Matthew Dixon - The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

For as long as sales training has been delivered and sales books have been written, theres been one singular objective weve all been focused on: How do we overcome the customers status quo?

Focusing on the customers status quo makes perfect sense. After all, its a formidable enemyone that salespeople lose to all the time. Human beings have a deep-seated bias for things to remain as they are. And customers, we all know, will regularly pass on pursuing opportunities that have been clearly demonstrated to make them better off.

It should come as no surprise, then, that companies have spent untold amounts of time and money on sales training, coaching, and enablement in order to help salespeople overcome the customers status quo. Sales organizations equip their reps with better scripting, tighter value proposition messaging, customer case studies, reviews, testimonials, proof points, ROI calculators, and objection-handling techniquesall designed to help the customer get over the hump, to get them to say yes to their offers and no to doing more of the same.

Of course, there is no shortage of opinions as to how to do this. Some say its about building trust while others argue its about diagnosing needs. In fact, we wrote about this very problem in The Challenger Sale more than a decade ago. In that research, we discovered that the best sellersChallengersbring disruptive, provocative insights that reframe the customers thinking as to how to make money, save money, or mitigate risk. What these gifted reps had figured out was that the way to get the customer to move forward is to show them that the pain of same is worse than the pain of change.

But that is not what this book is about.

This book is about a newer, more nefarious, and seemingly intractable problem facing salespeople today: What happens when the customer agrees that the status quo is unacceptable, that yours is the only solution that can help them attain their objectives, that the whole buying committee is on board... and you still lose?

This sort of thing happens more often than you might think.

In our research, we found that anywhere between 40 percent and 60 percent of deals today end up stalled in no decision limbo. To be clear, these are customers who go through the entire sales processconsuming valuable seller time and organizational resources, perhaps even engaging in extended pilots or proof-of-concept trialsonly to end up not crossing the finish line.