Why a Shared Mental Model is the Missing Piece in Complex Sales
In the world of complex sales, we spend a lot of time talking about prospecting, pipeline, win/loss analysis, and how to reach the right stakeholders. We invest in more training and coaching, better strategy, and processes. We hire more effectively, purchase enablement technology, and still… sales effectiveness rarely improves by more than a margin.
The missing piece? A shared mental model.
What is a Shared Mental Model?
A shared mental model* occurs when relevant stakeholders organize information in the same way, including current state, desired outcomes, and the necessary change and risk to bridge the gap.
One way to understand a shared mental model is to imagine that you’re planning to build a dream home for your family. Every stakeholder, from your family members to the architect, general contractor, construction managers, and team leads, needs to understand the objective clearly, as well as any part of the process that they will be directly engaged in. These are shared mental models.
What Happens If You DON’T Develop a Shared Mental Model?
The construction process is also a useful analogy to understand why you need a shared mental model. When building a house, there is often one person who initiates the project. If the family consists of a mom, a dad, and two children, imagine that it’s the dad who initially thinks: Wouldn’t it be nice to build our dream home?
Imagine that the dad immediately contacts a construction firm and tells them he wants to build a house, without first speaking with his family. Imagine also that the construction company eagerly takes his call, listens to what he wants, and develops a building plan based on that one conversation.
The dad approves the building plan and excitedly tells his family about it. You know what happens next. One hopes that he has not put down a deposit.
The mom objects to the expense of a home gym when none of them enjoys exercise. The children want to know why they have to share a bedroom. They all want to know where the dog is going to play since there’s no backyard.
No shared mental model means no dream house gets built, the construction company doesn’t get the job, and the family loses any deposit that was made. The dad might end up sleeping on the couch.
A shared mental model* occurs when relevant stakeholders organize information in the same way.
In a more likely scenario, the dad and the mom do talk extensively about what they want in a home, and already have a reasonable shared mental model before they speak with the construction company. But there are still a great number of hurdles to cross to ensure that everyone, not just the family, but also the architect, the construction managers, and team leads, share the same mental model.
Unless every major stakeholder agrees on what the outcome looks like and how the process will unfold (the shared mental model), the project is unlikely to succeed.
Why Your Salespeople Need to Facilitate A Shared Mental Model, No Matter Your Industry
When a family first contacts a construction company, there is almost always a great deal the family does not understand about building a house. Most families will build only one house in their lifetimes. They don’t know what they don’t know. The architect and the construction company, however, build many homes every year. They know a great deal.
This is true in your industry, as well. Your salespeople, if they are well-trained and experienced, know a great deal more about your product, about what’s possible, and how it needs to be implemented, than almost any customer will. Generally, the potential customer will have made this kind of purchase once or maybe twice in the lifetime of the company, if that.
Your team must ask good questions, identify and engage relevant stakeholders, help the prospect understand what they don’t already know, and provide consulting, options, and solutions to achieve the family’s vision. This process results in a more detailed shared mental model between you and the stakeholders on their team.
But it doesn’t stop there. Next, in the house-building scenario, the construction company must coordinate with the architect, subcontractors, materials suppliers, and others to build an even more detailed mental model and ensure that it still meets the family’s needs. The family will usually be involved in at least some of these discussions and decisions.
Likewise, a successful sale includes developing a clear mental model between all of the relevant stakeholders who will execute the project, in addition to the stakeholders on the buyer’s team.
Throughout the process, it is critical that each of the other stakeholders bring their own expertise to the table to ask the right questions and continue to build a more and more detailed picture of not only the outcome, but also the steps necessary to achieve the outcome, and the projected costs to the family. This process can be time-consuming, but it is necessary in order for the family to have a successful outcome and for the family to feel confident in making the purchase to begin with. Until every single relevant stakeholder is clear and has a detailed shared mental model, the project cannot successfully proceed. This is just as true in other complex sales environments. Each stage of the sales process requires a more detailed shared mental model and, often, more stakeholders. Too often, we talk to one or two people inside a prospect company and try to sell them what we think they want. This is like talking only to the dad and expecting the whole family to want to hire your company.How to Facilitate a Shared Mental Model
Now, imagine the same scenario above, where the dad calls the construction company, and the construction company's salesperson knows that they won’t win the project unless they facilitate a shared mental model.
The salesperson asks a few questions and discovers (no surprise) that the mom will be a major decision maker too, and that the children will have important opinions that will weigh heavily in the decision. So the salesperson asks the dad to bring the family in so they can figure out what they really need and want.
They also bring in the architect to help ask questions to identify what the family doesn’t know that they don’t know, and to educate them and facilitate an inner image of what their dream home will be like. As the process proceeds, they include construction managers, subcontractors, and others, in the conversation to ensure the family understands the process and costs, and to jointly develop a plan that makes their dream home achievable within their budget.
The company that does this wins the deal.
No matter what you are selling, if you are operating in a complex sales environment, your sales team must operate on a similar principle:
- Ask the right questions to identify relevant stakeholders
- Facilitate conversations that move toward shared mental models
- Help all stakeholders share their perspectives and distinctions on relevant topics at hand
- Zoom in and out of the stakeholders’ views to uncover hidden relationships and perceived risks
- Help to clearly define the gap between their current and future state, and how to minimize risk
- Ask questions to highlight what they need to know to make the right decisions
- Involve members of your team who would implement the solution to lower perceived risk for the decision-making team
This is more time-consuming than just showing up for a sales presentation and info-dumping about your company, but it’s also far more likely to move the deal forward. Sales teams who know how to skillfully facilitate a shared mental model among all relevant stakeholders are sales teams who win.
And that’s why a shared mental model matters.
* Please check out the research paper created together with Cabrera Labs on this topic.
By George Brontén
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
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