Dan Smith, CAO of Winning By Design, argues that sales professionals should diagnose customer problems before proposing solutions. He emphasizes active listening, mirroring language to build rapport, and repeating the diagnosis back before moving forward.
Chapters
Last 2 that I wanna go with you is that if you want somebody to like you, you have to show empathy. You cannot sound like a robot. You cannot sound like somebody who's just going down through a list of questions, just going through your pitch deck and just talking at them. Ultimately, you need to make it about them. Show empathy. Show that you actually care for that person. The biggest mistake that I hear in sales is that sometimes a customer will tell you, Oh, I'm really frustrated using your competitor's product. I get no visibility, it takes up too much time, it's not working for me. Now, if that customer just told me all of this great info, and I know that they're gonna be a perfect fit for what I can help them with, I would respond by saying, perfect, awesome, oh, you're gonna be a great customer, that's exactly how I can help you. But if you put it from the customer's mindset, they just opened up to you, they said, I'm frustrated, I'm struggling with this, Everything is going to the wayside. If you come back and say, that's awesome, there's gonna be a mismatch there. You're not being empathetic. So I want you to lead with empathy by saying, I'm sorry to hear that. Sorry that's happening to you. Other customers that we work with struggled with the same thing. What they found was— Solution. And now I'm going through this mindset shift of making it about the customer and not about me. And we're doing everything that we can to avoid looking like that traditional salesperson, pushy, aggressive, self-interested. What we're trying to do is help the customer solve problems. The final thing that I want to leave you with today is a very fun quote that I wish I came up with that combines medicine and sales. And I hope that this stays with you. Whenever you're trying to think about how to sell your product better to your customers, I want you to remember this: prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. If I start pitching you a solution before I understood what you're actually trying to solve, You're doing it wrong. If you think about this from a running analogy, you're running in the park, you twist your ankle, somebody comes up to you and says, trust me, I'm a doctor. First of all, anybody who says trust me, you never trust that person. Anybody who tells you that they're an expert, you're like, hmm, you might be faking it, bro. Don't think you're there yet. So ultimately, you show expertise, you show trustworthiness by the questions that you ask, the expertise that you prove based on how you guide the conversation. So if somebody came up to me in the park after I stumbled over and said I have a hurt ankle, and they said, can you wiggle your toes? Can you move your ankle? Good, that means it's not broken. What about when you do this exercise? Do you feel any pain on the right side of your knee? Oh no, good. So it sounds like it's just isolated to your ankle. Now if that person told me all you need is Advil, that'll help you, put that, relax, Ice it. You'll be fine in two weeks. I would trust that person. But if he came over to me and saw that I was limping, and the first thing that he said is like, "Ooh, looks like you're in pain. You're in pain, right? Have some oxy." I'd be like, "Bro, I do not need oxy for this bad boy. I just hurt it right now." I would feel immediately that person is trying to pitch me, trying to prescribe me a solution before he knows what my problem is. Don't be like that type of salesperson. Don't just pitch your product. First, diagnose before you prescribe. So the last 2 that I want to put up here, the E stands for empathy, the R stands for repeat. If you suggest the next step, if you suggest a solution, a demo, a trial, whatever you are suggesting to them, that is your prescription. But you need to do that after repeating back your diagnosis. So if this hypothetical doctor in the park came up to me and said, Because you can move your toes, because you feel pain on the right side of your knee when you do this, it sounds like this might be a ligament issue, and it will be beneficial for you just to have some Advil and ice it. He diagnosed me, and then he prescribes a solution. That comes back to the repeat. All too often, we have a conversation, we realize that we connected all the dots, we assume the other person did, but now we can just make it dead simple for them. This is the fundamentals of how to communicate as a sales professional. There's obviously a lot more to it. I tried to drop in 3 books for you, so depending on what you're most interested in, you know which way to start going through it. But there's a lot of things to unpack here, and there's a lot of things that you can learn from each other. But it comes back to what we spoke about at the very beginning of the session. The best way to learn something It's not just by doing it over and over and over. It's about being deliberate with your practice. Be deliberate about the tone that you're using when you're communicating with each other. Recognize what your volume is, how fast you're speaking. Are you using silence? Are you using filler words? Do you accidentally have some uptalk that's really hard to listen to? Are you super boring and talking only monotone? And this can get really boring too. Choose what about the tone that you want to fix. Then figure out what questions you want to ask. Write these questions down. If we go closed-ended, then open-ended, that helps it be very easy to know how to answer that question. Then we talked about active listening, and I feel very strongly that if there's only one thing that you take away from today, it's picking up the tone words that somebody is saying and mirroring it back to them. Once you start doing that, You're going to start seeing people like Alex, who are all closed up, just blossom in the conversation. All of a sudden, they won't be able to stop talking. Thank you.
