Episode Details

Blair and David analyze and then look beyond the requests for reassurance potential clients make during the late stage of a sale to address their underlying motivations.

"Transtheoretical Model" (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983; Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992)

DAVID C. BAKER: Blair, today I want to ask you about something that I've heard you talk about for many years and it's this notion of alternative forms of reassurance.

BLAIR ENNS: Yeah.

DAVID: We used to do this event together and we did it for like 10 years running.

BLAIR: You mean that one where I carried the both of us.

DAVID: Yeah. That's the one, right. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely the one. I remember listening particularly attentively to this one section that you used to talk about because it was a new concept to me, but I was also really fascinated by it and I thought, mainly I thought the title was just perfect and you called it something like the alternative forms of reassurance and as I recall at a certain point in the sales cycle when an agency is in the process of landing a new client, that prospective client still wants a little bit more information and they might ask for something and this was a way as I recall, where you could kind of redirect the question and provide alternative means of reassurance. You remember those days?

BLAIR: Yeah, I remember those days fondly and the way you described it, I think of a judo move. We're talking about late in the sale and I guess I'll back up in a minute and explain why reassurance is important late and it's not important at all early, but we're talking about late in the sale when your job as a salesperson is to reassure this nervous late stage client and they ask you for things. I was counseled to look beyond the request, the specific request and look at the motivation for the request and sometimes the request is the negotiation, the request is to cut price. Maybe you're just negotiating, but maybe there's something else going on here or maybe they're asking for a money back guarantee or maybe they're asking for references or maybe they're asking to do things a little bit differently.

DAVID: Right.

BLAIR: In a lot of those situations, you have to think about what is the client buying from you. Anytime they hire your firm, they're buying a path to their desired future state, and so when you put forward a proposal in front of them with a price attached and they look at that price, you are essentially pricing their desired future state discounted for uncertainty. In every price, there is an uncertainty discount that's built in or there's some math around an uncertainty discount that the client is doing. Looking beyond the motivation for the request late in the buying cycle, again, it might be to cut price, it might be to offer references or it might be to do the engagement differently. It's not universal, but many times they see a lot of risk in the engagement and they're simply trying to mitigate that risk. They're trying to lower that uncertainty.

BLAIR: So if the engagement fails because of what's known as performance risk and that is you're the provider, your questionable ability to do the job, if in the end you don't end up doing what you say you're going to or to the quality that you say you're going to and you affect the outcome, but then the client is on the hook for that and if they think there's a great chance that that's going to happen, then if it's really high, they won't hire you at all. But if it's a little bit lower than that, maybe they'll see the risk and decide, "Well, for the level of risk that I'm taking, I want a lower price." So that's just one example, asking for a lower price where the client's really just trying to mitigate their risk, factor in uncertainty or another wa