Changing Your Prospect's Mind — Is It Even Possible?

By Julie Thomas


Have you ever had to change a prospect or customer's mind? Picture this — you have been working with a prospect for a period of time and all is going well and moving forward. All of the sudden, your calls and emails are no longer being returned. What has happened? After a period of time goes by - you finally connect with the prospect only to hear the following: "After the time you spent with me, I decided to explore some alternatives - now I am leaning toward doing business with your competition, rather than you and your company." YIKES...what are you to do?

While this exact scenario may not have happened to you, something similar may have or will some day. There are many times our job as a sales professional is to educate and persuade for the purpose of changing someone's mind. A fundamental principle in ValueSelling is that "people need a reason to change." Before we can even create any sales cycle or qualified prospect we need to either create or uncover a reason for our prospects to change. The same principle can be applied to changing someone's mind if they are leaning toward a competitive alternative.

The key to effectively changing someone's mind is to start a conversation that surfaces conditions, consequences or implications that they may not have considered or be aware of. Rather than tell the prospect that their conclusion may be flawed or incomplete, initiate the conversation by asking a question that will raise some anxiety to open the dialogue.

Well placed anxiety questions in a sales cycle can provoke new thought in a number of scenarios:

1. Surfacing a business issue or "reason" to change from the prospect's perspective.

2. Placing doubt in the prospect's mind that a competitive alternative to your products or services will provide them more value than yours.

3. Creating urgency for your prospect to act sooner rather than later.

The concept of an anxiety question is to engage your prospect in a conversation - rather than lecture on the virtues of your capabilities. To create anxiety questions, begin with a complete understanding of the benefit or value of your capabilities and business practices. If you know that your solution is more reliable than the competition - for example, your product breaks less often and is easier to service, you may try to create anxiety around that fact. Rather than ask the innocuous question: "Is reliability important to you?" which won't give you any real insight or cause the prospect to think differently, try this:

"Have you considered the cost or consequence to you and your business if this device/machine is out of service?"

Based on how that particular question is answered, you are now in a conversation about reliability, serviceability and the differences between you and your competition and the impact of those differences.

The key to a good anxiety question is to phrase the question in a way that the prospect momentarily experiences the consequence of NOT having your product or service. The questions are designed to challenge the prospect's current thinking without insulting anyone's intelligence or damaging the rapport you have created with the prospect or customer.

Many of our clients phrase anxiety questions with either a reference to a third party research or existing client/customer reference.

For example,

"A recent Wall Street Journal article on your industry concludes that companies in your industry will be consolidating facilities, how prepared are you for that consolidation?"

"Clients of ours have told us that one key reason they have migrated to our products was our 7X24 customer service organization; what happens today when you need customer service on weekends?"

Our goal is to help our clients and prospects come to their own conclusions favoring our products and services. Rather than telling them again and again what we do that is different and/or unique, we want to ask questions that get them to consider the importance of our uniqueness and convince them in the process.

Anxiety questions open the dialogue to new possibilities in a sales cycle. They are provocative - and raise conditions that the prospect may not have considered. They are focused on the future rather than the past. They are phrased in a way that will not damage the rapport you have established.

About the Author Julie Thomas is President and CEO of ValueVision Associates. Julie has been in sales and sales management for over 19 years and is a noted public speaker, author and consultant. www.ValueSelling.com