Three Takeaways from "Gap Selling"
Learn How To Sell Better Following The Ideas from Gap Selling
Gap Selling isn’t brain science. Author Keenan from A Sales Growth Company does a good job of peppering intuitive concepts with snappy anecdotes, but the value of a book like this comes down to personal practice.
Do you need to read the 262 pages to get the big picture? No. But if you want to sell better, you have to see gaps more clearly, love gaps more dearly, and follow gaps more nearly, day by day.
Let’s review three big concepts that any seller should add to their toolbox.
A Painful Today, A Transformed Tomorrow, and The Gap
Sales 101: ask lots of great questions. The core Gap Selling framework hinges on questioning your way along three main avenues:
Make a buyer’s current state as tangible as possible, pain and all, to both of you. Some components of that current state include Facts, Problems, Impact of the Problems, Root Causes, and Emotional State.
Identify what the buyer’s desired future state looks like, specifically regarding the impact that a solution to a today problem would look and feel like.
Stretch the gap between the two, either by identifying how far back a buyer’s current state really is or by helping the buyer paint a more glorious picture of their desired future state.
TL;DR: If you want to Gap Sell more effectively, bucket your lines of questioning into Current State, Desired Future State, and How Big Is The Gap Between The Two.
Emotion = Motion
Sure, all sales are emotional, but a sales framework like Gap Selling is centered on change. A buyer, whether they know it or not, wants to change from their crappy current situation to a more perfect tomorrow. If you need to sell, you want to help them make that change.
Change sucks and is often painful for anyone. That’s why buyers resist change: it’s uncertain, it can cause pain, it can damage morale, it can show vulnerability, etc. You might even fail.
A buyer’s emotions provides the motion needed to change. Without an underlying emotion driving through the change pain, buyers won’t change and won’t buy.
Half of Gap Selling is spent describing the tactics to provoke emotional change, but at a more general level, those tactics can be bundled into Outcome Motivation and Fear Motivation.
Outcome Motivation is the energy generated by a desired outcome. “Life will be better if I just do X Y Z and buy this product.” Outcome Motivation provides a rope that will pull a buyer through the buying process.
Fear Motivation is the energy generated by avoiding a current pain. “I don’t want to struggle with this thing anymore".” Fear Motivation provides a push for a buyer to move through the buying process.
Both types of motivation work, one is not necessarily better than the other, but a seller has to know how to deploy both forms fluently to consistently sell.
TL;DR: No feels, no deals.
Help Buyers Buy
Most people nowadays don’t like being sold at; they want help buying. Gap Selling, however, rejects the idea that customers know what they truly need. Often a customer’s stated need is the start of the discovery process to the true pain underneath.
Remember, emotions drive the buying process. A Gap Selling seller isn’t trying to close the deal, or sell the widget, or nudge the customer. Instead, a Gap Selling seller-
-helps a buyer articulate the pain that’s prevented them from making the big change they’re afraid of making.
-prompts a buyer to tease out the possibilities that a solution could unlock.
-anticipates and mitigates the pain that buyers experience when they change from today to tomorrow (i.e. make the purchase).
There’s a lot of ways that Helping Buyers Buy shakes out through the sales process, but centering the process on the buyer will make for happier and easier sales.
TL;DR: It’s not about you, it’s about the buyer.
The Gap Selling approach simplifies a lot of complicated sales methodologies while staying aware of today’s interconnected landscape. However, sales is only one third of the broader approach organizations need to take to increase their overall revenue. Closing more deals definitely helps, but having people show up to hear your pitch and stick around after buying once…well, that’s Revenue Operations.
Buy Gap Selling at your local bookseller or just give the money to Jeff Bezos.