By working through the sales process and information with your buyer, you keep yourself from being a pesky poker and position yourself as a trusted and collaborative resource they will buy from again and again.

Challenging and Provocative Selling: Do you Provoke or Just Poke?

Provocative. It’s an approach to selling that has appeared in articles, blogposts, and books these past few years. It was renewed with the Challenger Sale book and it seems the underlying premise is that we are to provoke our buyers. While provocation to get someone thinking or to challenge the status quo can be a good thing, often this approach can do more poking than provoking.

This poking or jabbing at people to get them to pay attention can easily be taken too far. Remember what you did as a kid when you were poked? Most of us poked back, yelled “Mom, he’s poking me” or ran away. None of these actions is what we want from our prospects.

The majority of the thousands of sales professionals I have worked with do not want to sell this way. They are so uncomfortable with telling their prospects what should be important to them, that they find lots of reasons NOT to call on people!

Many buyers don’t like or want to be poked or challenged in this way either. The president of an architectural and engineering firm told me that when a sales performance organization called on him using their provocative approach did initially get his attention when setting the appointment. But, when the extreme provocative approach continued during the meeting: they informed him what he should be worried about and what he had to do or he would fail; he knew he did not want to work with them.

He also told me that he did not want his team to adopt this type of selling. He said (paraphrase) “That’s not what we’ve done in the last 50 years and I don’t want to start doing that now.”

What we need to do is to pair our industry knowledge and broad base of experience with a desire to involve the buyer. We need to be provocative and collaborative to:

1. Identify what they already know. While we can be armed with research and background, we still have to identify their level of knowledge, experience, and their ideas before we start telling them what they must do.

2. Determine how to support their ideas, knowledge, and expertise. What do you know that validates their ideas and knowledge? Share best practices you have picked up that will be helpful to them. Often people are either short- or long-term focused. Fill in the complimenting pieces for the whole picture.

3. Make it easy for them to connect how your solution addresses what is important to them. Connect any information you share directly to this buyer and their business or situation. Don’t assume they will make the connection.

By working through the sales process and information with your buyer, you keep yourself from being a pesky poker and position yourself as a trusted and collaborative resource they will buy from again and again.