5 Whys: Why Can't I Sell More Easily?
Using “5 Whys” means literally asking “why?” around five times in a row — like you’re a 3-year old — and is a way at getting at the root cause of a problem. It comes from Lean Manufacturing and particularly from Toyota and Taiichi Ohno. You can read about it in laymen terms here and here.
Problem Statement: I have a difficult time executing the sales process as often and as much as I’d like to
5 Whys: Try #1
Why? Because I don’t enjoy the process, and I forget to follow up with people after the initial contact or two.
Why? I don’t enjoy the process because I don’t think I’ll be that successful.
Why? I don’t think I’ll be successful because, despite the fact that I have a great product, they don’t yet know that I have a great product and probably won’t want to talk to me.
Why? I don’t feel confident that I know how to handle the initial moment to communicate my value in a couple of seconds.
Why? I don’t have something that I can say: “Hi, we do eyetracking and optimization. Have you heard of us? No? Ok, we are incredibly valuable and if you only have 1 minute, then check out this [insert_thing]”
Root Cause, and Next Step
I don’t have something that effectively explains what we do in 15 seconds. I will create the message that then I can have my designer make it look nice. I’ll probably generate a short PPT with just a couple of slides to communicate to the designer what I’d like the result to be.
Why? I don’t follow up with people after the initial contact or two because I forget.
Why do I forget? I don’t have a reliable way to remember to follow up on something a few days later.
I could use a calendar. Doing so would be quick and easy to implement. I’d have to start writing down follow-up reminders. It’s that or start parsing the notes files I use each day to generate daily reminders.
Why don’t I use a calendar? Calendars are in a separate place that I need to remember to enter stuff into. Also, it’s too easy to forget one, making the process unreliable. I need something that I can use quickly in the heat of the moment.
Why don’t I auto-generate daily reminders? I’d need it to be quick and easy to generate. I could parse the call logs in a directory pretty easily. Then I’d just need a way to do that daily. I could use cron (which I don’t know how to use), or set up a work flow for it.
5 Whys: Try #2
Why? Because I don’t have a lot of contacts Solved: a mined all of the phone logs over the years to generate a list of contacts we have. I also can use LinkedIn.
Why am I not contacting everyone we’ve contacted before? I haven’t gone through and categorized the different people into:
- those that I should email
- those that I should call
- those that I can connect to on LinkedIn
- those that I should offer a pre-payment discount
Why am I not doing that? That’s a good question… I’ll schedule that for tomorrow so that I will at least know how the situation looks.
Why am I not contacting more people on LinkedIn? I could connect to more people who I’d like to be contacting. Then, I could contact them to describe the new service. And since I’ll have a fast, effective way to do that, it could work out well.
Root Cause, and Next Step
I don’t have a firm categorization of contacts into action-item-groups. I will review the contact spreadsheet and categorize contacts based on how I should contact them.
For LinkedIn, I will take the people from my contact list and see who of them I can connect to as an introduction, then follow up with them via email and/or phone.
Postscript
Working through this process formally, writing as I went, helped me specifically target what mental blocks I’ve had regarding sales. Coming into this process of asking myself the “5 Whys” I just knew that I was having difficulties and I felt it was difficult to solve. Now I have clearly defined, somewhat easy to solve problems. It will be interesting to see where this all leads…