One of my favorite stories on this topic came from Mark Cuban in an interview he did for Inc. Magazine on CNBC. The topic was the Dallas Mavericks, a sports team that he had just bought. The only award that the team had won to date was, “The worst professional sports franchise of the 90’s.”
Although this isn’t quite the same as selling in a recession, if you listen to the interview, there’s a lot of insight on what we need to do today. Watch it and then come back for the rest of the story.
https://www.inc.com/video/watch-mark-cubans-best-ever-sales-pitch.html
Hopefully, you saw what I saw. He had to find his “unique selling proposition” when no one wanted to buy tickets anymore. Note that I called it a unique selling proposition and not a unique value proposition. In my mind, the value of the Dallas Mavericks as a sports franchise didn’t change. Instead, Mark Cuban just found a unique selling proposition that brought people back to the stadium. That USP was “the experience” that a family shared when they went there. It wasn’t about whether the team had a winning record. He tweaked the messaging, along with a few other things like adding music and some other kid and family-oriented goodies, and the floodgates reopened.
That “reframing” of the selling proposition is very much akin to what we need to do in today’s market. What’s different now? Both the motivations AND the fears. We have to solve for both problems to be successful.
As you know if you’ve read some of my other posts, I like to explain concepts using examples. As a result, I thought I’d take on the toughest market right now as an illustration: Travel. There’s no doubt that the entire travel industry has taken a very big hit, from airlines to hotels to rental cars.
The reason is, of course, the forced lockdown. But beyond that, there’s the fear, uncertainty and doubt of airline travel, whether the pandemic will continue to disrupt vacation plans, will we still have a job, as well as all of the cancellation and change policies that we’ve faced as buyers in the past.
Did my need for a vacation or weekend getaway change. Heck no! After being locked in our home for weeks, I’d LOVE to go on a vacation to get away from it all. Surely, you feel the same.
What’s stopping us? That’s easy: fear, uncertainty and doubt about when travel will be both safe and available again – and of course, whether we’ll still have a job to pay the tab. As a result, we’re not lining up to buy tickets and to book hotel rooms and rental cars.
With that as a backdrop, one of my favorite travel sites that pushes travel deals to me all the time is www.TravelZoo.com. In skimming through the deals, they’re pretty awesome at this point. What the airlines and hotels are slowly doing to attract us and mitigate our fears are two-fold.
On the motivation side, I’ve seen airline flights and hotel packages that are pretty amazing at this point. At the time of the writing of this post, there was a 9-night package to Athens, the Greek Islands AND the flights, for $999. Or how about a roundtrip flight from NYC to Paris for $295? Or how about a 5-night cruise on Norwegian for $199?
But that’s only HALF OF THE EQUATION during a recession. Truly, I’m very motivated! But the other side of me is saying things like “What if travel won’t be allowed when I’m planning to go?” Or, “How safe is going to be?” Or worse yet, “What if I lose my job?” That’s the part that we as sellers have to discover when we talk to our buyers.
Those are all real concerns. What is the travel industry doing to mitigate some of our fears? Well, they can’t talk to each and every one of us, so you’ll see in their banners: “No Change Fee” and “Fully Refundable.”
That might not be enough to get all of us to buy, but in a recent McKinsey & Company report, they showed how airlines and hotels are joining forces to “produce a touchless journey” from airline check-in through your hotel stay.
You get the idea. In a recession or other bad times, you have to address both the motivations and fears that your customers are harboring. That means a much deeper ‘consultative’ sell, maybe even a shift in your unique value proposition, but at the very least, a shift in your unique selling proposition. In either case, you need to ‘adjust’ the value that you are bringing to your clients, or you’re not going to get any sales.
For some, these will be untested waters. But I assure you, these are skills that you can learn, and skills that will help you differentiate yourself from your competition.
To get you started, we have an upcoming webinar called, “How to Sell When No One Is Buying.” It’s on May 29th, at 11:00 AM ET | 8:00 AM PT. Without a doubt, I think you’ll really enjoy this one. It’ll have many different perspectives on the “secret sauce” of selling during a recession, but one perspective that I think you’ll especially enjoy is one of the panelists we included from BCI. Her name is Kristin Anderson, our top quota producer YTD in 2020. And why did we include her? She just sold a pretty large deal to a company that’s filed for bankruptcy. We won’t name the company, but her approach and thinking should give you a very different perspective on whether sales can be made when seemingly, no one is buying.
