If you watch pro football you’ll notice that on some of the networks they have a format where the individual players introduce themselves in a prerecorded segment. The formula is the player says their name and their college. Some of the players get cute and name their high school, or their junior college (Aaron Rodgers has done this on occasion). In just the past few years players from Ohio State have started referring to their college as “THE Ohio State University” – and now it’s part of the culture of the school. Not sure how many of you are from Ohio, or know much about the state school system there. It turns out there are many Ohio state universities. Kent State, Bowling Green, Ohio University, University of Toledo, several others, and my favorite – Miami University (I grew up in Oxford), are all Ohio state universities. There are 14 in total.
So, while Buckeye fans and alums may claim it, there is not one Ohio state university. There is also not just one sales method that one should employ. We’ve read about, or been taught, different sales methods, and each one seems to suggest that their method is the end all and be all. Not true.
I’m a huge fan of the Challenge Sales approach. However, Challenger works best in a demand creation situation when you are trying to disrupt the status quo – to get a client to consider something different from what they are now doing. Seems sensible. But what if you are working with an existing client and you want that client to renew or extend an existing agreement or project? The last thing you want to do is disrupt the status quo. Rather, you want them to keep on doing just what they are doing. So you need another approach, one that doesn’t challenge them.
Corporate Visions did some important research in 2017. On the topic of “When to Challenge”, what they found, in a nutshell, is that your main job with current customers is to reinforce the status quo. If you do so you’ll have a 13% increase in the intent to renew/continue. Turns out if you challenge existing customers with a disruptive message you’ll incur a 10% increase in the likelihood they will switch (at worst), or shop for other options, which still sucks.
While top sales performers know this intuitively, the start of a new year seems like a good time to sit down and consider whether your sales method is a hammer and everything looks like a nail, or whether, organizationally, you have an agile and flexible approach to your sales efforts, predicated on the situation.
Everything is not a nail, there is not one sales method, and there is not one Ohio state university, all claims from Columbus to the contrary.
