“ELAvate” Your Customer Attitude to Commit

My second post on the Customer Decision Ladder Series demonstrated how we Align with the customer’s actions, words and feelings.  The ELAvate Decision Ladder process is straightforward:

The ELAvate Decision Process has Four Actions:

1. Listen to the customer with your ears and your heart
2. Identify where the customer is on the Decision Ladder
3. Align with the customer action or attitude
4. ELAvate the customer conversation up the Decision Ladder

In the last post we learned how to Align. For review, here are some ways to Align with the customer actions and feelings on the Decision Ladder.

	ACTIONS	ATTITUDES	Suggested Align Statement
	Commit	Confident	"Okay. You've got it."
	Play	Enthused	"Great idea, isn't it!"
	Continue	Interested	"That is interesting."
	Study	Reserved	"More study could be helpful."
	Look/Listen	Neutral	"No problem. Seems simple if we take it one step at a time."
	Challenge	Competitive	"It needs to be better. Okay. Let's look it over."
	Stop	Hostile	"That's clear. Okay, tell me the specific problem."
	Avoid	Fearful	"It sounds risky."
	Complain	Troubled	"It sounds like a hassle."
	Neglect	Indifferent	"If that's not an area of interest right now, can I ask you a few questions about your current situation?”

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ELAvate the Customer Conversation up the Decision Ladder

In this third post of the series, you will learn how to ELAvate the customer attitude up the Decision Ladder to make a mutually beneficial commitment to move the sale forward. The strategy here is to use key action words in your discussion to ELAvate the customer  to be open enough to discuss issues on the higher rungs of the Decision Ladder.  For example, you might ELAvate a customer from Complain to Listen, Challenge to Study, or from Play to Commit. Let’s review some examples.

	Customer Level	ELAvate Action Word Strategy
	Commit	"Okay. You've got it. Let's wrap it up." “Sounds good, let’s review what we have decided.”
	Play	"Great idea, isn't it! Well, seriously, which do you prefer?" “How might you envision rolling out this project?”
	Continue	"That is interesting. Let's think about that idea." “ What you said was interesting. Can you elaborate more?” “Could you imagine what might happen if..."
	Study	"More study could be helpful." Which area are you most interested in at the moment?" “ Let’s look at this issue from another perspective.”
	Look/Listen	"No problem. Seems simple if we take it one step at a time." Let's analyze and study the pros and cons, see what fits most reasonably." “I had a similar customer situation like yours. May I tell you about it?”
	Challenge	"It needs to be better. Okay. Let's look it over." “Let me give you a few examples where we have had success before.” “Making sure you don’t repeat mistakes is important. What made it difficult before that causes you to question now?”
	Stop	"That's clear. Okay, tell me the specific problem, so we might look/talk about some alternate approaches to stopping it." “OK, What areas are of interest to you?”
	Avoid	"If it's too risky, let's look/talk about some ways to avoid that. I have an idea . . ." “Reducing risk of failure is important. Let’s explore how we might do that.”
	Complain	"If that's too much of a hassle, let's look at some ways to simplify this. Maybe there's a way." Sounds like it was a real pain. Let’s analyze what happened.” Nobody likes trouble. Let’s see how we can eliminate it in the future.”
	Neglect	"If that's not an area of interest right now, let's look/talk about some other problems.” “I see it’s not of interest. May I ask a few questions on your current implementation so I may be of help, now or in the future?

Listen and Identify where your customer is on the Decision Ladder, Align with his/her actions and feelings at that level, then ELAvate them with action words to motivate him/her to participate in a discussion that moves them up the ladder to Commit.

Your application and practice can be a simple method I have employed when meeting with a customer. First, cut and paste the Decision Ladder on a sheet of paper that you plan to use to take notes on during your sales call. As you take notes, you can glance at the Decision Ladder to help you formulate your discussion strategy to ELAvate the customer to a close. For your convenience, we have created the Decision Ladder Discussion Sheet for you to download and use.

ELAvate your selling success this week by helping your customer make well informed committed decisions using this proven process!