How context changes everything: B2B and B2C

We explore why consumer buyers fear missing out while business buyers fear being wrong, and how that single difference changes pace, questions, and language. We show how adaptability beats scripts and share simple checks to rescue a stalling deal.

• limits of scripts and the need for tactics
• differences between B2C emotion and B2B risk
• career protection and consensus in business buying
• FOMO vs fear of being wrong as core drivers
• when to use energy, speed, and confidence
• when to use calm, clarity, and patience
• mapping stakeholders and decision paths
• calibrating language and using DISC
• diagnosing mindset mismatches when deals stall

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Welcome to the podcast!

Chapters

• 0:13 Setting The Stage: Beyond Scripts
• 0:36 Why Scripts Limit Real Selling
• 1:22 B2C Vs B2B: Mindsets And Stakes
• 3:23 What Drives Consumers: Emotion And Speed
• 4:53 What Drives Businesses: Risk And Careers
• 7:17 Fear Lines: FOMO Vs Being Wrong
• 8:45 Switching Mindset: Energy Or Calm
• 10:55 Common Mistakes When Switching Modes
• 14:06 Map Risk, Stakeholders, And Language
• 16:33 Calibrate With DISC And Clarity
• 18:25 Diagnose Stalls And Adapt Fast
• 19:42 Final Takeaway And Sign-Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Hello again and welcome to another podcast. Now, if you've been listening uh to the last couple, you'll know that I've been walk working through a bit of psychology. So the approach that top sales people take was the first one. Then we looked at what motivates buyers. And in this podcast, I'm going to put that all into context. So please stay with me. Please remember to like and subscribe. My name is Graham Elliott. And here we go. So the important thing that I hope you've taken from this is that scripts are very limited if you're using a sales script. So they may I would suggest they're useful when you're starting out, but I think the sooner you can get away from them the better, and start focusing much more on tactics, as in the kind of questions you're asking, how you're responding to clients, how you uh and how you listen and what you hear when they give you responses. What are you actually hearing? Because there's a massive amount of information in what you're hearing. So the key thing here is to really think about your approach with different clients. Now, having spoken about a buyer mentality, and this is primarily last time we looked primarily at the business-to-business uh person, because I think that one's that one can be less obvious because um personally we all have business to consumer experience just in our normal day-to-day, whenever we buy something. So it might be a car, a washing machine, I don't know, you know, whatever we're buying, we have that kind of experience. Uh, so I looked more at the business to business. However, what I want to talk about now is what's the difference between the two scenarios. And I did touch on this and I did talk about this in a podcast a few podcasts ago now, and looked at the the difference and the mindset. But in the context of what we've been talking about, I really want to revisit that. So you can have the same salesperson, but basically, what they're doing, what made them successful in business to consumer, for example, can completely derail them when it comes to business to business. And equally what you were doing in business to business, if you switch to business to consumer, and again, with some sales roles, you may well be bouncing from one to the other. Um, going back to business to business with a business to consumer mentality, that will also create problems for you. So the key thing you have to remember is that while both types of buyer are trying to solve a problem, there they're actually different problems. So remember, I talk about salespeople being problem solvers, so you've got to be clear on what the problem is. Um, to a large extent, if you use the kind of questioning I've been teaching you, and I teach in uh my online course that you can find on the website, that's called um consultative selling. That's on uh www.salescraft.training, that's the ad. Um there are there are different problems that you're trying to solve. So the bottom line here is that for business to consumer buyers, what they are driven by, first of all, is emotion. So most of it is emotional, they've probably made their mind up already, but they might not be sure. But this is a kind of feel-good buy, it's immediate gratification. The other things that on on the other side of that is that they're concerned about personal risk because often this will be their own money, so they don't want to buy something that then immediately goes wrong. And I've had this recently with a fairly major purchase I bought, and it has gone horribly wrong. But this is the worry, this is the concern. And if you think about it, if you're buying a car, for example, you don't want something that's going to break down, cost you a lot of money to repair all that sort of thing. The other thing about business to consumer buyers, so the consumers, is that they're likely to make decisions fairly quickly. As I've said, a lot of the time when they walk in, if if you are running in a store or a showroom or something like that, they've either made their mind up already or they're 50% there. That's why they're there. You might have your browser, so they might be earlier in the cycle, so they might be wanting to get that emotional connection, that emotional motivation to go a certain way. But when someone is coming in to have a more serious discussion with you, the chances are that they've already made their decision. Now, going to business to business buyers, they are definitely going to be risk-averse. So they're going to want to minimize the risk, minimize the exposure to the business. And this is, I think I'm right in saying it's it's more true in smaller businesses, because often what can be a fairly minor investment for a large business can be quite a major one for a small business. And you have to remember that, particularly with a small business, if the person making the buying decision gets the wrong thing, makes a mistake, or backfires, goes wrong, costs money, whatever it is, this could kill the business. Or it might result in people losing their job. It may be that they have to let people go because they just can't afford to pay them, even if it's over a short period. So they will be risk-averse, but for different reasons. Now, another thing that motivates buyers, which I spoke about last time, is just career protection. It's how definitely in the longer term they want on their CD or their resume to show really good judgment, to show that they've made good calls when it comes to buying decisions. Their buying decisions have been have had a very positive impact on the businesses that they're working in and have produced tangible results. They can demonstrate their critical thinking when it comes to making a decision. They don't want something that turns into a train wreck. So it's not just about the damage to the business in the short term, but it's the damage to their reputation in the longer term, and that in turn will um affect their career prospects. So it's really important to um remember this. Now, another thing with uh business to business is that they tend to be consensus-driven. So, in other words, there may well be other people involved in the buying decision, whereas business to consumer it might be one person often. Um, and then with business to business, typically you'll have um much slower purchasing cycles. So the um time from inquiry to purchase will tend to be longer than business, a business to consumer. Consumers tend to buy pretty much straight away, or after a little bit of maybe haggling or just feeling comfortable. The key, if I was to summarize all of this, so the key thing to summarising this is that business to consumer buyers fear missing out, whereas business-to-business buyers fear being wrong. So, this I would suggest would take takes you a fair distance when you look at what the fears are. And again, if you remember thinking back to um earlier podcasts, fear is what generates objections. And it is really important that we are consultive salespeople, we're consultive problem sellers, and we take their fears very seriously. We make sure that they're reassured, that we understand them, and that we address them. We don't ignore them. That's what bad salespeople do. They'll try and get around them, they'll they'll try and avoid talking about them, all of that kind of stuff. And that's a classic way of undermining trust, uh of just blowing the deal, basically. So just to repeat that, because I think it is important, business-to-consumer buyers fear missing out. So often they will make a decision because there's a limited number, or it's a sale and it's only on for a short time, or whatever else it might be. So business-to-consumer buyers fear missing out, business-to-business buyers fear being wrong, and that has usually much more longer-term impacts. So, how do we look at the mindset shift, I guess, that we have to consider when we're switching from one to the other? So, for business to consumer, as a seller, as a salesperson, remember that energy creates momentum. Remember, they will often go for a quick sale, they'll get that instant gratification, all of that stuff's going on. So, this wants to be high energy. You want to be enthusiastic about the product. I mean, not overdo it because that can really turn people off. Honestly, I find it annoying. But you want to be positive about it. Secondly, you want to be confident. So, confidence equates to certainty. So, again, remember that often the people who are coming to you to buy something are not experts in that field. Some of them will be. Uh, they may know more about it than you do, that's for sure. Uh, but others won't know. And in that situation, they are definitely looking for someone who is confident because that's one of the things they're looking for. It helps create certainty in them that they are making the right decision and um whatever they're buying will work well for them. And finally, for business to consumer, speed tends to be build excitement. It is an emotional buy. They want to, they they will likely feel excited about it. I mean, if you've bought a new car, just as an example, haven't you felt excited about it? If it's been a house, how about that? Um, possibly not so much with the washing machine, I don't know. But you never know. But hopefully you understand what I'm saying. So it is about energy, so it's about energy to keep the momentum going. You want that decision pretty quickly while the energy is high. That's a great point to make a close. So if you take my course, you'll know you'll learn where the other two points are that are really uh key in in having hot spots to close the deal, and you need to create certainty. Now, um, when it comes to business to business, we're sort of going in the other direction. So, in order to build credibility, we want to be calm. If you remember last time, one of the things I was talking about as a seller, you keep it slow, you keep it paced, you don't start talking a lot, you slow down, you contemplate, you're you're thoughtful, you're considering what that person has just said to you and how it impacts your offer, and how your offer will impact their business. So calm is important, clarity is much more important in some ways than certainty. You need to be really clear, and this is again sitting side by side, being on the same side of the table with them, being consultative, having the discussion, and that clarity will equate ultimately to certainty because they know that all of the potential issues have been addressed and they are feeling more positive about going forward, and patience builds trust. So, again, if you're thinking at it from a business point of view, and this also applies to consumer a little bit, but I think more so in the business side, if you are trying to close the deal quickly, if you're pushy, um, you don't even need to be pushy, there just needs to be a certain level of speed. And I think basically that level of speed, as you increase speed, it starts to create uncertainty in the buyer. That threshold is lower in business to business business sales than it is to business to consumer because consumer sales, you actually want a little bit of speed because you're building that energy again. Business to business, keep the energy lower, build trust through being patient and through having discussions that cover off everything. So the mistakes that made here if you are switching from one to the other, and even if you're not, just be aware of these differences. But if you are using a business-to-consumer urgency in business-to-business sales, that is likely to start creating resistance because the buyer will start to feel like they're being pressured, and given the stakes that they are playing with, they will not want to do that, they they will tend to hold back. On the other hand, if you apply a business-to-business strategy to business to consumer, if you over-analyse things in business to business, a consumer is likely to first of all see that loss of energy, they'll see that loss of excitement. It might make them start to think of other potential problems that they hadn't thought of before. Now, I'm not saying here that you want to be selling something that doesn't work, that would be unethical. So, this what I'm about is ethical selling. But you don't want overcomplicate things, and once you start to overcomplicate, people start to think of all sorts of scenarios, most of them might be complete nonsense, never happen, but then you're creating problems, or you're creating a rod for your own back to use an expression. So to summarize this, how do we move this into something that you can apply just day to day? And then this comes back to the kind of approach a professional top professional salesperson will use. So the first thing is to be aware of the audience, be aware of who you're talking to, and be clear on who own who owes the risk. So, in the case of the consumer, probably they do, it's probably a personal sale, so it's their own money, which is important to them. In the case of a business, it's probably not the buyer's money, but the consequences of a good sale will impact them, and the consequences of a bad sale, where things go wrong, will also have a big impact. So, who owns the risk? Who are the share, the stakeholders in this decision? The next thing is being clear on the decision path. Who are the decision makers? Who has to say yes? How many people are involved to say yes? So it might be one in the case of consumer, probably not one in the case of business. Sometimes it is, but the chances are there will be other people who have to get involved in this decision-making loop. And with every person that you speak to, you need to be clear about what their concerns are, what their fears are on this particular deal. Because if, for example, you're selling something to an engineer or an engineering company, an engineer will have a different set of priorities and a different checklist to the CFO, the five, the or the financial officer, the financial director. So you need to understand the fears and concerns of both parties. So everybody in that buying cycle, you really need to address their concerns and fears. And then make sure that your language is calibrated appropriately. So this is having the balance between emotional language against um a more rational framing. Now, this actually goes much deeper, and I'm not going to go into this in this podcast or in fact in any other podcast because it's covered, um, it's it's quite it's quite a deep subject, and I cover it in uh the course, uh consultative selling. But you will have different conversations with different people because they expect you to not only speak to them in a certain way, but they will have different concerns. So I use a model called DISC, and it talks about four types of people, and this is another layer when you go past business to consumer versus business-to-business sales, you actually drop down another layer to looking at the actual person that you're the personality type you're dealing with. Now, the the reason I use disc is that there are only four, and disc is um a system you can use to make reasonably valid judgments on the fly. So you can apply this as you'll as you meet someone, as you're speaking to them, you'll have a rough idea very, very quickly of how you need to approach that particular person. I'm not going to say any more about that here. Um, but the key thing is to calibrate your language. And if you don't have any other guidance, just remember that if you're selling to a consumer, you can be a bit more emotional than if you are selling to a business um buyer, in which case it needs to be more rational. Okay, so why is it that salespeople tend to get a bit stuck when they don't adapt? And essentially, if you're looking at a business, someone who's used to selling business to consumers, so used to selling to people to personal buyers, they're going to find business to business is slow. And the danger is that they'll kind of up the pace, and they'll in fact they're most they're quite likely to carry on doing what they're used to doing when they're working with consumers and not recognize that the the pacing needs to be different, the the um decision-making process is probably different, and they do need to make that adaptation because if they don't, they're gonna come unstuck for business-to-business sellers moving into consumer selling, it might feel a bit shallow, it might feel that people are just making decisions really quickly, but of course, it's um it's emotional. So the key takeaway from this, I hope, or one of the things to take away from this is just to recognize that if you do have a deal that's stalling, just look at the mindset mismatch if there is a mindset mismatch. In other words, are you using a business-to-consumer selling technique in a business-to-business scenario, or are you doing the reverse? And just step back a little and look at the stages and who's involved, and just look at your own approach, and can you do something a bit more effective, either with that sale or next time? So, the key thing, the thing, the thought I will leave you with here, is that great salespeople, so the best paid salespeople aren't defined by tactics, they're defined by their adaptability. They're able to connect with and sell to anyone. If you're if you understand the environment you're in and you're using the right approach, that will feel perfectly natural. If you're using the wrong approach, it will feel like a struggle. So I hope you found that useful. Please remember to like and subscribe if you feel I've earned it, and I'll speak to you again on Monday. Bye for now.