Stop Being Impartial

Listen, I know you want to be impartial. I know you want to be consultative. I know that you want to come across as the trusted advisor helping your dream client come to the right decision about their future—even if it means they choose a competitor’s solution.

Enough already. There’s a time to be impartial, and there’s a time to be damned partial and super-biased towards your solution.

Here’s how it works:

Early in the sales process, especially when you’re prospecting, you can create value by being impartial. Being impartial helps you gain trust. It helps show you are not completely self-oriented. You can help your dream client discover the source of their dissatisfaction, understand their needs, and evaluate some of their options. You’re still qualifying and exploring. If you discover that you don’t have the ability to create value for you’re your prospective client because they need something you can’t provide, by all means move on. Be impartial and recommend someone that can help.

But if you do have the ability create value, then you need to shift gears.

As the sales cycle and buying cycle move into later stages, you should be growing increasingly partial to your solution. The value you create needs to be more clearly defined, and you need to increasingly differentiate your offering from your competitor’s. As you get closer to building the exact solution, your bias for that solution—and for you winning—should be increasing.

Once you get past qualification and exploration you don’t gain anything by being impartial. Why else would you be dragging your dream client through your sales process and their buying process if you can’t create value for them? Your dream client needs to know you want their business. You need to stop being impartial and compete.

Consultative doesn’t mean that you are impartial through the whole process. You are consultative early in the sales process, and you’re damned biased and completely partial as the opportunity progresses.