Sales Training Blog

Never underestimate the selling power of a survey

In 1997 my book, Tough Calls, came out.As the first national release of an unknown business writer expectations were low. My publisher told me most business books sell less than 3,000 copies in their lifetime and if I could hit that number I should be happy.

But my book had a secret weapon build into it: an imaginative survey that offered new insight into problem customer behavior.

Within a year of the book's release I had been asked to share survey insights with appearances on CNN, CNBC, Wall Street Journal TV (twice), and The Fortune Business report. Book sales were bolstered by international translations with the Korean edition alone hitting that 3,000 copy sold mark. You can click on the picture to see a video clips from four of my 1997 television appearances. Remember, it all started with a survey. And before you play the video, also remember, I had more hair then.

Selling with survey drama

If your client is not emotionally involved in a survey’s outcome, you can do a Personal Sales Survey, have the results break your way, and still not win the sale.  

To win emotional involvement you need to add drama to the process. But survey drama? Many salespeople yawn at the mention of a survey on a sales call. But surveys that sell are different. You must win involvement or doing the survey is a wasted effort. Here are few approaches that work:

1. Survey their passion
What gets your client’s blood pumping? Their competition? New opportunities? Government intervention? While many surveys can seem dull, few things get a client more excited than a survey about the things that get them excited! After you have covered these things add in some questions that advocate for your product.

I once called on a large Japanese component company whose US division could not convince the home office manufacture a smaller scale product. I did a PSS to measure the trend in their market toward the smaller scale components. The survey created huge interest because the US people felt so passionately about it. 

When the survey proved the point for the US division, they really pushed the survey results internally, along with the answers to the questions that documented the superior aspects of my product…all the way to the very top of the corporation.

2. Turn the survey into a contest
Here is the pitch, “You don’t think my service offers better customer service? I’ll prove it to you by challenging the service you are using in a survey to an objective audience. We will do a Personal Sales Survey, just for you, and measure either an independent industry sample or the sample of potential customers you are trying to win over. If I lose I don’t bother you for a long time, but if I win you have to give my service a try.”

This is no longer just another dull sales survey, this is now a contest, bring on the shootout, its high noon. Part of the drama is in the possibility of watching your product or service fall flat on its face. But, if you have done your pretesting, you should have a good idea of the results before you start. 

3. Discover an opportunity
I once was trying to sell a company on doing a webinar services. The company buyer said, “Josh, Webinars are fine but my audience will never go for them.” I did a PSS. The client’s customers were very enthusiastic about webinars and could not wait for my client to offer them. No one gets excited about surveys for the sake of surveys, but everyone gets excited about a new opportunity. I made the sale.

When you do a Personal Sales Survey, don’t think of it as a survey, it’s an unscripted event where you and your client discover new things together. There is drama in that!

Starting a Personal Sales Survey program

One of the best new Sales 2.0 tools are online survey services that have made taking a survey so easy that Personal Sales Surveys (PSS) can now be used to sell individual clients. 

They are more just "nice" services, they are essential to meet new demands of selling as the differentiators between competitive products move more to intangible features.

These days, when your product has a unique feature it often does not stay unique for long. One lens manufacturer told me that just  few years ago a new feature would give them a sales advantage of four to five years. Today, that is down to about 8 months. With faster design and manufacturing techniques, the increasing software content of products, and outsourcing, competitors can replicate competitive advantage quickly.  

 But there are many less tangible features that can brought into the sales process when measured. Features like brand presence among a clients's customers, comparative customer service, reputation for innovation, ROI among existing customers, and long term product durability, are sustainable features easily measured.

Most salespeople “document” competitive advantage with enthusiasm, selected anecdotes, and relationship building. But imagine if you could document your product's advantages in the ways listed above. You could leave your relationship selling competition in the dust. It works, I’ve done it.

Before you start using Personal Sales Surveys to prove a competitive advantage, you need to be sure you have a measurable advantage.

The first step is to list the buying criteria active in your market that affect your product. They can be product speed, durability, customer service, etc.  Next, survey your market to measure which of these criteria your product dominates. In most markets different products have different advantages and it is rare for one product to dominate all.

In addition, you need to know why the buying criteria your product dominates in, is important to buyers.   
 
If you discover that your product has no measurable advantage against competition, you no longer have a sales problem; you have a product or marketing problem. 

But let’s say you have a measurable advantage in product durability. When surveyed, 43% of past customers say your product held up best over the past 5 years, 20% say your next closest competitor did, and the other 10 players in your market fight for single digit scores.  

If a buyer believes that product durability is the most important buying criteria you can prove your advantage using a Personal Sales Survey. Easy.

But what if the buyer believes a different criteria is more important. 

Then, you shift gears and use a Personal Sales Survey to document the importance of product durability specific to his situation.

Ask your client's customers:

How long have you  owned these different products?

How long did each one last?

How did not having to replace the longer lasting ones save time?

How much money did you save by having a product last longer? 

Having lived with these products for five years which product would you buy again?
Etc.

Now, the Personal Sales Survey measures experiences that support the case for product durability. By bringing these measurements forward you can show your client that product durability might be more important than he or she assumed.

Often, claims of intangible advantages are met with skepticism among buyers. "You say your product will last longer, have a better ROI, or has better customer support than your competition. How can you prove this?"

There is always a way to measure some relevant audience, somewhere, that has had experience with the range of competitive products. 

Buyers today want more proof and less lunches. Personal Sales Surveys can help you deliver.       

Surveys that sell: do more black men go to prison than college?

Surveys are the most powerful sales agents on the planet. They sell not by overtly asking for an order, but by creating the “persuasive facts” that decisions are based on.

Call me skeptical, but having crafted hundreds of surveys that sell, when I hear a "persuasive fact" I want to know who created it, what bias it has, and what its creators are trying to sell me.
Here is one such "fact" I've heard for years, most recently during the 2008 Presidential elections:

 "There are more black men in prison than in college."

Do you think this is true? 
This "fact" was used by several candidates during the 2008 presidential campaign by several candidates and is accepted as as true in many current social discussions. But the "fact" is misleading and should not be used. It first was introduced in 2002 as part of a study created by the "Justice Policy Institute", whose stated mission is “to promote effective solutions to social problems and to be dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration.” A high minded organization, but not one without a bias on the topic. 

 The report compared two government statistics: In 2000, there were 791,600 black men behind bars while only 603,032 were in college. The numbers dramatized the shameful condition of American black men at the time.

But using this "fact" is not appropriate for two reasons:
First off, it is no longer true:
The same government statistics released in 2005 showed 864,000 black men in college and only 802,000 in prison. Still terrible numbers, but progress had been made, and as of 2005, a small majority now go to college.

But the bigger point is that this fact misleads because it is an apples to oranges comparison. Attending college and going to jail are different life experiences that happen in different time frames. A majority of people, black or white, go to college only between ages 18 to 24, whereas the "opportunity” to go to prison can happen throughout adulthood.   

The black male population of 2000 had a very high frequency of incarceration. If you compare their frequency of attending college, which would only happen in a four year window, to their frequency of attending prison, which could happen anytime during a lifetime, the comparison will skew toward prison. Just because the statistics of "going to college" and "going to prison" were gathered in the same year does not mean all comparisons between them are true. 

Take this 2007 quote from then presidential candidate, John Edwards:

“We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.”

Even as the basic statement about more young black men going to prison was accurate back in 2000, Edwards is stretching the comparison to mean things it does not.

Working with the 2005 statistics, the fact checkers at the Washington Post did an “apples to apples” comparison of just college age black men, in college and prison, finding that the number of black men in college is actually, "...five times the number of young black men in federal and state prisons and two and a half times the total number incarcerated.”

If you make the "fact" about black men an apples to apples comparison by limiting the sample to just black males of college age, the remaining fact just doesn’t sell:
"There are two and a half times more college age black males attending college, than there are in prison.”

Yawn.

Think about this: this "fact," about more black men going to jail than college was first presented almost 10 years ago by an advocacy group. The "fact" is still influencing decisions today even though it is not true anymore, and was originally based on a bias most people were not aware of.

Again, I state that surveys are the most powerful sales agents on the planet. If you are not using them to advocate your organization’s ideas and products, well, call me skeptical again.

Read the Washington Post fact check report

Read a review of the original report that shared "the fact" from the Justice Policy Institute 

Read a 2007 NYT article:  A black film maker tries to debunk the myth of more young black men in prison than college

 

Selling with "voice of customer" surveys

One of the best Sales 2.0 tools on the web today are the new online survey services like SurveyMonkey.com, Zoomerage.com and snapsurveys.com. Many organizations use these to do customer satisfaction surveys, but over the years, I’ve developed a system of using them as a client specific sales tool that accelerates the selling process.

Your marketing department may have used these services to do a market research project but they have have made the survey process so quick, cheap, and easy that surveys for individual customers you are in the process of selling should now be part of the selling routine. 

The most powerful way to use these surveys is to measure the voice of your customer’s customer. While many sales voices get drowned in the din of competition, when your customer hears your same story from THEIR OWN customers it’s as if it were screamed in their ear with a bullhorn. They hear it loud and clear, will believe it, and will act on it. 

 

I pioneered this approach years before the new online survey services existed. On calls I would tell clients that THEIR CUSTOMERS had a strong preference for my product over competition. If skeptical I presented them the following challenge; I would pay for a survey to measure their customer’s preferences. I helped them design a short survey, printed it, stuffed it in envelopes each with a return envelope, put stamps on all envelopes, and handed the whole thing over to them. My client then had a secretary apply the mailing labels of their customers and mailed them out. When a stream of filled out surveys favoring my product rolled in my future sales were assured.I found that even where my competition had long term relationships I would still get the business. No one argues with their own customers.

Today’s online survey services put my old system on steroids. Here's how I do it today; I help my client develop the questions and type them into a preformatted survey form. I then have the survey service generate a link where the survey is posted to be taken. I forward that link to my client. My client simply emails it to their customers asking them to fill it out. The new survey software is simple and quick to use. The process that took me days to set up and weeks to get results from can now be set up in 15 minutes with complete results back in two days.

Accelerate sales? Think about it. When you get your customer's customers to advocate for you, you can replace months of relationship building or proving unique value with a two day ephipahny that ends with your client saying, "Hey our customers say we should switch, how soon can we do it?" If your your organization is not using "voice of customer" surveys for individual clients you are missing one of the greatest sales accelerators of Sales 2.0.