Getting Ghosted? Leverage JOLT to Change the Outcome

Getting Ghosted? Leverage JOLT to Change the Outcome

Wall Street Journal bestselling author, frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, and Founding Partner at DCMi, Matt Dixon, joins Craig Patterson, Aryaka’s SVP Global Channels, to discuss his latest book, The JOLT Effect. A renowned sales expert, Matt shares his sales journey, including his inspiration for writing The Challenger Sale, and dives into the current state of sales, customer hesitancy, and how sales teams can leverage new research to overcome these challenges. Together, he and Craig discuss the reasons why customers choose not to move forward and explore the approaches that high-performing salespeople use to overcome customer indecision.

Matt goes on to introduce JOLT, an acronym for four behaviors that high-performing salespeople have discovered to overcome customer indecision: Judging the level of indecision, Offering a recommendation, Limiting exploration, and Taking risk off the table. Through this, salespeople can help customers make the right decision and feel confident that they are working with a trusted advisor who has their back. Dixon emphasizes the importance of understanding the root of a customer’s hesitation and guiding them to a decision, rather than overwhelming them with too many options or resorting to the ‘FOMO hammer’. He also stresses the significance of building trust by providing transparent recommendations, even if it means suggesting a lower-priced or smaller-scale product. As you will hear today, Matt’s research has shown that understanding customer indecision and building trust are essential for sales teams to succeed in the current landscape. By using The JOLT Effect and taking a customer-centric approach, salespeople can instill confidence in their customers to make the right decision and ultimately improve their close ratios.

Episode Highlights:

• Transformational moments occurring in the sales industry
• Understanding customer hesitancy and using the new research to help customers move forward
• Matt Dixon’s latest book, The JOLT Effect
• The story behind his first book, The Challenger Sale
• The JOLT acronym
• Exploring the different approaches that salespeople take when trying to re-convince customers of the benefits of the product, and why these approaches may not be effective
• Errors of commission and errors of omission
• FOMO and FOMU
• Helping customers make confident decisions
• Digging deeper to understand what is really going on
• Fear of failure
• The impact of scare tactics and endless options
• Building trust with the customer

Quotes:

“Customers are pushing off big decisions, kicking the can down the road. They’re super hesitant.”

“We needed to take a fresh look at what great salespeople do differently.”

“Anywhere between 40% and 60% of a salesperson’s qualified pipeline will ultimately be lost to customers who do nothing.”

“So, what we found was that the status quo actually isn’t the enemy of sales that we thought it was.”

“We call it the JOLT Effect, because it’s really about surprising the customer, giving them a reason to change, giving them that kick in the pants.”

“Your customers care a heck of a lot less than about the 10% discount you’re offering them right now. They care a lot more about losing their job. That is what they’re really worried about.”

“You’ve got to instill the confidence that the customer is making a great decision, they’ve done plenty of research, they’re working with a trusted advisor, and you’ve got their back. They’re going to look like a hero, not like a fool.”

“They’re not afraid of missing out. They’re afraid of messing up.”

“In a world of endless options; customers suffer from choice overload. They don’t want to choose the wrong option. So guide them to a decision.”

“We need to…break down that agency dilemma and build a bank of goodwill that we can later cash in. And the way we do that is we tell the customer specifically what they shouldn’t buy, even of the things that we sell.”

“Your job is to be a trusted advisor, and the way that you earn that trust is by being transparent and honest and telling the customer exactly what they need to know.”

“The more you can give your customer a sense of control, a sense of agency, a sense of ownership of the process, the more likely they are to make a commitment to you.”

Links:

Host: Craig Patterson, Aryaka

• Aryaka
• Aryaka Dreamers and Doers Podcast

Guest: Matt Dixon

• DCM Insights – The Customer Understanding Lab
• Challenger Live Training: Overcome Customer Indecision – The JOLT Effect Playbook
• Course: Overcoming Customer Indecision with The JOLT Effect by Winning By Design