Your Buyer Doesn't Need More Information

For a long time, one of the salesperson’s most important jobs was providing information.

We knew the product, understood the market and knew the competitors. If a buyer wanted to understand the differences between three solutions, they usually had to talk to three salespeople.

That gave us an information advantage, and it’s an advantage that’s quickly disappearing.

Today’s buyer can visit your website, read reviews, watch demos, compare competitors, talk to peers and read analyst reports without ever speaking with you.

Now add AI.

A buyer can ask AI to compare vendors, summarize reviews, identify potential weaknesses and even help construct a business case. Research that once took days or weeks can increasingly happen in minutes.

So when the buyer finally agrees to talk with us, what do we do?

Quite often, we give them more information.

Logos arrives pre-built

Aristotle described persuasion through three appeals: Ethos, Logos and Pathos.

Logos is the rational case. Does this make sense? Will it work? What does it cost? What’s the likely return? How does it compare with the alternatives?

Traditional selling devoted a lot of energy to building that case for the buyer. Today, much of it may already have been built before we arrive.

The modern buyer is increasingly their own first analyst. They’ve researched the category, compared alternatives and formed an opinion about what might work.

That doesn’t mean they’ve got everything right. There may be gaps in their analysis, assumptions worth challenging and things they simply couldn’t discover through research. That’s where a good salesperson can still add tremendous value.

The difference is that we’re not necessarily building the rational case from scratch anymore. We’re helping the buyer test the case they’ve already started to build.

In Act Like You Can Sell, I describe this as Logos arriving pre-built.

It’s a relatively small change in how we think about selling, but it can create a big change in the conversation.

Instead of asking ourselves, “What else can I tell this buyer?” perhaps we should be asking, “What does this buyer already believe, and where can I help them test it?”

That’s a much more interesting conversation. It also requires us to listen before we start filling in what we assume are gaps.

So where does that leave the salesperson?

Certainly not irrelevant. It means our value is moving.

If the buyer can get product information, comparisons and increasingly sophisticated analysis without us, simply knowing more isn’t the differentiator it once was.

Our value comes from what we can do with that information together.

We can challenge an assumption, add context that research missed, understand the politics behind a decision, recognize something the buyer hasn’t considered, or ask the question that changes how they look at the problem.

Most importantly, we can have a conversation rather than simply deliver information.

AI can help both sides prepare for that conversation, but it can’t have it for us.

Try this in your next sales conversation

Before your next discovery call, resist the temptation to begin by deciding what the buyer needs to know.

Instead, find out what they already know.

You may learn more from that answer than you would from another ten minutes explaining your solution. You might also discover that the buyer doesn’t need more information at all.

They need something else from you.

In Part Two, we’ll look at Ethos and why, when the rational differences between competing solutions start to narrow, trust in the person sitting across the table can become one of the most important differences left.