What is phase 3 of brain-friendly selling – Context and Catalyse?

Grant Leboff: Simon, in the third phase of Brain Friendly Selling' and you talk about 'context and catalyse'. I don't think that is immediately obvious to a sales person so perhaps you can explain?

Simon Hazeldine: So first of all I want to understand the context the customer is in. For example, where their company and their organisation is in. What's going on in their industry? What's going on in their organization? Look at a broad, contextual level. Helps you to understand what the customer is likely to be interested in.

Then the questioning process digs deeper into the specifics of what's going on and the two primary driving forces in the more primitive regions of the brain is to; stay away from pain or problems and to move towards solutions or towards reward. So the questioning process that I advocate goes into understanding the problems, the challenges or sometimes the opportunities that the custom has not yet been able to realise. It's not always going to... it sounds like quite a negative conversation, but it's a problem they need a solution to, or it's an opportunity they need help realising, and they feel the discomfort or the pain. So I'm going to kind of explore that. Dig, dig deeply into it - understand what that looks like. Then I'm going to flip over to get that towards motivation, asking about ideally what they like to achieve? What would a potential solution look like? And moving backwards and forwards between those two motivating forces - gets that sort of catalysing effect it - gives you a dual motivation.

The customer is very clear about where they are and what they'd like to avoid or move away from, and they're very clear what good or success looks like and the benefits they will receive. Then you can show how your solution or your product or service helps them to make that journey from where they are now to where they would like to be. A very powerful way to motivate customers to make buying decisions and to take action.

Grant Leboff: And he said you know in your answer about this negativity, it could seem like a negative conversation but actually, isn't important to have that negative conversation? Because actually, if there is no discomfort with the customer they've got no reason to move to somewhere else which after all is what you want them to do.

Simon Hazeldine: No problem, no sale. And sometimes a problem is you're shown something better, that's a better solution. It's going to save you time, save you money, give you a better quality - that creates a sense of discomfort. But also, sometimes, unless you dig deep into the root cause of the problem, what's the impact of this problem? If you don't sort this out, how much is this going to cost? What's the impact on your employees, for example, if the technology they're using is frustrating them. You're employee engagement score is going to drop. You might have people leaving your business because they're dissatisfied working there. What's that going to cost you? And it's probably going to cost you 25 percent of salary to recruit someone if they leave. So if you've got 10 people leaving a month because of those problem, times 25 percent of their salary, that annual bill is £ millions. If your solution is less that, that's a pretty easy return on investment argument to make to the customer.

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