Insight selling is about providing your stakeholder with a new perspective of their situation. Something they had not been thinking about or truly considered before. Ideally, your insights are about the risks you see for the customer’s business when sticking to their status quo. But also about business opportunities for your customer, if they would make a change to your company. However, there seems to be a lot of pressure on finding the right insight. As if you are looking for a magic wand. Something that creates that eureka moment for the customer and sim sala bim the sale is done. Sometimes you do find these insights, but often there is more work to do. What if there is not one big insight but instead several small insights? Welcome to the Domino-Insights Effect. 

Let’s first get a misperception out of the way. To deliver insightful information you need to understand the customer’s situation really well and what they are trying to achieve. But that doesn’t mean, you need to know more about the customer’s business than your customer, something you will probably never achieve. Trust, however, that you are the only person in the room or on the call who has a better understanding of the intersection between the customer’s business and your business. The customer doesn’t know what you know. They do not have your experience, that you have build up through meetings with so many other similar businesses, who may all have similar challenges. You might actually have many insights waiting for you in your own backyard. 

Focus on how you can help your customers grow their business and achieve their profit targets. It is about providing advice and guidance that leads to better outcomes. Help them recognize and understand how a different set-up would help them achieve what they are trying to achieve. You may not be able to do that with one insight. Placing one small insight after the other creates that domino effect that needs only one last push in the direction of greater-value-than-your-competitor perception. You will know immediately if the information you shared was insightful by observing their body language. Typically you see a surprising reaction like raising eyebrows or widening eyes. Often your customer reacts by saying: “Oh, that is interesting. Tell me more”.

Changing suppliers is not an easy decision for many businesses. The stakeholders involved in making such decisions, often fall back on their status quo because looking through their lenses they have explored all the options. Your insight selling allows them to see something they didn’t even know was there, with a changed perspective. Many small insights have the same or greater effect than one single insight. Who wants to play Dominos? 

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