Triangle Selling (book summary)

Triangle Selling: Sales Fundamentals to Fuel Growth by Hilmon Sorey and Corey Bray

Key Take-aways

Of the seven methodologies in the book, the two I found most useful were:

H.E.L.P.: To maintain momentum between meetings
- Highlight your conversation
- Educate your prospects
- Leverage your network (for their benefit)
- Predict the future (to prevent deal blockers)
G.R.O.W: To ensure pilots turn into deals
- Gather political resources
- Roll out pilot
- Organize a communication cadence
- Win a larger deal

Overall Review

I recommend this book for someone new to sales looking for a comprehensive set of methodologies. It is also fine for someone who has read the sales classics but still enjoys good reminders and a few new tips.

The good:

The book covers most methodologies that sales trainers focus on: qualification (at least on pain); running meetings, conducting demos, adding value between meetings, getting referrals, executing pilots, asking question, etc.
It is a fast, efficient read.
There is a nice amount of immediately actionable “how-to”
The authors do a great job of using & citing novel research sources (unlike many authors who just regurgitate the same stuff)

The bad:

As short as it is, I felt the book dragged at the beginning (over-use of metaphors) and at the end (excessively long example applying the book’s methodologies without really adding anything new).
While the authors do use and cite interesting sources, they do the same thing that so many other sales trainers do = repackage stuff that has been around for ages into new acronyms that are just different enough to call them proprietary. For instance, P.L.A.N. is Sandler’s tried-and-true up-front contract. “Disqualifying questions” is Sandler’s negative reverse selling concept. Political resources is Miller-Heiman’s buyer-types model.

Chapter 1 Introduction

The three sides of the triangle are:
- Reason: What will move the prospect to buy?
- Resources: What must be accessed, navigated, or changed in order to buy?
- Resistance: What obstacles will be encountered in the buying process?
The book will also cover a number of methodologies:
- Qualification on Pain: “Have you satisfied all of the S.C.A.L.E. drivers?”
- Running Meetings: “Did you execute your P.L.A.N.?”
- Conducting Demos: “Did you S.H.A.R.E during your meetings?”
- Adding value between meetings: “Is there a chance to H.E.L.P.?”
- Getting referrals: “Can you connect the D.O.T.S.?”
- Executing pilots: “How are we going to G.R.O.W. the pilot?”
Steps we advise organizations to follow while evaluating their existing method of selling include:
- Common Language: Does everyone on the sales team use the same vocabulary when talking about deals?
- Complexity: Are sales activities as simple as they can be?
- Relevance: Does how your company sells match your market and buyer personas?
- Adoption: Do salespeople apply a consistent method of selling and realize success?
- Accountability: Can management coach and effectively measure the success of sales execution?

Chapter 2 Why Focus on Sales Fundamentals

The objective isn’t to find the best salespeople, but rather to maximize the sales team’s performance through multiple factors, including the:
- Salesperson
- Sales Process (the steps navigated jointly by buyer and seller from initial conversation through close, referral, renewal, and upsell)
- Sales Fundamentals (the means by which a salesperson evaluates, influences, and responds to buyer actions throughout the sales process)
- Coaching Fundamentals
- Technology Stack

Chapter 3 Communicating with Prospects

S.C.A.L.E.
- Status: Understand what threatens or enhances your prospect’s perception in relation to their peers
- Certainty
- Autonomy
- Likeness
- Equity: Expectation of fair exchange that allows the prospect to view the sales person as a trusted advisor
Matching and mirroring behavior, which, while often effective, makes for high comedy. Similarly, learning style is no indication of one’s preference. However, there are four fundamental communication styles: (credit: Mark Murphy)
- Analytical (data junkies)
- Intuitive (big picture – like to know the destination, not all the points along the way)
- Functional (want process, detail, time lines, and clear plans)
- Personal (value emotional language and connection as a means of expression and confidence)

Chapter 4 Reason

There are two Reasons to buy:
- avoid pain
- seek reward
Problems are experienced by organizations. Pain is experienced by individuals.
The assumption that a change should be obvious is incorrect when prospects have cognitive dissonance, since they will have to first believe that what they wake up every day to come to work to do is wrong.
Questions are not asked for the benefit of the salesperson but rather for the benefit of the prospect.
Types of questions:
- Probative: Can you be more specific?
- Socratic: Is there a particular reason why you’ve asked?
- Disqualifying Questions: Recruiting sales reps isn’t one of your top priorities, is it?
Asking permission to ask a difficult question or make a difficult statement mitigates the negative impact on a prospect’s Status.

Chapter 5 Resources

Seven Resources
- Emotional (pain or reward)
- Intellectual (ROI; gap analysis; opportunity cost; benchmarks)
- Financial (budget & budget approvers)
- Political (roles of stakeholders)
  - Type of purchase: top-down; bottom-up; middle-out
  - Political roles: Champion/Coach; Economic Buyer; Executive Sponsor; Influencer; Administrator (day-to-day contact after purchase); Saboteur
  - A critical question to ask early on is the following: Can you walk me through how you’ve made similar purchases in the past?
- Technical
- Human: implementation; training; change management; support; continuous improvement
- Energy: incumbent solutions; inferior “popular” products
There are three ways to uncover Resources through questioning:
- (Previous) Experience
- Social proof
- Disqualifying questions.

Chapter 6 Resistance

There are five flavors of objection:
- No money
- No urgency
- No problem
- No trust
- No confidence
In his book, Resistance & Persuasion, Dr. Eric Knowles identifies only three types of Resistance:
- Reactance = resistance to the sales process itself. Eliminate by:
  - Sharing stories
  - Minimizing Requests:
  - Using “Yes and…”
  - Validating: Often, prospects just want to be heard. Salespeople should validate that they understand what the prospects are saying
  - Asking disqualifying questions
- Skepticism: Techniques for reducing skepticism include, but are not limited to, the following:
  - Create a guarantee:
  - Reframe the offer
  - Create a future focus:
- Inertia: Techniques for dealing with inertia include:
  - Disrupt and Reframe Resistance (I’m not sure I’m able to help you, but here is what we do so you can decide if we should keep talking”
  - Acknowledge Inertia (Is there not a lot of motivation to change here?)
  - Reciprocity
  - Do the Math: If it hasn’t happened already, it’s time to do a deep dive on Reason and uncover the problem that the prospect is trying to solve.

(There is no chapter 7)

Chapter 8 Developing a P.L.A.N

The P.L.A.N. is a salesperson’s blueprint for ensuring that meetings stay on track and opportunities maintain momentum.
- Pivot: Move from initial pleasantries to the business at hand.
- Logistics: What are the mechanics of the meeting?
- Agendas: What is going to be accomplished?
  - You previously mentioned that you want to talk about [ topics ] today. Is there anything else you were hoping to cover?
  - Once their agenda items are in place, salespeople can add what they want to cover.
- Next Steps: What decision will be made at the end of this meeting?
  - Most experienced buyers, especially senior executives, will respect the fact that next steps are brought up at the beginning of the conversation.
The Triangle relies upon salespeople’s ability to perform discovery and ask questions throughout the meeting, and once prospects give permission, salespeople have the green light to start uncovering Reason, Resources, and Resistance.

Chapter 9 H.E.L.P. Your Prospect

H.E.L.P your prospect to maintain momentum between meetings
- Highlight Your Conversation (in written and/or video format). Provide thoughtful highlights of what just happened, including:
  - Major topics that were discussed
  - What the prospect heard or saw that they liked
  - Any unresolved items, such as answers to technical questions
  - Restating the next steps that were agreed upon at the conclusion of the time spent together.
- Educate Your Prospect
  - Customer Stories as similar to the prospect as possible with respect to: size, industry, use case, and so on.
  - Myth Busting: Myths might revolve around the cost of implementation, side effects of products, and other factors.
  - Market Updates (regarding your product, not THEIR market which the know better than you)
  - Cross-Functional Integration: Help the prospect work cross-functionally in their own business (ex: marketing, sales, and IT)
- Leverage Your Network
  - Make a Connection
  - Hires (help them hire)
  - Prospects: Does the salesperson know someone who has a problem that the prospect can solve?
  - Other vendors:
  - Partners
- Predict the Future
  - Sometimes when we have a great meeting with someone like you, they go back to their team and realize no one is interested. Will you let me know if that happens?
  - Coach the prospect on how to break up with the incumbent vendor

Chapter 10 Making Triangle Moves

How does a salesperson maintain control in a dynamic environment?
The person asking the questions controls the conversation.
Most selling conversations will begin with Reason and move to Resources. If at any time Resistance is felt, the salesperson should move back to that aspect of Reason or Resources.
When faced with Resistance, the response should be a question, an active listening technique, or an answer that ends in a question. Each of these options will move the conversation away from Resistance and back to Reason or Resources, while maintaining rapport by satisfying each of the prospect’s S.C.A.L.E. drivers.

(There is no chapter 11)

Chapter 12 S.H.A.R.E. Your Demo

Demos are a conversation, not show-and-tell.
S.H.A.R.E
- Simple
- Highlight: What makes their product or service unique, disruptive, and more innovative than the competition… show them
- Acute: Salespeople must demonstrate their keen understanding of a prospect’s Reason and focus the solution on the acute Reason a prospect would buy.
- Relevant: Showcase case studies, solutions, and statistics that will appeal to the Likeness driver of the prospect.
- Engaging: Engagement happens through conversation, not demonstration, though the demo can serve as an excellent backdrop for the conversation.
Example SHARE framework (Credit: Chris Orlob)
- Act I: The Contextual Overview: Contextual elements include:
  - Relevant Reason
  - Relevant statistics
  - Case study narratives
- Act II: The Upside-Down Demo
  - Start by presenting the use case that was talked about the most by the prospect during the discovery phase of the sales cycle.
- Act III: Drive Engagement
  - In successful demos, the “rate of speaker switches” increases by 36 % in the second half.
  - Even when answering prospect questions about the product, the salesperson should be “tagging” their own question onto the end of their response.
  - Salespeople who are presenting complex diagrams in slides should instead attempt to collaboratively whiteboard the diagrams from scratch with the prospect.
- Act IV: P.L.A.N. to influence the Certainty driver and the Autonomy driver
  - Winning demos involve 12.7 % more time devoted to discussing “Next Steps” at the end of the call.

(There is no chapter 13)

Chapter 14 G.R.O.W. Pilots and Initial Contracts into Larger Deals

The challenge with pilots is that they are often the point in the sales cycle at which deals stall for several reasons:
- Lack of Clarity around who owns the pilot on the prospect’s team, who else must be involved, what is being evaluated, how that evaluation will be conducted, and what success or failure looks like.
- Lack of Timeline
- Lack of Decision Criteria in an agreed upon “ if… then ” next-step sequence.
The G.R.O.W. acronym includes the following:
- Gather political Resources
  - When considering who to include, salespeople should work backward from understanding everyone whose buy in is needed to approve a larger deal post-pilot. If these folks are not willing to participate, we suggest delaying the pilot until they are on board.
- Roll out pilot
  - A formal roll-out plan includes the roles and responsibilities of people on both the vendor and prospect teams
  - The plan should also include an official roll-out event that will be attended by key stakeholders
  - Key metrics should be defined that will determine the success or failure of the pilot.
- Organize a communication cadence
  - Initial Champion Check-In
  - Continuous Champion Communication
  - Mid-Pilot Executive Briefing
  - Final Champion Check-In
  - Pilot Wrap-Up: Bring all key political Resources back together, review the pilot, and present the proposal to move forward with the larger deal.
- Win a larger deal

Chapter 15 Connect the D.O.T.S

D.O.T.S
- Demographics: What is the profile of the person to whom you want to be referred?
- Options: What might a prospect be doing today to solve a problem instead of using your product or service?
- Traits: What do your customers have in common?
- Symptoms: What are the signs that a problem exists that you can solve?
The best salespeople ask anyone and everyone for referrals, including:
- Prospects
- Customers
- Vendors
- Friends
- Co-workers who aren’t in sales

Chapter 16 Proposals

Sending someone a proposal is not an accomplishment.
Proposals are simply the confirmation of the Reason for purchase, the Resources allocated to do so, and the terms of that agreement. By the time a proposal is sent, the salesperson should have:
- Uncovered all necessary information across Reason, Resources, and Resistance.
- Identified where the prospect falls within each of the drivers of the S.C.A.L.E. model.
- Received verbal confirmation that the terms being proposed are acceptable to the buyer or at least that the salesperson’s champion will support them and push for a deal to get done with their colleagues.
Here are our recommendations for delivering proposals, in order of effectiveness:
- In-person to all key stakeholders
- Live web conference to all key stakeholders
- In-person to the champion
- Live web conference to the champion
- That’s it. If the champion says, “Send it over, and let me take a look,” the salesperson should be skeptical that a real opportunity exists.

Chapter 17 Running the Triangle

(This chapter contains a fictional sales conversation applying all of the methodologies outlined in the book.)

Chapter 18 Use Cases

(More applications of the methodologies to various selling situations)

Chapter 19 Getting Started

(Concluding chapter with no incremental tips)