Change is hard. Somehow we forget this when we have our seller’s hat on. But we know it very well in our personal lives.
Imagine you’re asked to change cell phone carriers. Maybe you get an offer in the mail from a new carrier for just $5 per month – a fraction of what you pay now. And this new carrier claims to have better coverage than all the others. Would you leap to make the change? Probably not!
Why? Because changing would mean:
effort (hassle and energy)
risk (maybe their coverage isn’t as good as they say it is; maybe you’d have to get a new phone number)
and time (you’d have to dedicate a good portion of your day to getting it set up)
Before you could be convinced to change to that carrier, you’d have to be convinced of whether you need to change at all.
Change management psychology
The Gap Selling framework recognizes the critical – and often overlooked – aspect of change management psychology.
To this end, we say that there are two sales within each sale.
Sale number 1 is: should your buyer make a change at all?
Sale number 2 is: should they change to you?
As sellers we tend to assume our buyers should make a change (i.e. buy). So we leap into convincing them why they should choose our solution. But when we do that, we ignore change management psychology – to our detriment.
Pain is not the answer
Many sales approaches advocate finding your buyer’s pain. But this approach is misguided for two reasons:
1) Finding and amplifying your buyer’s pain can come across as manipulative. This will negate any trust and credibility you might have established.
2) People live with pain all the time! It’s not always enough to motivate change. Think back to the cell phone example. Imagine you have mediocre coverage in your neighborhood. The frustration (pain) of dropped calls probably still isn’t enough to make you endure the effort, risk, and time of changing to a different carrier.
Instead – calculate the cost of inaction
So if it isn’t about pain – what will motivate change? Your buyer’s current state problems must be untenable or intolerable.
One might say, “ok well, isn’t intolerable the same as pain?” No, it’s not. Your buyer will understand that it’s time to make a change only when sticking with the status quo would cost more than the time, effort, and expense of finding a new solution.
To calculate that cost of inaction (the cost of sticking with the status quo), define everything in their current state.
For example, if they’re a print office that has inventory waste every month because they have an inefficient inventory management process – you can calculate that inventory waste in dollars. For every month that goes by, they will continue to lose that amount. And when they lose that amount in inventory, it eats into their profit. If they don’t make a change, that total amount over time is the cost of inaction.
This is how you become a change agent. Help them connect the dots in a way they may not have seen on their own.
Humans are so… human
In my personal view, change management psychology is part of what makes sales so fascinating. Humans are complex creatures. We have all kinds of fears, aspirations, resistance, blind spots, and confounding biases.
As a seller, when you seek to understand your buyer -- not as a person who will buy your stuff – but as a human, the work is so much more fulfilling. Especially when you remember that as a seller, you are a change agent who can help people move from their current state into their desired future state – but only if you both agree that they should make a change at all.
"Why You Can't Ignore Change Management Psychology"
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