Stop Giving Information and Start Building Meaning

Imagine this. A salesperson is working a complex sale and currently in a room with all of the stakeholders at a potential customer company.

They know nothing about the stakeholders who are gathered and have never met them before. They are talking to them about all of the amazing things their offering can do. They have a powerpoint presentation with slides showing diagrams and charts, explaining every detail of the product. They talk for thirty minutes.

The audience is either entranced, or bored out of their minds.
Which is it?

Now imagine that the same salesperson has had individual conversations with each of the stakeholders prior to this meeting.  Imagine that they understand each person’s point of view, what matters to them, how they see the problems and opportunities relevant to the offering. Imagine that they have built a rapport with them, and a shared perceived reality. Imagine that they have aligned them all with a common vision of what’s possible and how it will benefit them. This time, they are in that room sharing how each stakeholder’s concerns will be addressed and their highest priorities and greatest opportunities will be opened  by your offering.

Now which is it? Bored or entranced?

Who are going to make a purchase?

Information is Just Information Until you Structure it to Mean Something

In a fascinating interview by Hans Busstra in January (embedded below,) physicist and CPU inventor Federico Faggin talked about the nature of consciousness and the universe. He said the difference between a machine and a conscious being is that a machine can receive and transmit information, but it doesn’t understand the information. Even current AI technology, smart as it is, doesn’t actually understand what it is doing, which is why we get hallucinations and artefacts in the outputs.

Faggin says, furthermore, there’s a step that conscious beings (such as humans) can (but don’t always) take that goes past understanding, which is to make meaning of the information.

In sales terms, the difference is this. When you stand in front of a group of stakeholders you’ve just met and talk about your product, you are offering them information. They may not understand it, and it probably won’t mean much to them.

When you understand how much they know and how they learn best, you can help them understand the information. But you still aren’t even halfway to the sale. Only when you connect the understanding with something that matters to them, have you created meaning. And without meaning, you won’t make a sale. Now throw in the complexities of a high stakes B2B sale, and you’ve got multiple stakeholders each with a different idea about what matters, and the problem gets bigger.

In the first example I gave at the start of this post, you have a salesperson throwing information at those stakeholders in a desperate hope something will stick. In the second example, you have a salesperson who understands what matters to each person in the room, and therefore is able to make the information mean something to them all.

Not Just Meaning, but Shared Meaning

In complex sales, stakeholders almost always have interests and priorities that are different and may even seem at odds with other stakeholders.

The job of the salesperson is to first understand each stakeholder’s priorities and motivations, and then guide a process that leads everyone to a shared sense of reality, a shared concept of the problems and opportunities, and a shared sense of meaning. When you can do this, you have entrained your stakeholders and your odds of closing the sale are high.

However, this is no small task, and in order to do it, salespeople need skills, structure, and tools.

How to Organize Information to Create Shared Meaning

In order to create a shared meaning, your salespeople need tools. Specifically, they need tools that help them organize information in a structured way in order to understand how the customer’s company and the individuals and processes within it, actually work.

Derek and Laura Cabrera’s DSRP theory provides those tools. By zooming in and out on organizational and individual goals, examining the intersection of systems within the organization and the hidden relationships between them, salespeople can simplify and clarify the task of bringing everyone together on a shared reality.

Membrain is uniquely built to help your team organize and then structure information they gather from prospective customers in a way that enables them to create this shared meaning.

What Happens When Shared Meaning Is Created?

When objects or individuals are moving in rhythm with each other, a fascinating thing happens. They become entrained, and their thoughts and feelings line up. This is what happens organically, for instance, in a conga line. By the time everyone is done marching and dancing in sync, they are all laughing and engaging with each other and much more likely to buy rounds of drinks for each other.

In a sales setting, a shared rhythm is rarely automatic. At the start of an engagement with a salesperson, everyone talks about their own perspective on the problems and opportunities. They have different ideas about what is possible, what the problems are, whether they are important, what opportunities are available, and very different ideas about how to accomplish their goals.

When a salesperson has helped to create shared meaning, those same people come into alignment and resonance with each other, and now, instead of herding cats, the salesperson is guiding an engaged conga line to a goal that they all share and that means something to them.
And that’s how you make a sale.