Ditch the (Sales) Script
Blair sees too many creative firms talking at prospective clients using sales scripts instead of having a series of wide ranging conversations on their unique issues and objectives that set the tone for the potential long-term engagement.
Links
“Mastering the Value Conversation”
Transcript
David C. Baker: Blair, today, I am interviewing you on the role of scripts in sales.
Blair Enns: I can hear the enthusiasm in your voice. [chuckles] You sent me this script and I'm not sure what to do with it. I feel like, "Wait, I can't use it."
David: Hold on. I absolutely did not send you a script.
Blair: Well, it's notes, so now, is this a test?
David: You let me read the notes and we're good. Interject with the odd question, just don't disrupt my flow. The official title of this is Ditch the Sales Script. In other words, don't use sales script.
Blair: Yes.
David: I like this topic. I really like the topic.
Blair: Good. Well, I think that's it. That's all I've really got on the topic. Don't use sales scripts, they're silly.
David: You are going to drag us through this, right?
Blair: Yes. Let's start with a thought experiment.
David: Oh God, here we go.
Blair: Yes. I've given this to many of my clients over the years and I'll give it to you. You try this on.
David: I'm not paying you for this, just to make that clear.
[laughter]
Blair: Why start now?
David: Yes.
Blair: All right. Usually, I do this if we're in a real-life workshop, or we're in a hotel meeting room somewhere and I'll say, "Hey, I just came from the washroom down the hall. I ran into somebody. Turns out that the board of directors of your most highly coveted prospective client, they're meeting in the meeting room next door. I told them that you were in here. They said they're looking for a firm like yours." They want you to go in there and like now, you have 30 seconds and spend 15 minutes talking to them about your firm, "Go." What's your reaction?
David: I'd love it. I would absolutely eat that opportunity up.
Blair: That's my reaction too. It's like, "What are you going to say??
David: I'll figure it out.
Blair: Yes. You've got 30 seconds. You'll figure it out on the way there. I've heard you say, from a stage, that you people, meaning creative people, love to dive off the diving board and invent water on the way down into an empty pool. I'll figure out the water thing on the way down. That is somebody that has a high autonomy score. Somebody with high autonomy issues, systems, procedures, and routine, they want the freedom to be able to make things up as they go. Therefore, they are not flummoxed or disturbed by the idea that, "Hey, no preparation. You've got to go and you've got to be on in 30 seconds ago. Go."
Their reaction is, "This is what I live for." The other end of the spectrum, you have low autonomy people who are systematic and process-oriented and they need to have visibility into what's coming next. Their reaction in that moment is [makes sound].
David: No way, no way.
Blair: "I don't know what I'm going to say. I have to prepare." You take those extreme opposite reactions and you place them at the ends of the autonomy spectrum and we are all on that spectrum somewhere between high autonomy, "Giddy up, I'll figure it out on the way over," and low autonomy, "I can't do it. I'm not prepared." Sales scripts factor into this.
David: I remember hearing about 40 minutes before a session was supposed to start at a conference and the speaker got food poisoning. The conference organizer called me up and said, "Hey, we have a two-hour pre-conference seminar kind of thing. We have a two-hour slot. Can you fill this?" I was immediately overcome with a little bit of dread, but also real deep excitement like, "This will be fun."
On the other hand, when I read through your notes, the first thought that came to my mind, I don't know if you've gotten these or not, maybe you, in Canada, are exempt from this, but do you ever get phone calls that seem like they're coming from a person, but they're actually a recording and they say, "Good day." Then there's this pause and you say something and then they come back and it's very obvious at that point. Now that is a scripted sales call, right? [laughs]
Blair: There's a scripted sales call that's being delivered by an AI now, or it's a human being with this scripted sales call. We're recording this just after your most recent MYOB conference in Atlanta, which was a massive success. One of the things that happened on the last day was a tree fell on a power line in the neighborhood, took out the power for the entire block. The last few speakers of the day, and you were the last one, had to speak with no power.
There was only generator-driven lighting, so minimum lighting. There were some skylights in the facility. They couldn't use their slide deck, and they had to project their voice. I think there were three speakers.
David: Three speakers, yes.
Blair: All three of the speakers, and you were the third, performed exceptionally well. They seemed just completely unfazed by this. You would expect, at a conference for creative people, that most of the people on the stage would be perfectly fine in that moment. Some people would not. They would not be able to function.
David: They wouldn't, yes. Getting back to this, are you generally saying that a sales script is just never a good idea for this kind of selling?
Blair: For this type of selling, yes, it's never a good idea. We need to understand first, when your people ask you for a sales script, that says a lot about them. It doesn't say anything bad about them, it's high autonomy and low autonomy. They're not good or bad. Any place that you occupy on that spectrum would come with some trade-offs. The thing about creative people who are bored in a shoe routine, they will just go out of their way to not do things the same way they've done them previously. There's a reason for that.
Creativity, as we've talked about before, I subscribe to Csikszentmihalyi's definition of creativity, which is the ability to see, the ability to bring novel perspective to a problem. If that's you, if you're a creative person and you can think creatively about a problem. Just think about it, what does perspective mean? You're looking at something from a vantage point. If you have a novel perspective, you're standing where nobody else is standing.
What you're not going to do, you're not going to go stand where other people are standing. You're going to do things differently, you're going to think differently, you're going to change your routine and you're not going to fall in love with any routine. That's what allows you to be creative. You're always driven to try something different, to try something new for the first time.
David: It's clear that a script doesn't have much of a useful role in selling, but frameworks are different than scripts.
Blair: Yes, frameworks are different than scripts. A creative person doesn't want a script, they don't even want a framework. A high-autonomy creative person doesn't want a script, they don't even want a framework. They want the freedom to make it up as they go because that's part of where their genius comes from. A low autonomy person, so you think engineers, accountants, people are very systematic who are low risk. They want visibility into what's coming next. They want a script. Neither of them should have scripts, but the creative person needs something to rein them in. Otherwise, they're going to go through 100 sales calls to the extent that anybody does sales calls.
They're going to go through the sales interaction differently every time because they're always looking for the novel approach rather than happening on something that's pretty good. Frameworks meets these two parties in the middle and it's what both need. The low autonomy systematic person who really wants a script, if you give that person a script, they're going to sound like a sales robot.
I may have told this story before, but in my last agency job, I was put through a sales training program and Win Without Pitching would not exist if I had not spent three days in the sales training program. A couple of my colleagues were also signed up by my boss, the agency owner for the sales training program. One of them, when we were debriefing a few days later, she said, "Oh my God, I just got off this call." I'm halfway through a sentence and the guy stopped me and said, "Did you just come out of a sales training program?" She said, "Yes."
It ended up being a good call because they had a good laugh about it, but she was a low-autonomy person. You put scripts in the wrong hands or the hands of the wrong people, they're just going to sound like sales robots. There's people who really want scripts. They want them for reasons of comfort, but they really shouldn't have them because they're going to sound like robots.
David: A sales training organization like yours isn't about giving people scripts, it's about giving people frameworks and that's okay.
Blair: Yes, so frameworks exist in the middle between these two things. You think of a framework as a map. In our four conversations model, we've done a whole episode on this, we'll link to it in the show notes, all models are wrong, some are useful. A model is the way that you make sense of complexity and view the world. Our model is this idea that the sale happens in four discrete and linear conversations. That's rarely the case, but it's a helpful model. It's helpful to think of the sale that way.
In each of these four conversations, there's an objective in the conversation, something you're trying to accomplish. Then there is a framework to help you navigate to that objective. That's fundamentally it, there's no script to help you to navigate to that objective because you don't want to be locked in by a script. You need the freedom to be consultative, to be interested in the client, to go where you feel you should go. You don't want to have like this free rein to drag things out forever.
David: That'd be the opposite side of it, right?
Blair: Yes, I heard many times in my agency life, and I probably said it a bunch of times, "Yes, let's just keep the focus on me." I've been guilty of this many times early in my agency career of coming back from a new business meeting and saying, the team says, "How did it go?" My response was, "Great, we scheduled an hour and we went two hours." It's like, "It took me years to realize that's not a great meeting. That's somebody who doesn't actually know the objective, who doesn't have a framework, and who's also not respecting the other party's time."
David: When I hear about sales scripts and I think about my own experience on the receiving end of this, and I don't know, this just could be my twisted perspective, but when I experience somebody selling to me with a script, the thing that I think about the most is that they aren't really listening to me.
Blair: Exactly.
David: They're talking at me, and I get this twisted desire to disrupt the conversation and throw them off. Sometimes it can be cruel on my part, just honestly, because I'm not really going to buy something. I just want to know, "Are you a human? Are you listening to me?"
Blair: Yes, it's like somebody reading a line. Another benefit of the wonderful Flexport 2000, Mr. Baker, is, and then you interrupt and go, "What are you wearing?"
David: [laughs]
Blair: "I'm sorry?" it's not a sexual thing, just, "What are you wearing?" Where are you sitting right now?"
David: [laughs] Yes, "I want to get to know you as a person".
Blair: Yes, because people like that, people who need a script, they're really thrown off by the unforeseen objective. That salesperson who is selling a transactional thing at volume, scripts have been tested and refined and refined and optimized, et cetera, for the average in a scenario, most of the possible objections are plotted out, and there are this, "If-then branches, these decision trees around this objection, you move to this part of the script." When you get something outside of that, they don't know what to do.
I have worked with a lot of low autonomy principles of creative firms, not nearly as many as there are high autonomy, like it's almost nine to one, high autonomy versus low autonomy, because of the reason that creativity is correlated to autonomy. The low autonomy people, they can succeed at sales, but they have to brute force it. What I mean by that is, they're not so good at their intuition in the moment. They're not comfortable and relaxed enough to go with the flow.
If you think of that annoying person on the phone who's calling you, they've got this decision tree. In a consultative sale, their decision tree for them to succeed at sales, it has to be massive. I think of it as the equivalent of a chess computer. A chess computer isn't really thinking its way through a game, it is processing all of the possible moves at one time. That's effectively how you win at chess. That's how a computer beats a human. I don't, I'm probably professing to know more about chess than I do.
Magnus Carlsen is the current reigning world champion. I think he has been for the last five years, at least maybe longer. He's an unusual chess player. It's pretty clear to me, he is in a highly autonomous individual. The chess world, I believe, is just dominated by low-autonomy people who are systematic and process-oriented, and they can crunch huge amounts of information. They can recall all these patterns of all these past games. Magnus Carlsen can do that to a certain extent, I believe, but he can also just play on gut.
There's nobody else, again, I'm overstating my knowledge of the chess world, but I don't think there's anybody else, certainly not at that highest level, who can play on gut the way he can. We've got to work with the tools that we're given, whether we're high autonomy or low autonomy. Frameworks are in the middle between scripts and no scripts. Everybody would benefit from a framework. Nobody in our world, in the consultative selling world, nobody would benefit from a script.
David: You and I have both met agencies who are hiring, or maybe they already have a salesperson, or they're hiring a salesperson, and this person comes from not a consultative selling background, but more of a transactional, they were selling SAS software, is the most frequent thing I see, or 10 years ago, maybe they're selling copy machines or something. How much of an overlap is there between the transaction versus consultative and high versus low autonomy? Is it pretty close?
Blair: I'm not sure. You think of the copier salesman. A lot of people came out of a business degree and their first job was selling office equipment. Sometimes it was for IBM, sometimes it was for Xerox. One of the reasons people went to Xerox was the quality of the training. I don't know that world enough to know whether or not those individuals are high autonomy or low autonomy. Those are consultative sales. I suspect they are high autonomy. I think a lot of people in the creative professions back then who were in biz dev roles and the creative professions did come from that world.
I think they struggled with another problem, which was you have to have a really high sales drive to succeed in that world. That makes you a little too impatient, I believe, for selling creative services and more thinking-based expertise-based services. I think that's a different problem that set them apart.
David: Right. Maybe something about that in patience is we have to have a close even if this is not in the best interest of either the client or the agency at this point, we have to have a close, and so instead of selling four or five really great new relationships a year, they'll sell 15 or 20, some of which are not a great fit because of that impatience.
Blair: Yes. It's like my cat meowing at the back door, "Look what I caught. Look what I dragged home." It's like, "Oh my God, really? Another mouse, another bird." I don't know if that's the right metaphor, but it's like the salesperson, "I killed something." You look at what they kill, it's like, "Yes, we don't eat that." "Yes, but I killed something. I have a need to kill. I killed something."
[laughter]
David: You know what struck me when I was reading through this? We send each other these notes in advance so that we can think through it. What struck me is that this is all so relevant, but we also ought to be thinking about whether the person we're selling to is low autonomy versus high autonomy, too, and not just how our approach is, right? We ought to think about how they want to receive this, too.
Blair: It's funny. I never thought of that before. I know there are other dimensions of the personality of the salesperson where you have to be tuned into where the other person is on the spectrum. One might be affinity, the need to like and be liked by the people you work with. You and I are both low affinity. You're even lower than me. I've measured both of us.
David: Something you like to point out frequently.
Blair: If we're selling to a high-affinity person or affiliation person, there will be a gap there. The high-affinity people can be uncomfortable by that gap. It will seem to them like we're not interested in them, when the truth is, we're really interested in the situation and creating value for them, and neither of us have this need to like our clients or to be liked by our clients. Somebody to, whom it's really important that they like the people they work with, we can seem aloof. We have to remember that moment to raise our level of humanity, raise our affinity.
When it comes to autonomy, I'm not sure, and you might be right, but I can't see it. I think whether you're high autonomy or low autonomy, the situation calls for something. In our world, that something is, you need to know what the destination is, you need to know where you're going, but you need to have some freedom to get there. You're never ambling off track, you're not going down these rabbit holes, you're staying focused. There's a sense of purpose and direction to the conversation, but you don't find yourself saying the same things over and over again.
David: If it's true, well, I can just take the word if out, it is true that most of the people listening to this who are in a selling role in this field are high autonomy people. They don't even need scripts. They actually resist the idea of a script. What are they struggling with that we need to watch for? Their desire for high autonomy means they don't even want frameworks, they don't want training. What do they struggle with? Obviously, they're really good at selling consultatively, but what are their tendencies because of that that need to be changed?
David: They struggle with going on too long, having meetings, trying to feel their way through a meeting. I don't know if you've ever asked the question of your clients, but ask somebody, "Well, okay, what's the purpose of this meeting you have coming up?" A lot of time, they won't even have thought of it. “Well, to get them to hire us.” No, no, but this is a very specific meeting. It's the first interaction between the two of you beyond the initial email, or it's the second meeting you've already had a qualifying conversation. What's your objective here? What are you trying to accomplish?"
You might be surprised how few people have actually thought deeply about that and gone into the meeting with a very specific objective other than get them to hire us. That's the ultimate goal through the arc of the sale, but that's almost never the objective. The objective, while we're on the point of every new business interaction, every sales interaction, is to see if there's a fit suitable enough between the client's need and your expertise, suitable enough to take the next step. Now, that means different things at different points in the sale, so that's why you should have a framework for how you introduce the firm, how you do outreach of any kind, how you talk about the firm. You should have a framework for how you qualify leads and determine whether or not this is worth spending time on.
You should have a framework for how you write proposals, you should have a framework for how you conduct a closing conversation, you should have a framework for how you negotiate. This is just in the sale, right? You could take this and extrapolate it out to other domains. All of these things and a couple of things I haven't mentioned, you should have frameworks for them, and you shouldn't be tied in by scripts.
Blair: Even if you're not having to train somebody internally, you ought to have those frameworks. Ideally, let's say you're running a 10 or 15-person firm, you could talk with the entire team about your frameworks, your philosophy of selling what you're aiming for, what are the steps. That just sounds really smart because everything is a little bit more intentional there, and you have ways of thinking and so on, I love that. I don't know why this is just a new thought to me.
David: I feel like you just plugged the wind without pitching workshops, so thank you for that. [laughs]
Blair: I was actually thinking of another firm, but yes. [laughs]
David: Anything else for this group here?
Blair: Just the idea that the framework is the map. It's not the predetermined route. In a conversation, so it's a qualifying conversation where you have an objective. The objective is to vet the lead to see if an opportunity exists and then determine the next step. You know where you're going, you know what the purpose of the conversation is, you give that person a framework, B.A.N.T is a common framework: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe. It's like, here are the four areas where you need to get information so that you can determine, whether or not, there's a fit here and what the next step, but within that framework, you shouldn't have scripts. You can have set pieces.
We did an episode called 10 Set Pieces where it just specific sets of language. Those aren't scripts, those are just a particularly powerful sentence that you might say in a specific situation. It's okay to have set pieces and you will build up a library of set pieces over time. If you think of you, the owner, or the manager, you're handing, to the salesperson, their destination, "Here's what you're trying to accomplish," and a framework, "Here's the map to getting there." Then you leave the exact route to them.
You decide how to get there, just use the framework. The building blocks you pull from the collection of toys and the order that you use them in, should have something to do with the client on the other end if you're listening to them and adapting to the style that they most appreciate in that sale.
David: Very interesting stuff. Thank you, Blair.
Blair: Thanks, David.