Highlights
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I began to make trade-offs, compromising on both sides of the table—with the customer and internally with the company: if they wanted black, well then I’d figure out black. I caused havoc back at the office. The customers were managing me and our process, where I felt I had been reduced to an order taker.
Location 165
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We are all creatures of habit, and we will keep doing what we have been doing unless we have that struggling moment. So I flipped the lens, stopped trying to push my product, and started to understand what caused people to pull new things into their lives.
Location 223
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Tags: [[pink]]
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JTBD is the theory that people don’t buy products, they hire them to make progress in their life.
Location 232
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Great salespeople don’t walk around in a sharkskin suit, selling for the sake of profit. Great salespeople are real people: they ask questions, they listen, they learn, and they help you make progress in your life.
Location 235
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The customer was a set of demographics: age, zip code, income, etc., but that’s not what causes people to buy. Their age and location say nothing about what’s going on in their lives. To me, these demographics seemed like static pieces hanging in space, disconnected.
Location 267
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Tags: [[favorite]]
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When I started interviewing customers in Home Depot, on the surface, there seemed to be endless situational reasons, infinite even. I realized if I could group customers into a few categories of causation, I could figure out how to come in at just the right time and place in the buying process and help them, as opposed to pushing my product. So, I dug a little deeper. When I asked someone why, I stopped taking their surface answer. When asked the right questions, the causes for buyers shrunk dramatically—there were just five reasons my kitchen-countertop customers bought.
Location 269
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Correlation is not causation. Correlation is surface knowledge and causation is truth. The world of marketing is dominated by correlation. Once you understand true causation, you have night-vision goggles. The JTBD theory when applied to sales is a method for understanding what causes people to buy, as opposed to what correlates with your product or service.
Location 279
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People convince themselves; we convince them of nothing.
Location 290
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But great salespeople don’t sell; they help. They listen, understand what you want to achieve, and help you achieve it. A better title would be “concierge.”
Location 307
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With supply-side thinking the focus is on the profit—the product must make money inside a specific cost structure. Everything you talk about goes through the lens of the product or service. You push your product. The supply-side does not see how the product fits into people’s lives.
Location 381
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Demand-side selling is understanding what progress people want to make, and what they are willing to pay to make that progress. Our product or services are merely part of their solution. You create pull for your product because you are focused on helping the customer. Demand-side selling starts with the struggling moment. It’s the theory that people buy when they have a struggling moment and think, “Maybe, I can do better.”
Location 391
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“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question—you have to want to know—in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.” Clayton Christensen, innovation expert and Harvard Business professor
Location 402
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Demand-side sales always starts with understanding the people who already bought and made progress with your product or service and then seeing the patterns to help others who have not made the progress yet.
Location 435
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Today, information is readily available, competition is fierce, and consumers are well-educated. As a result, salespeople are dealing with an entirely different buyer. They don’t walk into a dealership waiting to be sold to. They live in the age of information. But a new problem has emerged. Consumers are overwhelmed and inundated with information, more confused than ever. As a result, buyers today struggle to find solutions to their problems. Sales must evolve!
Location 500
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As product developers we think about the first two forces—the push and the magnetism of our product—a lot. We imagine the next big feature we’re going to bolt onto our product, which everyone will love. But we ignore everything else—the anxieties and the pull of habit. Our experience has taught us that the money is made on the anxiety side of the equation.
Location 610
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What we are taught in business school is to add more features, but the forces work as a system and sometimes more features is not better because it causes more anxiety.
Location 620
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Once you have the first thought, you’ve opened up the space in your mind for the information. Without this first thought there is no demand. But once you have it, you notice things you didn’t notice before, which causes you to transition to passive looking.
Location 640
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Four ways to create a first thought Ask a good question…and not give an answer Tell a story Give a new metric State the obvious
Location 642
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Many talked about the challenge of sorting through and packing up their entire life. Wrapped into their home purchase was a plethora of fears and anxieties. They’d get stuck and consider not buying. Our solution: We raised the price of our condos, built a storage facility across the street, and hired movers to pack their belongings, label their boxes, and move them. We included this service as part of our package. Additionally, we built a clubhouse with a sorting room inside our storage facility. Now when their kids visited, they could all walk across the street, and sort through their lifetime of belongings together at a casual, leisurely pace.
Location 806
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Disconnected: Most people don’t know why they do what they do. They will tell you a purchase was random, an impulse purchase, or they’ll give a simple answer. You need to dig and not accept their surface response. Most people live their lives in the moment and don’t connect the dots. “I bought a mattress on an impulse.” “So how long haven’t you been able to sleep?” “Two years.”
Location 925
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When somebody transitions to active looking and asks for a quote say, “I need thirty minutes to an hour of your time to understand your business before I can give you a quote.” In that meeting set the expectations, “I’ll come back with three alternatives that will help you frame your situation better. From there we will morph a fourth option by merging the best of three. If at any point you reach out and I am not available, I will contact you within twenty-four hours.” Then set the tone, “I’m a straight shooter. If it’s a no, I’ll tell you no; if it’s a yes, I’ll tell you yes.” By setting the expectations up front, you’re already ahead of the competition.
Location 1642
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Tags: [[pink]]
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At this point, you’ve built trust; now you realize that trust is caused.
Location 1651
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Remember, the most vulnerable people in your portfolio are your current clients because you’ve learned to ignore them.
Location 1676
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Tags: [[pink]]
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Remember, value is created and money is made by solving the anxiety side of the equation.
Location 1686
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Tags: [[pink]]