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Gap Selling

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book describes the concept of gap selling, which is identifying the customer's ideal end state and the gap between the current state and the end state to drive sales. It is about understanding the needs and wants of the customer and being so focused on understanding the customer's problems that you can actually sell the solution credibly.

🎨 Impressions

I think a very important point in the book is that you are selling solutions rather than a product. The customer wants to not have this issue.

Also, no one gives a shit about you. (In a sales context only hopefully.) What we sell is important, but also, we also need to understand that usually, what we sell will help; that is not in question. The question is, it the thing you sell worth the effort?

The thing that sells is the sales experience; it is the combination of the relationship, the problem and the solution to the problem (What you are selling)

✍️ My Top Quotes

  • We create the reasons the customer goes dark. We create the focus on price. We allow the customer to hold us hostage over an irrelevant feature.

  • You aren’t losing sales because you can’t sell. You’re losing them because you don’t understand how to diagnose your customer problem(s) and how the problem(s) drive the sale. Your product doesn’t drive the sale.

  • That’s what gap selling is all about. It’s not about pitching products and services; it’s about solving problems and making people’s lives easier.

  • *The nine truths of selling play out in every sales transaction you’ll ever engage in. They are:

    • No problem, no sale
    • In every sale there’s a gap
    • All sales are about change
    • Customers don’t like change
    • Sales are emotional
    • Customers do like change when they feel it’s worth the cost Asking “Why?” gets customers to “Yes”
    • Sales happen when the future state is a better state
    • No one gives a shit about you*

  • Every sale starts with a problem. If a problem doesn’t exist, there is no sale—period.

  • Every sales transaction is about identifying a gap—the distance between where customers are now (their current state) and where they want to be (their future state).

  • Assumptions, exposing (and sometimes confirming) the true size of their problem, then correctly assessing the impact it will have on their lives. The more impact, the larger the gap. And the larger the gap, the more valuable the solution, i.e., your product or service.

  • It supports the idea that humans suffer from longevity bias, the phenomenon in which we ascribe more positive feelings toward things that have been around for a while than toward things that are new.

  • Rosabeth Moss Kanter, bestselling author and professor at Harvard Business School, says there are ten threats that cause people to resist change. Inadvertently triggering any one of them during the sales process could easily cause your buyers to pause and reconsider whether they really want to buy. Below are Kanter’s ten threats:

    • 1. Loss of control
    • 2. Excess uncertainty
    • 3. Surprises
    • 4. Too much change at once
    • 5. Loss of face
    • 6. Insecurity
    • *7. Extra work
    • 8. The ripple effect
    • 9. Past resentments
    • 10. Real danger

  • Every time you ask “Why?” you chip away at the surface layers of your customer’s psyche to get to their intrinsic motivations, the whole reason why they ever gave you a chance to talk to them in the first place.

  • Everything we do, whether we’re six months old or sixty years old, is influenced by an invisible backdrop of events, feelings, and biases that affect the way we perceive the world and react to each other. They all play into the creation of our current state. Your customers have a current state, too, that includes everything we’ve talked about so far—their feelings about change, their intrinsic motivations, the realities of their business, and the facts of their work lives.

  • The more you learn about your buyer’s current state, the greater you understand the changes necessary, and the more information you will have to close the deal.

  • Gap selling requires you to know and understand more about your customer’s world than what you’re probably accustomed to. There is far more to it than what they reveal on their websites. Your goal must be to understand everything you can about what’s happening in their organization as it relates to what you sell.

  • People don’t buy products—they buy solutions to their problems. If they can’t recognize at least one clearly defined, measurable problem, your buyer will not buy.

  • While you’re at it, you also want to understand how your customers will feel once their problems have been addressed. Why? Because getting people to imagine their emotions in the future, as well as bringing their dreams and desired outcomes into focus, will anchor them in that future.

  • Establishing your customers’ current state (pain) while anchoring them in the future state (pleasure) primes them to be open to, and even enthusiastic about, allowing you to help them plan for the journey that will take them across the chasm.

  • Early in my career, I had a sales manager who told me there were two types of salespeople: the ones who were great at socializing and building relationships, and the ones who developed credibility. They were both great at their jobs, but the former would always have

  • Early in my career, I had a sales manager who told me there were two types of salespeople: the ones who were great at socializing and building relationships, and the ones who developed credibility. They were both great at their jobs, but the former would always have a smaller piece of the business than the latter.

  • People want to go to hockey games with their friends; they want to buy from people who know their shit.

  • Knowledgeable about their customers’ industry and organization, and as a result are so well respected, they can pretty much speak their minds at any time, and even push their customers to consider ideas that may make them uncomfortable.

  • Think it’s become pretty clear by now what the gap is. Quite simply, it is the space between the current state and the future state. The gap is where the value of the sale lives. The less drastic the distance between where you are and where you could go, the smaller the gap—the less value there is in changing, and therefore, the less urgent it is for the customer to buy what you’re selling.

  • Salespeople can manipulate the size of the gap by helping the buyer see things they didn’t see before. There is no way customers can understand the value of your life-saving pill if they don’t realize they are dying. That’s why you have to spend so much time exploring their current state and helping them envision their future state.

  • If you identify a small gap, you may realize that there really isn’t that much you can do to help, or that in the end your customer doesn’t actually need you. That’s OK. In fact, it’s super valuable. Knowing you’re dealing with a small gap keeps you from wasting your time chasing after

  • Your number one job when selling is to get the customer, buyer, or prospect to let you help them.

  • During the discovery calls that led to closed deals, salespeople spent more than half of their time listening while their customers talked. The opposite was true of discovery calls that led to missed deals. In those calls, buyers talked only 28% during the length of the call; the salespeople talked almost 80% of the time!

  • These formulations will help you avoid making your customers feel like you’re badgering them, and instead give them a sense of control. Deb Calvert’s book Discover Questions Get You Connected is a great resource.

  • Beyond probing questions, you want to ask process questions which try to get information on how your customers do what they do.

  • Answers that leave you guessing. “We’re not growing fast enough,” is simply not sufficient information for you to work with when you’re gap selling. It’s too open to interpretation. What is “fast enough?” Your idea of “fast enough” and your prospects’ may be totally different. Train yourself so that every time you hear a lazy, vague, open-ended answer like, “We need to hire more people,” or “I want to increase revenue,” you stop the conversation and ask the prospect to articulate exactly what they mean. You’ll probably need to help them along, maybe like this:

  • The thing is, most salespeople focus on solving the technical problems when it’s the business problems that create a customer’s unique buying motivations and lead to the biggest gaps.

  • At asking questions. Learn to create a rhythm and flow in your questioning that takes your buyer on a journey. Ask the right type of question at the right time in the right tone, and you will be amazed at what you can discover about your customer. Once you get good at it, your destiny will be filled with informational

  • If you want to get better at selling, you gotta get better at asking questions. Learn to create a rhythm and flow in your questioning that takes your buyer on a journey. Ask the right type of question at the right time in the right tone, and you will be amazed at what you can discover about your customer. Once you get good at it, your destiny will be filled with informational gold.

  • Use your CRM—it’s going to be your best friend. No matter how good you think your memory is, if you’re doing a proper gap-selling discovery, you’ll never be able to recall all the data you collect. Document it in your CRM.

  • It’s fascinating how we salespeople have been trained to hurry up and get to the close. Don’t be. Have patience. Go slower. Focus on gathering as much information as you can about the world your buyer is struggling with and why they want to change. Remember, change is what this whole game is about.

  • Good salespeople are patient—they don’t just have the patience for the work; they embrace it. They understand that the success or failure of the sale is deeply rooted in getting as much information as possible so they can clearly identify the gap. Great selling takes a maniacal commitment to doing the work and doing it well.

  • Given the in-depth nature of a gap-selling discovery, you may have already figured out that you should never, ever combine a discovery and a demo. For those of you who didn’t, I’ll say it again: You should never, ever combine a discovery and a demo.

  • Demo Challenge: Try to conduct your entire 45-60 minute presentation without saying the word “if.” If you succeed, you’ll have conducted a good demo.

  • The best messages are those that compel recipients to action. What’s the point of writing a message if no one is going to read it, or worse, if they read it and then don’t take the action you’d like?

  • My research has revealed that 72% of salespeople who used social media to sell outperformed their peers and exceeded quota 23% more often than those who didn’t. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should dump the other channels.

  • *A potential employee’s experience and accomplishments matter, of course, but only—only—in relation to how many of the nine gap-selling traits they embody:

    • curiosity
    • critical thinking
    • empathy
    • problem-solving
    • leadership
    • creativity
    • deliberate learning
    • coachability
    • business acumen

  • Ultimately, to become a superstar gap sales leader you have to make sure that your focus is turned in the right direction. That is, outward. Just as gap selling isn’t about the salesperson but about the customer, being a sales leader isn’t about getting what you need out of your sales team but about providing what your sales team needs to get out of you.

  • In a study released in their book The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson of CEB (now Gartner) revealed that 53% of customer loyalty was not a product of customer service, as might be expected, but of the sales experience.xv You hear that? More than half of a customer’s loyalty is due to the work your team is doing before the prospect even buys your service or product! They’re not hooked by the company or brand, nor the product and service delivery, nor the value-to-price ratio. They’re hooked by the sales experience. And there is nothing more effective for maximizing that sales experience than gap selling.