From the course: Sales: Closing a Complex Sale

The importance of validation

From the course: Sales: Closing a Complex Sale

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The importance of validation

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- To understand the important of validation, it's important to understand first how the brain processes information in order to make a decision. The brain makes decisions instinctively and emotionally, and then looks to validate that decision with the facts and the data, not the other way around. Validation comes in many forms, but in our case it will primarily come in the form of customer testimonials, and our ROI or return on investment mechanisms that believably align with the customer's primary performance metrics. It's important that you don't get caught making the mistake many sales people make. They try to lead with the facts, data, or testimonials, when that information must be reserved for the point in the process that the customer is looking for validation. Think of validation as the great risk equalizer. We all have varying degrees of risk tolerance, as do your customers. We may get emotionally excited about a product or solution, but in the end, decide we can't actually purchase it due to a variety of practical, rational reasons, like budget, or delivery, or overall timing, et cetera. To give you a real world example, I'll tell you about the last vehicle purchase I made, my Toyota Tundra. Now, as an old farm boy, it had been too long since I'd owned a truck, and I was very excited to go test drive the various models. My wife and I agreed on a budget and away I went. I drove the Silverado, then the Sierra, then the Dodge Ram, the Ford F-150, and I liked them all, but didn't really love any of them. Then I drove the Toyota Tundra. It was incredible. It had the most features and the interior that I wanted, and I really, really wanted it. Then I found out it was $10,000 over the budget that we wanted to spend. But of course, now my brain kicked into validation mode. I began looking for every way possible to justify the added expense based on all these amazing features I was emotionally connected to. I looked at all the great consumer reviews and the consumers reports, and on and on. I was able to spend that extra money. I just needed to validate the decision to do so. This is where value clarity comes in. Now, in the case of my Tundra, I did all the work validating my own decision. But in the case of most B2B complex sales, you as the salesperson generally needs to be the one driving value through this validation process. Now, if you do everything correctly throughout the buyer journey, the validation experience is much, much easier because you have a buyer who, like me, is simply looking for the reasons to justify the decision. If you skip steps in the process we've taught throughout this course, you will find yourself having a tougher time convincing the customer your price is worth the value. Either way, there must be a validation process, and it must end with the customer agreeing to and seeing the value of your solution and the proof points you've presented to prove it.

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