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For years a rep on one of my client's teams had the same conversation with the same plant, and it always ended the same way.
He sells vapor control. When a plant loads a tanker, vapor comes off the product, and whatever the units on the dock don't capture goes into the air. That's product they bought and can't sell.
This plant had three units. Their answer had always been redundancy. One goes down, we load on the other two. Nothing to buy.
Then the plant went quiet. Tanks out of service, no work, nothing to quote. An average rep would write an account like that off and go find somewhere warmer.
He drove out anyway, and this time he asked something else.
"When you load on two units instead of three, how much product are you losing?"
He already knew the answer. He had run that math a hundred times. He sat there and didn't say it.
The maintenance manager across the table had never once thought about it that way. He said they could still load.
That was the meeting. No quote, no pitch, just a question somebody now had to go find the answer to.
It took a few lunches. The maintenance manager couldn't answer it, so he took it to his boss, who took it to hers.
Eventually the guy at the top of that building called the rep.
He Knew The Answer The Whole Time
Afterward I asked him what the hard part was.
It wasn't the question. It was sitting there with the answer in his mouth and leaving it there.
"It was hard not to just be like, 'Here's your issue, here's what we can do for you.'"
He had the math. Any competent rep in that building had the math. That's what the ROI calculator on your website is for, and it's why nobody believes it. A number your marketing team built to prove your product pays for itself is a marketing asset. A number your buyer worked out because somebody asked is a problem he now has to solve.
Your rep can do the arithmetic for them. The buyer will nod.
Nodding is not the same as buying.
The Number Also Tells You When To Walk
A second rep on that team had a customer who'd gone from hauling a product in two trucks down to one. Saved them real money. It also meant they were now loading a hot product into a tanker that used to carry crude, and the vapor coming off that has to be controlled. That's the opening.
A few weeks before, at lunch, a different guy at that company had told him what the haul actually ran. Miles, trips, cost per mile.
So he walked into the meeting and played dumb.
- What's the run look like?
- What's the distance?
- What's it costing you?
He worked the math out loud until the director stopped him. They get a heavily discounted rate, the director said. Your numbers are high.
Fine. What's the real one?
$67,000 a month.
His own contract rate was around $108,000. So he said it out loud. "At that price you'll try this for a quarter and switch right back, because you don't save anything. It doesn't make sense."
Then he asked the director what it would be worth to get down to $50,000 or $55,000. That's $140,000 a year. Somebody's salary.
He killed the deal he walked in to sell and left with a bigger one.
Ask Who Did The Math
In another session a rep walked in with a loss his prospect had taken. A wrapped vehicle at $7,000. A modified truck bed. Tools that weren't covered. Call it $25,000 to $30,000 in the moment, and then the jobs they couldn't take because they were a truck short. He put the real figure closer to $200,000.
I asked him three things.
- Is that a lot of money to them?
- How do they feel about it?
- Do they want your help?
Ask them in that order.
Go pull the last deal your team lost on price. Ask the rep what the buyer said the problem was costing him.
If your rep gives you a number, ask him where he got it.
If he worked it out himself, that buyer never said a figure out loud. Not to your rep, not to his own boss, not to himself in the truck on the way home.
What I Wrote About On LinkedIn Recently
Your Top Rep Might Be Lucky Ask a top performer why they won the last one and you get "I built rapport," or "the timing was right." None of that is specific enough to teach anybody. The reps who actually improve can walk you through what they did. The question they asked. The 4 seconds they sat there before the buyer filled the silence. If your best rep can't tell you what he does, nobody else on that team can learn it, and the day he leaves it goes with him. Debrief your next three wins and make the rep tell you what they did, not why they think it worked.
Our Current Setup Is Fine I sat with a team listening to recorded calls, and on one of them the prospect said their current setup was fine. The rep moved to the next question in the deck. The prospect had just opened a door into the deal and the rep walked past it. Buyers hand you a compelling reason constantly, just not in the words your training told your team to listen for. Pull one recording this week and mark every place a rep took an adjective as an answer and moved on.
