If you look at today’s title, you may be asking yourself if this is going to be a sales blog post or something like bonus material related to Grammar!  But not to worry, since as you will find out, Grammar is quite important when it comes to Sales.   

In the pre-internet area, customers and salespeople lived in the “Tell me!” Economy. All the available information regarding products and services was not in abundance as it is right now, therefore salespeople were leading with features.  In their book Sales Management-Process and Practice, Cuevas, Donaldson and Lemmens, define features as “facts, data and information that help describe a product or service”.  The company’s offerings were presented mainly using nouns accompanied by adjectives that served the purpose to give as many attributes as possible to the nouns.

Nowadays, we are well into the internet era and the “Show me!” Economy.  Customers are interested in outcomes; outcomes are linked to actions and actions are described by verbs.  Thus, if a company wants to be called customer-centric, rather than product-centric, must accordingly train its’ salespeople to lead with outcomes and therefore with verbs.  If this is not the case and features are still dominating the sales conversations, hence nouns and adjectives, then we run the risk of our salespeople to be characterised as Talking Brochures.

Apart from the above, as Bosworth, Holland and Visgatis point out in their book Customer Centric Selling, leading with features is one of the main causes for a salesperson to lose control of the whole sales procedure.  This is because if we use this approach, we invite the customer at very early stages to ask a very logical question:

“How much does it cost?”

 Without discussing goals, problems and potential usage or establish value in the buyer’s mind, the salespersons are dragged in pricing conversations and therefore start doing concessions (meaning discounts) almost from day one.  And all this because of using only nouns and adjectives!

Based on the above, one thing looks certain: The future of Sales lies in verbs!