Don’t Get Stuck at Wimp Junction

I just finished reading Wimp Junction: The Place Your Sale Was Lost…and How to Win It Back, by Jennica Dixon and Terry Slattery of the Slattery Sales Group based in Edina, Minnesota. I feel like Slattery is the Midwestern version of Maestro, or maybe we’re the East Coast version of them. Based on what I read in Wimp Junction, we have a lot in common.

The book focuses on the science behind why methods work or don’t, and it offers clear strategies readers can put into action immediately. It’s worth reading cover-to-cover (and you know I don’t always say that), but for now, I’ll share some highlights to tide you over until you get it in your hands.

WHERE IS WIMP JUNCTION?

My role at Maestro is in messaging, so it’s no surprise that in order for me to love the book, it has to have clear and compelling messages. But the delineations made in Wimp Junction are crystal clear in a way I rarely see. As in, I finally understand where marketing ends and sales begins, because Wimp Junction provides an exact definition that makes sense in the real world. But before we explore that definition, let’s talk about another.

What is Wimp Junction? Where is Wimp Junction? And who is the wimp? (Bad news—it’s you.) Dixon and Slattery define junction as “the place where two routes diverge: your route to close your sale at high value, and your prospect’s route to commoditize you.” And wimping out? That’s “to unintentionally surrender value and margins in a complex sale by taking the prospect’s route instead of yours.”

You’re a sales professional. You have a product or service that you’re selling based on its value. You aren’t the cheapest option out there. You may even be the most expensive, but your differentiators make you worth it. The problem is that many buyers want to throw you onto a spreadsheet with your competitors. Once that happens, everyone starts to look the same, and the only noticeable difference is price. You’ve been commoditized. Welcome to Wimp Junction.

Once you make it to Wimp Junction, it’s hard not to start offering discounts. By this point you have likely spent a lot of time and energy on this prospect. But even a 10% discount has huge impacts on your margin. Plus, you know you’re worth your price tag. Your prospect doesn’t understand your true value. That’s what got you to Wimp Junction in the first place. So, how do you articulate your value to keep this from happening?

TCOOL FOR SCHOOL

If you were competing on price, as Dixon and Slattery point out, you wouldn’t need salespeople in the first place. And why do you have salespeople?

1. To learn how your prospect makes their decision to do or not do business with you.
2. To alter that decision-making process until it places more value on your differentiators
   than on someone else’s lower price.

That’s it. But don’t be fooled. These are no easy tasks, and only salespeople can do them. Here we get to the difference between sales and marketing. Wimp Junction describes marketing as a “one-to-many” endeavor. One message goes out to many people. Marketing can introduce a brand or a product. It can increase awareness, persuade, and answer questions. But marketing cannot take you the “last mile.” Only salespeople can do that.

Sales is a “one-to-one” endeavor. “One seller skillfully engages a human prospect through conversations that uncover the prospect’s true motivation to change and that translate the marketing message to the prospect’s world.” The key to selling when you’re not competing on price is to identify your differentiating value (DV). Your DV is the difference between your price and your cost. Price is the monetary amount that changes hands, but cost is the full cost of ownership. Dixon and Slattery have another word for it—TCOOL, the “Total Cost of Ownership Over the Life” of a product.

If you have real differentiating factors, your TCOOL will be lower than your competitors. Maybe your competitor is cheaper, but their solution requires a lot of maintenance that the prospect will have to pay for. Maybe the least expensive solution has a lot of outages which translates into down time and lost revenue for the prospect.

Defining your differentiating value is critical. Wimp Junction suggests asking yourself the following questions to figure out what it is:

1. What do you offer that is either truly unique or executed better than your competitors?
2. What are all the consequences—to the prospect—in the absence of each strength you listed?
   What happens to your prospect if they don’t have each strength?
3. What is the impact of each consequence? In other words, ‘So, what?’

YOU’RE SO EMOTIONAL

We love asking, “So, what?” at Maestro. Your platform provides a full view of a client’s account. So, what? You can see all of the correspondence the client has had across your organization. So, what? Because you can see all of their previous correspondence, you won’t ask them questions they’ve already answered, have them get angry, yell at you, and cancel their account. Ding, ding, ding! That’s what you need to drill down to.

Dixon and Slattery give us a more eloquent way to ask the same question: “What’s happening to whom in the absence of your differentiating value?” If you have real DV, there is someone in the prospect company who is feeling real pain without it. This person is your “emotional customer.” This is the person you need to be connecting with.

The person who is tempted to see you as a commodity and put you on a spreadsheet with all your competitors? That’s who Dixon and Slattery call a “logical customer.” Logical customers take you straight to Wimp Junction. Maybe they’re in IT, so they would be buying and implementing your solution. The problem is that they are not the one feeling the pain of not having your solution. And if they can’t feel the pain, they probably don’t plan on spending much (or any) money on a solution. Logical customers are the reason that 40% of offers from sellers result in no decision at all. Logical customers are perfectly fine with the status quo.

So, how do you find these emotional customers? And what can you say to them so that they don’t immediately send you to a logical customer? And how do you uncover all the pain points of these emotional customers? And where do 90% of preventable losses happen? And how is a request for proposals (RFP) like a luau? And who is the pig at said luau? (Bad news—it’s you again.)

All of those questions are answered in Wimp Junction. I have only scratched the surface of the useful nuggets you’ll find in this book. It’s a quick read and has so many tips, tricks, and specific good questions. It’s worth reading if you or anyone you care about has taken a detour to Wimp Junction.

Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co to learn more about our range of offerings—sales strategy, messaging, sales ops, coaching, and more.