
interrupting but shutting up and slowing down) as it brings a level of intimacy that opens both
parties
In sales, this helps the rep catch the missing opportunities the customer might say about his
needs or his problems for which the rep has the solution.
Ex: During the negotiation part of a sales presentation, you ask the customers for $300 for
your solution, to which the client say “sorry, I can’t give $300”. By listening, you’re hearing an
offer, as the customer might be able to close the deal for a smaller amount or not yet as it is
not the right time.
2. Say “Yes and.”
Try to not say NO but rather be positive by saying YES AND not Yes but which is too
negative
AND: Help spiral towards other possibilities. In sales, it helps not being closed off as it opens
the conversation for other options that the customers might not have thought about before.
Ex: Customer says that he wants for a newer technology to be included in is solution. The
sales rep could answer by saying: Yes, and that could very well be included in the next sprint
as it ha snot yet passed to final verifying tests”
“Yes and isn’t a technique, it’s a way of life” - Salit
3. Make your partner look good
Win win situation: one person’s victory doesn’t depend on another’s person defeat
=in improv, making your partner looks good makes you look better as it enables clarity
(solutions that nobody imagined before)
In sales, making you partner look good show positivity and interest for the other person,
while truly listening what the customers is saying as you ask questions and react to their
answer in a positive manner.
Ex: A sales pitch where the customer starts by talking about his company, a good answer to
that would be to say “That’s so interesting” And to expand on that by asking another question
about the company, making for a friendly interaction between two acquaintances and less a
war battles between two enemies.
 o Explain different kinds of frame that can be used to provide clarity p132-138

Clarity : the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and
to identify problems they didn’t realize they had.
The following five frames can be useful in providing clarity to those you hope to move.
1. The Less Frame
=Framing people’s options in a way that restricts their choices can help them see those
choices more clearly instead of overwhelming them.
EX: Experience where consumers visited ≠ booth jam: the booth with 24 varieties = 3 %
bought jam. But booth with a more limited selection, 30 % made a purchase”.
“Adding an inexpensive item to a product offering can lead to a decline in consumers’
willingness to pay.”
2. The Experience Frame
=Framing a sale in experiential terms is more likely to lead to satisfied customers and repeat
business.
People are buying an experience, and researchers have shown that people derive much
greater satisfaction from purchasing those than they do from purchasing physical goods.
Anticipation of buying experience in future purchase = more satisfied than really buying the
good.
3. The Label Frame
“In the Wall Street Game, 33 percent of participants cooperated and went free. But in the
Community Game, 66 percent reached that mutually beneficial result”.
“The neatest group by far was the first—the one that had been labeled ‘neat’”.
“Merely assigning that positive label—helping the students frame themselves in comparison
with others—elevated their behavior”.
4. The Blemished Frame
“Remarkably, in many cases, the people who’d gotten that small dose of negative information
were more likely to purchase the boots than those who’d received the exclusively positive
information”.
“The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the ‘blemishing effect’—where ‘adding a minor
negative detail in an otherwise positive description of a target can give that description a
more positive impact’”.
“But the blemishing effect seems to operate only under two circumstances. First, the people
processing the information must be in what the researchers call a ‘low effort’ state. That is,
instead of focusing resolutely on the decision, they’re proceeding with a little less effort—
perhaps because they’re busy or distracted. Second, the negative information must follow
the positive information, not the reverse. Once again, the comparison creates clarity. ‘The
core logic is that when individuals encounter weak negative information after already having
received positive information, the weak negative information ironically highlights or increases
the salience of the positive information”.
“If you’re making your case to someone who’s not intently weighing every single word, list all
the positives—but do add a mild negative. Being honest about the existence of a small
blemish can enhance your offering’s true beauty”.
5. The Potential Frame
“Participants, on average, gave the veteran player with solid numbers a salary of over four
million dollars for his sixth year. But they said that for the rookie’s sixth season, they’d expect
to pay him more than five million dollars”.
“People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more
uncertain, the researchers argue”.
“Next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also,
emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow”.
o Describe attunement p.68-:

= ability to bring one's actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the
context you're in, for example when you’re forming relationships.
3 principles to attuning yourself important to sales function:

- Increasing your power by reducing it

= there is an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking

= study concluded that power could blind you and move you off the proper position, make
you misunderstand information and distort clear messages
To successfully move people depends on power inverse. As salesperson = you have to
understand the customers’ perspective, get in their head, and see everything from their POV.
= You have to assume you’re NOT the one in power

- Using your head as much as your heart

= Perspective-taking is mainly about thinking with your head whereas empathy is mainly
about feeling with your heart. Both are very important and have to be used together in a
successful sales rep
Study to move and convince customers’ perspective, perspective-takers are more effective
than empathy.
=Important to know that individuals are not disconnected from relationships and context.
=Important to train a salespersons’ perspective taking powers on people and on their own
relationships and connections. (work analysis like social cartography that can help see how
people are related before entering a situation)

- Mimic strategy

=monkey see, monkey do, a human tendency that serves as social glue
=Award winning study showed that mimicking deepened attunement and enhanced the
ability to move customers.
= Recommended by successful negotiators that to get a better deal one should mimic the
mannerisms of their negotiation partner.
Proven that this strategy is very effective.
o What is the purpose of a pitch? P153-171 (success of elevator pitch)

The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The
purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other
person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you”.
Dan Pink’s six successors to the elevator pitch:

1. The One-Word Pitch

“The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word—and doesn’t
go any further”.
2. The Question Pitch
“By making people work just a little harder, question pitches prompt people to come up with
their own reasons for agreeing (or not). And when people summon their own reasons for
believing something, they endorse the belief more strongly and become more likely to act on
it”.
3. The Rhyming Pitch
“Participants rated the aphorisms in the left column as far more accurate than those in the
right column, even though each pair says essentially the same thing. Yet when the
researchers asked people, ‘In your opinion, do aphorisms that rhyme describe human
behavior more accurately than those that do not rhyme? the overwhelming answer was no”.
“Rhymes boost what linguists and cognitive scientists call ‘processing fluency’, the ease with
which our minds slice, dice, and make sense of stimuli”.
“If you’re one of a series of freelancers invited to make a presentation before a big potential
client, including a rhyme can enhance the processing fluency of your listeners, allowing your
message to stick in their minds when they compare you and your competitors”.
4. The Subject-Line Pitch
“The researchers discovered that participants based their decisions on two factors: utility and
curiosity”.
People were quite likely to “read emails that directly affected their work”. But they were also
likely “to open messages when they had moderate levels of uncertainty about the contents,
i.e. they were ‘curious’ what the messages were about”.
“Utility worked better when recipients had lots of e-mail, but ‘curiosity [drove] attention to
email under conditions of low demand’”.
“Ample research has shown that trying to add intrinsic motives on top of extrinsic ones often
backfires”.
“Along with utility and curiosity is a third principle: specificity”.
5. The Twitter Pitch
“The mark of an effective tweet, like the mark of any effective pitch, is that it engages
recipients and encourages them to take the conversation further—by responding, clicking a
link, or sharing the tweet with others”.
6. The Pixar Pitch
After someone hears your pitch, ask yourself:
What do you want them to know?
What do you want them to feel?
What do you want them to do?

- Challenger book:

o P104-p111- ch. 6: Layers of tailoring and Rationale for doing it:

 has to do with the increase in consensus buying (i.e., the need to have the broader
organization on board before moving ahead with a purchase) that’s arisen as a reaction to
the push to sell more complex solutions to customers. = new reality of solution selling.
53% B2B customers loyalty = result of how you sell, not what you sell.

= start at the broadest level—the customer’s industry—and work your way down, to the
person’s company, the person’s role, the company and finally, to that individual person.

- Industry: What’s going on in terms of industry trends and current events? Has a big
competitor recently folded or has there been a meaningful merger?
- Company: Is the customer rapidly gaining or losing share? What about regulatory
changes? What do the company’s recent press releases and earnings statements
suggest about strategic priorities?
=2 first layers: easiest ones. Usually tailored messaging in practice,  at this level.

- Role: tailored at the level of a customer stakeholder’s role (rarer)

- Individual: their personal goals and objectives (even rarer)

When a rep comes in not just with a sales pitch, but with a sense of what’s going on in that
customer’s company and industry, = beginnings of a tailored message.
map out not just who the key stakeholders are, but what these stakeholders care about
and why they care about these things. By doing this, the Challenger is in a much better
position to be able to take control right from the beginning.
 o 3 misconceptions about taking control ch. 7 p.120-130 of challenger book +ex

1. Taking control is synonymous with negotiation (so at the end of sales process)
Challengers take control across the entirety of the sales process, not just at the end. Prime
opportunity to take control = beginning!!

- Challengers know sales meeting isn’t synonymous with offer at the end:

Ex of 20% of sales meeting = clients already have a vendor, but just entertaining competitor
to be sure = no real intention of buying other offer (usually reps meet with junior contact – no
senior decision maker). Good for reps because they are asked to come in challengers will
press for extended access and cut effort short if access isn’t granted (no useless waste of
effort and time)

- Issue of free consulting:

Customer invites salesperson to come in, analyze a problem, and generate creative solutions
 spend + six figures to pursue a complex opportunity. BUT customer encourages this free
consulting work until the best solution becomes clear, at which point they go shopping for the
cheapest supplier
Challengers differentiate themselves by confronting customers early on: willing to invest in
customers if he invests in them in return: have some assurance
Challengers will “lead and simplify” = teach the customer how to buy the solution.
2. Reps only take control regarding matters of money.
Wrong because challengers take control to push the customer in terms of money yes, but
also in terms of how they think about their world and their challenges.
=Essence of commercial teaching ability to reframe the way the customer thinks about their
world.
Challenger in a position to take control by bringing new ideas to the table.
Also, when there is pushback from the customers (and there is almost always pushback),
challenger take control with insights to answer the why of the customers and with data to
support his ideas= even if the pushback isn’t about money.
 Rep has to convince the customer that the problem is urgent to convince him that it’s
worth solving with his solution.
3. Reps will become too aggressive if we tell them to “take control.”

=Confuse taking control (= being assertive) with aggressiveness

But being assertive is more in the middle between passive and aggressive/
For example: while an aggressive rep will attack others und use antagonistic languages to
achieve their goals, the challenger may use strong language (not offensive) to push the
customer in a way that is still respectful of the customer and its reactions.
Reps tend to gravitate toward more passive way than aggressive because they perceived
that the customer is more powerful in the rep-customer relationship, because in hard time
they feel like they have less control in the supplier-customer relationship and finally, because
they were taught to be more passive rather than aggressive by their management strategies
for example.
o P55--: rules of commercial thinking/ teaching

4 key rules:
1. Lead to your unique strengths:
 Commercial teaching must ultimately connect back to a unique supplier capability that
differentiates them from competition to translate into sales.
Show to the customer how you’re better than your competitors by answering to their pb
with a new insight that’s also the solution you’re offering: taught your customer not just to
want help but to want your help.

- Have to make sure that you can help not imagine a solution to make a sale that
hasn’t got an end-result
- Have to know what your unique strengths are in order for your teaching to lead back
to them
Only 14% of companies’ solution are seen as both beneficial and unique! The others don’t
differentiate themselves enough to stand out to the customer.
=prefer cheapest option
Deb Oler question: “Why should our customers buy from us over anyone else?”
very hard question even if seem simple
2. Challenge customers’ assumptions:
 Challengers must know their part of the customer business well to fundamentally
"reframe" the way customers think about their business.
to teach the customers you have to challenges them and speak directly to their world in
ways they haven’t thought of or fully appreciated before.
Have to reframe your insight based on your customer: company that sells printers to
hospitals don’t know about health care but know about info management in hospital setting
Hear customer say “I never thought about it before” to know that reframing worked
3. Catalyze action:
 A good teaching conversation builds a compelling commercial argument for why taking
action matters = change the way customers think to get them to act
 build a compelling business case for why action matters in the first place.
= well-executed teaching conversation isn’t about the supplier’s solution but it’s about the
customer’s business = alternative means to either save money or make money they’d
previously overlooked
4. Scale across customers:
 For teaching to be effective, organizations must provide reps with well-scripted insights
and diagnostic questions to map insights to customers.
more effective segment by segment rather than customer by customer:
 - Companies have to provide reps with a manageably small set of well-scripted insights
along with two or three easy-to-remember diagnostic questions designed to map the
right insight to the right customer so that they can teach effectively
- need a small number of powerful insights that naturally lead to an even smaller
number of unique solutions, all applicable across the broadest possible set of
customers.
- Customer segmentation by same need or behavior

o Describe the 4-step framework that describe how to break the habit of sales
representative tendency to give in too soon during a sales presentation p135-
139
= DUPONT

1. Acknowledge and Defer

Say something like: “I understand that price is something we need to address, but before we
do, I’d like to take a moment to make sure I completely understand your needs—so we can
make sure we’re doing everything we can to make this deal as valuable as possible for you.
Is that all right?”
=simple request that promises closure to the customer, while asking permission to proceed in
order to defer (delay) make sure they truly listen to what comes next without appearing
aggressive or dismissive
2. Deepen and Broaden
Time won + tension at that point to remove it and continue:
Tactics for uncovering the customer’s underlying needs:
Broaden: starts with getting the customer to simply restate things the rep already knows the
customer likes about their offering. = to expand the customer’s view of the things that are
important to them (apart from price)
3. Explore and Compare
= reps are trained on tactics for comparing and evaluating the additional needs identified
during the conversation.
Rep broadened that universe as much as possible before  start to shrink it back down, talk
about price again: “What are you looking to achieve with a 20 percent price reduction?”
= to uncover the rationale for the request, as the appropriate response will depend on that
rationale (ex: production cost reduction)
Negotiating over price + customers’ other value creators = negotiation expanded
4. Concede According to Plan
Reps are taught the importance of proceeding according to a carefully planned negotiation
strategy that trades away low-value solution elements first before defaulting to price = what
you’re willing to concede but most importantly how and when do you concede them in the
negociation.
NO: start small concessions go bigger, “take it or leave it deal”
YES: concede negotiables in an order and an amount that ensures both parties feel they’re
winning. Ex: start with a meaningful concession and then to offer smaller and smaller
concessions as negotiations continue.

=manage tension in constructive manner

- Why people raise objections (5 examples and present the responses) = on Moodle

Caused by:

- Sellers, not buyers

- Procrastination: Showing delay can mean lost benefits
Obj: “I’ll have to think about it with my wife”
A: What is the worst that could happen if you bought our product? (Mini-max
approach)
- Skepticism: Not sure about what the product can offer
Obj: “I am not sure that the photocopier can print a 20-pages report in only a minute”
A: “You can come in check it for yourself, but I do have testimony that prove the
speed of our printer” = give demonstration and provide proof
- Indifference: Not excited about the offer
Obj: “I am satisfied with my current coffee maker”
A: Do you think your current coffee maker will be able to fulfill your needs next year
when you extend your shop? “= question about future need
- Price: objections based on price of product
Obj: “The car is too expensive for me now”
A: “I can offer you a demonstration of a smaller model that has less option and is less
pricey” (convert to lower-priced alternative)
- Overstocked Customer: objections based on the inventory needs that have already
been met.
Obj: Our bar already has all the beers we need in stock for the next month.
A: You do have Oktoberfest coming up, I can offer you our white lagger to avoid
possible “stock-out” in case you run out. = Emergency only

- SPIN program: how is it set up and examples

Situation questions are questions in the sales process that ask for background or facts,
= key to understanding a context for uncovering buyer problems.
The theory behind the SPIN system is to talk about your product and your products benefits
as late into the sales interaction as possible. To do this you will need to get a conversation
going by asking questions.
1. Situation Questions: The situation type questions are the 1st questions you want to
ask after you have introduced yourself to prospect and established your trust and
credibility.
=Ask for background or facts
=Key to understanding a context for uncovering buyer problems.

- How are sales going for you?

 - What kind of coffee brewing system do you use right now?
- How often do you get coffee delivered to your location?
- Am I right in thinking that placing your coffee orders over the phone is very time
consuming?
- When did you first notice an increase in the prices you were paying for your coffee?

2. Problem questions: Ask about the prospects pbs, difficulties, or dissatisfactions.

= critical as once the prospect realizes they have a problem, they will realize they
have a need and people only buy once they realize they have a need or want.

- Do you have any challenges with your current office coffee system?
- Do you ever have people waiting in line to get their coffee?
- Do you currently ever run out of office coffee supplies before your next delivery?

3. Implication Questions: Ask about the pb consequences, effects, or impacts. = critical

because prospect is just realizing he has a problem but pointing out the implications =
show the pb is much larger concern than initially thought.
To extend + expand effects of the pb and link the pb to other potential pb = make
the buyer eager to find a solution.

- How has the problems with your office coffee system affected your staff?
- Has having people wait in line for coffee affected your team’s ability to respond to
client calls?
- Has running out of coffee supplies before a sales meeting ever caused a sales
meeting with a prospective client to get off to a bad start?

4. Need-Payoff Questions: Ask about the value, importance, or usefulness of the

solutions. = large influence on how much the prospect is willing pay. They do 3
things:
 Stir up positive emotions because they are helpful, constructive and focus on a
solution.
 Reduce objections because they cause buyers to explain how your product or service
will help, and in doing so, convince themselves of the value of your product or
service.
 Move the discussion forward towards action and commitment.
- How much time could you save if you used another service company that looked after your
ordering for you?
- Would it be useful to have a photocopier that printed a 50-pages report in a minute instead
of 5?
- lf you could decrease the number of missed prospect calls from sales staff waiting in line for
coffee, how many additional sales do you think you could make in a year?

Communication styles
 - Drivers:

Low responsive and high assertiveness

Recognize them:

Everything is about power & control. Usuallt in dark suit/tie and whute t-shirt and a bare desk
without papers or photos. Organize his/her entire day.

To handle them:

Maintain business-like relationship and don’t waste time : be precise and show increase in their
control. Demonstrate “bottom-line” performance.

- Analyticals:

Low responsive and Low assertiveness

Recognize them:

Everything is neat: desk, office and appearance, walls are filled with charts & graphs and calculator
on the desk. Person is highly organized and speak slowly & in “monotones”.

To handle them:

Stick to specifics & put things in writing while emphasizing technical details. But don’t overstate &
provide evidence and never rush! Show both advantages & disadvantages.

- Expressives:

High responsive and high assertiveness

Recognize them:

All about them & their image, love to be the center of attention. In their office, you’ll see photo ops,
awards and diplomas and self-gratification labels and posters. Wear their “hearts on their sleeves”.

To handle them:

Be entertaining with stories and anecdotes. Use testimonials to add impact and appeal to their status
& recognition needs.

- Amiables:

High responsive and low assertiveness

Recognize them:

All about people, close to their families and with other people in the firm. Usually casual clothes.

To handle them:

Develop personal relationship first and emphasize people a lot. Provide personal assurances and
discuss personal opinions.
Mix of 2 types exists.