Chapter 2

The N.E.A.T. Selling Compass

The four points of N.E.A.T. Selling: Need, Economic Impact, Access to Authority, and Timeline. Headaches versus migraines, and the discovery questions that surface real pain.

A brass compass representing the N.E.A.T. Selling compass
The N.E.A.T. Selling compass: Need, Economic Impact, Access to Authority, Timeline.

N.E.A.T. Selling is all about trust. Nothing more, nothing less.

Our goal in sales is to help our customer “fall in trust” with us. Not fall in love—falling in love happens after the sale when they start using the product or service. At a personal level, our happiest purchases are those we’ve made where we trust the salesperson. So the single most important thing we can do in the sales process is build trust. And you build trust by understanding your customers—their needs and their pain points. Which means doing good discovery.

Is your team bad at creating urgency? Do you wish your sales team was better at negotiating and not giving away discounts? Do you wish they didn’t have so many proposals out with no responses? Do you hate having to sift through the bullshit in your CRM on a Sunday night because there are too many deals that shouldn’t be there? This all means your team is not doing proper discovery. They are merely talking about surface pains and headaches. Not core pains and migraines.

How your team thinks about N.E.A.T. Selling is as integral to its success as the reinforcement of it. It’s less about adding steps to the process and more about helping them understand it.

Buying isn’t buying—buying is simply decisionmaking. In fact, it’s a process by which we reduce the risk we feel during our decision-making process so that in the end something is actually purchased. And as salespeople, our job is to help people reduce that feeling of risk they experience when making a purchasing decision. And if you’re a sales leader, your job is to help your sales team reduce the risk they feel in trying something you’ve coached them on.

Think back to a time when you had to make a big purchase. Maybe you were buying a house, or a car, or software for your team. Whatever it was, think about the process you went through to sign off on that final decision (or not). We’ve all been buyers before, so when we go to make a purchase, we understand what it feels like to be trapped in a lousy sales process or cycle. You know, the kind that makes you walk away swearing to never go through the hassle again.

As sellers, even if we’ve experienced that buyer’s pain before, we might get labeled as pushy, untrustworthy, or impatient. Buyers can feel when you’re aching to make the sale and hit your quota; they can sense your intention. They smell blood in the water and they are thinking about how much fun it’s going to be to drive you to a huge discount.

But that’s not what creates an impactful Buyer’s Experience. The goal throughout your process needs to move from being self-serving to adopting an experiencebased, buyer’s-mindset approach. It’s all about building a foundation of trust by listening to and truly discovering your customers’ needs. And many times our customers don’t realize what they really need. They think they know, and they simply do not.

Think about how well you and your team really know your customer’s needs and pains. Can you identify them by actual use cases, or just by buzzwords? If it’s buzzwords, you are not actually understanding their core needs and pains. The goal is to understand the prospects’ pains based on their current needs and actual experiences so you can quickly eliminate the prospects that aren’t a good fit for your solution. Remember that disqualifying equals qualifying: getting rid of the disqualified prospects and opportunities provides more time to spend on new prospects and the best opportunities.

As with any journey, you need to know where you are when you start, and you need to confirm or correct where you are as you go. You need a compass. And in sales, the compass that tells you where things stand is not labelled North, East, South, West. This compass is labelled N.E.A.T.: Need, Economic Impact, Access to Authority, Timeline.

Need

The first N.E.A.T. Selling compass point focuses on the customer’s needs.

We still see people conducting weak discoveries.

When discussing a prospect’s or client’s needs, too many salespeople talk about what their product or service does, which naturally turns into a feature/benefit sales pitch. It means they are focusing on surface pains, not core pains. What’s the difference? Surface pains are simply headaches. Core pains are migraines. And when someone has a migraine, there is an immediate moment of realization that makes curing this pain a greater priority than it was before the conversation started.

Painting a Picture of Pain

Believe it or not, people buy the pictures in their head more than the words they read or hear. We interpret the words and create an image in our minds so it’s easier to understand. Pictures of pain equal use cases.

When a salesperson tries to paint the picture for the prospect, it’s harder for them to relate. When a salesperson asks questions that help the prospect paint their own picture, they understand it intuitively.

So when this process reveals a core pain, that means you’ve asked your prospect the right questions for them to paint an accurate picture of pain in their own experience. Even if we know the picture ourselves, they need to hear themselves say it out loud to paint their own picture.

When they can describe a specific use case, that’s when you are getting deeper to core pains. For example, if my prospect is the head of sales, I know they will probably be on their computer on Sunday nights sifting through the CRM and trying to answer the “Are you almost done?” question from their boo without saying, “No, it’s going to be two more hours.” Now when you ask them if something like this happens to them, that’s where you know you found a real migraine, not just a headache. And from here the conversation naturally flows to the dollarization of the pain. (More on this when we get to Economic Impact.) (And for all the books reading this: we are saying the work is the migraine, not the book.)

So, is this a headache, or a migraine?

Discovery Questions

We believe it is important that you ask these questions of each person you speak with at every step of the way through the sales cycle.

For example, you may have an initial call with someone who will then report back to the buying committee or their boss. You may then need to have a conversation with the boss or committee.

Each time a new person joins the conversation, we recommend you summarize the current needs that were expressed and determine their specific needs as they relate to the project overall.

Here are some of the Need questions we recommend:

Economic Impact

The compass’s second point is about the Economic Impact of the needs discussed.

This allows you to show the true value of your solution in relation to solving their pains. And it gets them to confirm that what you offer is better, and by how much. And that means dollarization.

For example, oftentimes people want to be more effective and efficient. First, those are buzzwords, and I hate buzzwords. I hate them because when salespeople hear them, they make assumptions that the prospects’ or customers’ definitions of those buzzwords align with the value prop being presented to them. Even if they do align, it’s still not a big enough pain to confirm they will purchase your solution. When we hear buzzwords like this, our goal must be to get the prospect to paint their ineffectiveness and inefficiency as real-world issues in their own words and provide the numbers that capture the dollarization of the pains they have. This allows the prospect to paint a new picture of what will happen when a calmer and better future state takes hold. How much better will it really be for them and the organization? In short, we want them to tell us about their migraines, not their headaches.

Now, how do we guide customers through this process? By asking better questions.

Here’s an example: Your client shares that they are wasting ten hours per month on a manual sales process. You dig deeper and discover it involves five of their sales reps, so it’s really fifty hours per month wasted. Six hundred hours per year. Six... hundred . . . hours!!

We can easily dollarize based on salary. So that’s Economic Impact 1.0. Now here are the next three levels.

First, you ask your prospect, “Hey, if we can get you 75 percent—450 hours—of your sales team’s time back, what would they do with that time?”

The answer is usually something like, “More sales.” Don’t stop, dig deeper.

You now have Economic Impact 2.0.

Don’t stop, dig deeper.

You now have Economic Impact 3.0.

You now have Economic Impact 4.0, which is the urgency they need to face.

Discovery Questions

This is where most deals are won and lost, in our opinion. This is the dollarization conversation. These are the “showing value” questions that translate into real numbers.

And the best part of this: when you ask the right questions, the dollars being discussed are their dollars. The prospects and customers finally admit to and hear their real pains. Their pains in their own words and their own dollars.

When you get to the dollarization answers, this will make any discounting conversations so much easier for you. It is hard for them to argue the need for a discount when you can simply state, “I’m confused. When we spoke you said this pain is costing you $ . In fact these are the numbers you gave me. So, what’s the need for a discount exactly?”

Below are some of the Economic Impact questions we recommend asking based on certain goals of your prospects. Of course you should create your own, based on the pains you solve for your prospects/ customers.

And just like the questions you asked during Need discovery, each time a new person enters the conversation we recommend you ask them specific Economic Impact questions as well. You will often uncover more dollarizations.

When the goal is to increase sales:

When the goal is saving time:

Access to Authority

The N.E.A.T. compass’s third point focuses on accessing the most influential people.

When you are communicating with a buyer, you are not communicating with just one buyer. There is no longer a single decision-maker when it comes to buyers.

All purchases are made through a multitude of communities within your prospects’ and customers’ organizations. Some may actually be committees, while others will simply be a community of those affected by the decision. In either case, their blessing is required to close your sale.

Therefore, it’s up to you to determine whether the person you are speaking with is merely a cheerleader or if they can actually champion your cause for you and get you access—specifically, Access to Authority. We define authority as the people who can approve a purchase. They will come in various flavors and personalities. You must understand them all, and specifically what makes them tick at a business level when it comes to making decisions.

Old-school sales philosophy was to get to the decisionmaker as fast as possible. And we would, and still do, try to create an “internal champion,” and then hope we have the right fairy dust to sprinkle to get a meeting with their boss or boss’s boss. But the new school says we have to have a champion to help us determine the skeptics and the supporters. If they cannot help, then we merely have a cheerleader.

So what’s the difference?

We need to figure out these danger zones faster. This means we need to know who the skeptics are more than anything else.

Let me say it louder for the people in the back of the room. We want to know the skeptics first! They will be the ones who prevent the sale, which is why they are as important to understand as the people who want our products or services.

Stop trying to figure out who signs the contract— figure out who can block the signature!

People are scared to make decisions by themselves, especially when that decision is a direct component of their job. They want to cover their ass so if something doesn’t go right, they don’t shoulder all the blame. So buying has now become a consensus exercise.

Sometimes the advisors are formal committees. Other times they are simply internal communities, those that have no structure but can be affected by the decision to purchase your products and services. And that decision affects a host of other people, including their direct reports and often other departments as well. Sometimes the purchase requires help or support from other teams like marketing, security, or IT. But the decision-maker is in the spotlight if the wrong thing is chosen. And it can be worse if they do not take other departments into consideration when those departments’ regular duties, tasks, and business priorities are affected. It’s comparable to how, as consumers, we regularly seek the counsel of others when making decisions.

Here are some of the decision-making committees or communities we see come up during the Access to Authority conversations with prospects and customers.

End User Influencers: not a part of the committee but the people trialing your product/ service, who often have the heaviest influence on selection.

CFO: the person who loves to scare the salesperson and gives final pricing approval. Procurement Team: the group that loves to scare the salesperson and gives final pricing approval.

Now this might be counterintuitive, but here is what not to ask: “Who controls the budget?” or “Who else needs to approve it?” or “Who will actually sign the contract?”

Instead, ask this: “Who is the most skeptical person on the team? And what are they most skeptical about?”

And remember, we already know that after every meeting there is another internal meeting that we are never a part of. So here is how we coach people.

  1. “Hey John, I know you are going to have to take this back to your team for their opinion at some point. I am curious: who on the team is typically the most skeptical person?”
  2. “OK, when you think about them, what would you say they will be skeptical about when you bring this forward?”
  3. “OK, so if they are skeptical, and you love it, what happens when there is not alignment in that scenario?”

Discovery Questions

Often people love to use the word “review,” as in “legal review” and “security review.” Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, a salesperson hears these phrases and gets nervous because it feels like some big Judgment Day team. And that’s fair to feel. All feelings are fair.

We encourage salespeople to remember that these “reviewers” are really just people like you and me—a single person or an entire group. They are not really the Big Bad Wolf, and you are not Little Red Riding Hood. People are people.

Here are some of the questions we recommend salespeople ask during the Access to Authority phase of the sales process:

What other projects might they have that could delay this decision?

Timeline

The fourth and final point on the compass is about dealing with timelines—and the need to be diligent when doing so.

No deal can be closed without knowing when it’s going to close, but this is merely a seller’s point of view. The buyer’s point of view focuses on when they can actually get their hands on the product to do the things they want it to do.

So many times we—including me—believe our prospects when they give us a timeline. We hear a date and assume it’s true, but our job is to confirm repeatedly. Essentially, we hear what we want to hear, and once we have it, we don’t want to do or say anything that might make it worse. This is what someone once called “Happy Ears.” We don’t hear what is actually being said.

We ask a prospect things like, “Great, when would you like to get started? When are you seeking to implement?”

The prospect gives us a date. And we do a hard stop and start doing our ritual closing dance because we got a date. But that is premature.

We must dig deeper. Here is what we typically teach to our clients. It’s often a multilayered approach to digging and getting closer to the core:

  1. What happens if you don’t implement by [date]? If there is no real pain, then you have not done a good enough job on Need and Economic Impact, or have not gotten Access to Authority.
  2. OK, so to get launched by then, how long will it take to get approval?
  3. OK, so to get launched by then, how long will the legal process take?
  4. What other internal projects could come up to delay this moving forward?

Discovery Questions

Most salespeople and sales leaders simply suck at timeline discovery. This is because they focus too much on just one of the timelines: “What day will we get the signed contract back?”

And then what happens? The deal pushes to the next month or quarter. Or evaporates entirely.

We are shocked.

Our bosses and bosses’ bosses are shocked too and become “bossy blamers” looking for scapegoats.

(A special note for all the bossy bosses and bossy blamers: if this has happened more than once in your career, then it’s categorically, undeniably your fucking fault! You keep complaining that it happens, and it’s still happening? Why haven’t you fixed it?)

You know there’s this cool thing called the internet, right?

And you know you can ask it questions, right? And you know it will give you good answers, right? And you’re in leadership so therefore you must know how to take an idea to the masses, right?

Oh, wait, my bad. You don’t know any of this stuff. Thanks for buying the book. Let me know if you need me to come to train your team.

In case I haven’t been clear: it’s not the salesperson’s fault for a deal pushing if their sales leaders have not taught them about qualifying Timeline. If your deals push, short of some significant and unexpected life event happening to your prospect, like a family illness, then you’ve got Fake Timelines.

A Fake Timeline is what you get if you just take the “Reverse Engineer the Timeline” approach, which goes something like this: “So when do you want to implement this? Great, to implement by [date], it typically takes us ___ weeks for the integration and onboarding. With this in mind, we would need to get the contract signed by [date]. Can we do that?”

Now don’t get me wrong, these are good questions to ask. However, too many salespeople and sales leaders simply stop there and never get to the real timeline. Yes, it is always important to know the timeline from the prospect’s perspective. However, a deal signature timeline is based upon several Mini-Timelines.

Mini-Timelines are the specific moments when resources are committed by both parties to move a deal to closing. They can include anything from demos and deep-dive demos to competitor conversations, legal resources, financial resources, etc. If you only do a reverse timeline, then you are missing out on the real things that can move the deal forward.

And in addition, unless there is significant financial pain felt by the person and organization from missing the proposed launch date, there again you’ll have a Fake Timeline.

Here are some questions we encourage people to ask when it comes to confirming real deal signature dates:

The Compass

Sales is never linear. It ebbs and flows, like the tides. Some days there are clear and sunny skies. Other days are gloomy or stormy. And of course, there are days when our prospects and customers go completely dark.

This is the reason for the compass metaphor. The compass symbolizes that no matter where you are on the Seller’s Journey, you can keep yourself oriented and on the right path. The N.E.A.T. Selling compass guides us no matter how we decide to utilize it—as a philosophy, process, or methodology.

Every customer is truly unique in their approach to whatever solutions we provide. And even if we don’t have the same approach, we must meet them in their headspace. N.E.A.T. Selling allows us to take them on our Seller’s Journey while also respecting them and providing them with an amazing Buyer’s Experience.

Unlike other sales methodologies, N.E.A.T. Selling does not have a strict order. Not every sales conversation starts with N and then goes to E, A, and T, in that order. Sometimes a sales conversation starts with a deadline, a crisis, or a research effort. And while we can quickly move to Need, which is often the case, the conversation does not always start there. It is the situation that prompted the initial conversation that can then drive us to the need.

For example, sometimes our customers tell us they need sales training. Well, there is something that happened before they reached out to us that indicates the need exists. Often times it is something like missing quota or hiring new sales reps. This prompts a need for a conversation, with the specific type of conversation yet to be determined.

If someone says, “My boss told me to contact you,” we may be starting with Access to Authority before we get into actual needs.

And if someone says they need sales training because they have a trade show coming up, we start with Timeline before diving into the type of needs they specifically want to address in the training.

We encourage you to find the right way to make the compass work for you, in a way that supports the Seller’s Journey. And be sure to remember that the customer experience is what you want to enhance more than anything.