Change Your Vocabulary, Make More Sales? I Believe So

I read an article about politics recently that got me thinking about the vocabulary we use in complex B2B sales. The article was talking about how every political ideology has catchwords that contain the ideas of that ideology. As soon as you hear those words, you know you’re dealing with that ideology.

For instance, Marxism uses words like “surplus value,” “class struggle,” and “means of production.” If you’re familiar with Marxism, you instantly know the speaker is speaking of Marxist principles.

In Sweden, our political parties talk about things like “Swedishness,” “the work-first principle,” and “climate transition.” When we hear those words, we have a pretty good idea that we’re talking about politics and which side of things the speaker is on.

Each of these phrases tells you something about the mindset of the person speaking.

In sales, we also have catchphrases that we use to talk about various aspects of our work as sales professionals. And some of those phrases, I argue, represent mindsets detrimental to our profession. If we change them, we’ll change the profession–and improve our outcomes.

Winning vs. Losing Deals

Winning versus losing deals is almost universal terminology in the sales world. It’s instantaneously recognizable.

So why would I argue that it’s time to retire these phrases? Because they set up buyers and sellers as adversaries and make us enemies instead of partners.

In a healthy complex B2B sale, salespeople should be working with the customer to unearth and understand their problems, figure out who is impacted by the problem, develop solutions that solve for all impacted parties, coordinate communications, and bring everyone on board for the solution. If the salesperson has qualified effectively, this solution includes the seller’s product or service and, therefore results in a sale.

At Membrain, we chose different words to honor the reality of how we approach sales. Instead of “winning” and “losing” deals, we manage “sales projects,” and we either onboard (or upgrade) a customer or archive a project. A completed project is a “win” for everyone because the customer is solving a pressing problem by onboarding with us, and we are gaining a new customer. But an archived project is also a “win” for everyone because we and the customer have determined that it’s either not a great fit right now or it’s not the right time. Either way, we can revisit the question later because the project is archived, not lost.

By choosing this different set of words, we automatically shift the mindset of the sales teams from a competitive us versus them mentality to a collaborative problem-solving mentality. 

Hunting Vs. Farming

Who isn’t tired of this phrase? Once upon a time, it made sense to categorize salespeople according to whether they were going out looking for new customers or working with existing customers to keep them onboard and sell them more things.

But, frankly, these phrases suck. Not only are they outdated, they’re counterproductive.

Describing a salesperson as a “hunter” portrays that salesperson as a predator. Unfortunately, that is the stereotype of sales that many people still hold, and it’s harmful. Nobody wants to take a call from a predator.

Farming is equally problematic as a metaphor because it implies that the customer is a field to be plowed and managed instead of a partner organization to be collaborated with.

Instead, at Membrain, we talk about prospecting, active pipeline, and account growth. Prospecting is the process of looking for new possibilities to help people. The active pipeline includes the projects that we've unearthed and are working on together. And account growth is the process of working with a company to help them discover new ways to grow both their company and their relationship with ours.

Now, instead of a mindset that our company is going to do something TO your company, we share a mindset of our companies working together to solve problems and achieve outcomes.

Buying Journey

Another phrase that rubs me the wrong way. The last thing companies want to do is buy stuff. They want to solve problems and achieve goals. If they can solve their own problems and achieve their goals without making purchases, they will do that. They only buy if they have to in order to achieve their goals. 

If we focus on finding companies on “buying journeys,” we will severely limit our possibilities. The job of the salesperson is to find customers with problems and aspirations that we can help them solve and achieve. If your company is in a position to help them, preferably better than anyone else, then you’re in a position to sell to them. If you don’t have a solution that will help them, you leave them with a good experience and move on to help those you can help.

If we focus on finding companies on “buying journeys,” we will severely limit our possibilities.

At Membrain, instead of a buying journey, we talk about helping customers identify their problems and aspirations, assess options and opportunities, if possible, become a part of the solution, and assist stakeholders in their decision-making process.

These changes in words shift our sales team’s mindset and help us make more sales that are a good fit for our offerings, and they preserve the goodwill and positive regard of our customers and partners.
What mindset shifts would you like to see in the sales industry? What new words should we be using to effect those mindset shifts?