clients to make better decisions and reach better outcomes. It's not something you can fake, as your client will know within minutes whether you can back up your claims. You are much better off doing the work of becoming One-Up: recognizing where you are One-Down, then learning from others' guidance and expertise to help you level up.
Notes
1 1 Oxford English Dictionary (online), “One-upmanship,” 2021.
2 2 Jay Haley, quoted in Jay Haley Revisited, ed. Madeleine-Richeport Haley and Jon Carlson (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 6.
1 The Modern Sales Approach
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
—Alvin Toffler
Professional selling has evolved over the past 75 years or so and using the modern sales approach is the best way to show that you're One-Up. Despite this, two older approaches, legacy laggard and legacy solutions, are still practiced. One reason you may be One-Down is because you are using a legacy approach to selling, one that is ill-equipped to create better outcomes for your clients. Here, we'll look at why the legacy approaches can hold you back, and how the modern approach can help you become One-Up.
The Legacy Laggard
Even the most recent strategies and tactics you find in the legacy laggard approach are now more than fifty years old, with some elements dating all the way back to the 1920s. They're built on the concept of information disparity, the idea that because your client was lacking information about your company's products or services, they needed to meet with a salesperson to learn what is available. As you will learn in Chapter 3, this disparity allowed salespeople to take advantage of the customers.
The fact that the prospect needed to buy something the buyer was selling made the interaction transactional, like many business-to-consumer purchases, but transactional models don't create the right level of value for B2B sales. Legacy laggard salespeople are trained to find “the decision-maker,” the single person with the authority to decide to sign a contract and ensure payment, overcome their objections, and make the sale. That process started by answering “why us,” with the salesperson attempting to prove credibility by talking about their company's strengths and history to persuade the prospective client to buy from them. Because prospects in the 1950s and 1960s couldn't simply browse the company website, the salesperson also provided them with particulars of their company's products and services. The value of the conversation was limited to the products and services the sales organization provided, as they were central to making a sale. In fact, if you still start your sales conversation by talking about your company and your products, that strategy is pure legacy laggard. One of the main tenets of the legacy approach was to refuse to provide “free consulting,” an idea that not only reduces your value but prevents you from being One-Up.
Legacy Solutions
As the environment changed and companies demanded more from their suppliers or partners, labels that suggested a greater obligation than one might reasonably expect from a vendor, the new legacy solutions approach provided greater value to both the customer and the sales organization. The major shift in this period is best illustrated by the idea of discovery. Instead of the salesperson just sharing information about products and services, the first conversation morphed into a series of questions designed to find the prospect's dissatisfaction, their pain point, or their hot button. These conversations were—and are— still more valuable than the legacy laggard approaches. If your sales conversations focus on finding a problem that fits your company's solution, you're still using a legacy solution approach.
Salespeople who used a legacy solution approach still tried to answer “why us,” but they added “why our solution” to the mix. As solutions grew more complex and became more critical to a company's business results, the decision-maker gave way to the buying committee or task force, the group of people charged with deciding what to buy and from whom. Not only would the salesperson have to overcome objections, but they'd also be required to provide proof that the solution would work for this particular client. In a legacy solution approach, the solution is the value, and the salesperson provides value by solving the client's problem, getting us about halfway to an approach that is consultative.
Before we go any further, please don't worry if your approach is cobbled together from both legacy approaches. I used both models myself early in my career, and they were genuinely useful before rapid market changes caused me to adapt a more modern approach, focusing on creating enough value to win deals.
The Modern Approach
The modern approach is consultative, requiring much more of the salesperson. Modern contacts, stakeholders, decision-makers, and decision-shapers need salespeople to create greater value (read: more help). No client finds value in a conversation that doesn't help them improve their decisions and their results.
The focus of the sales conversation is no longer “why us” or “why our solution.” Instead, it's now about “why change” and “why now.” Instead of relying on your company and your solutions for your credibility, trusting you can create value in the sales conversation, the modern approach requires arming yourself with insights and a certain perspective on what your client needs to do to improve their outcomes.
Because you already know what problems the companies you call on are experiencing, instead of helping the client to identify a need or a problem that needs solving, the modern approach starts by helping your contacts understand their world—one often marked by dissonance stemming from the constant, accelerating, disruptive change in their environment. By explaining the nature of their contacts' challenges, the One-Up salesperson helps them recognize the need to do something different and provides them with the ability to improve their results. It's important to note that none of these outcomes require you to mention your company, your products, your services, or your “solutions.”
When your clients need significant change, that decision isn't going to come from a traditional decision-maker or a buying committee. The larger and more strategic the initiative, the more you are going to need something closer to organizational consensus. Instead of objections, you find your contacts with real concerns that speak to their uncertainty, which often paralyzes them and prevents them from moving forward. Being One-Up is required to resolve those concerns and create certainty around doing what is necessary to improve your client's position.
As the (One-Up) person best positioned to guide the (One-Down) client to the better results they need, you must lead them. We'll cover some leadership tactics later, but for now, know that your insights include which conversations your stakeholders need to have to make the best decision for their company. You can think of this as an agile, facilitated, needs-based buyer's journey. While the legacy approaches treated the sales conversation as linear, a straight line from Target to Closed/Won, the modern approach accepts that both sales conversations and decision-making are now nonlinear, requiring the agility enabled by being One-Up.
True Confessions of a Legacy Salesperson
I started making cold calls for a nonprofit when I was fifteen years old. After two weeks, I found a much better job at a skating rink, so
