Michael Harris
Michael Harris
Michael Harris, CEO Insight Demand, author Insight Selling, & published HBR
Selling Change Is Hard: Status Quo Bias Locks Change In A Prison Of No Decision
The value to buy your product is overwhelming and yet the customer decides not to buy. At times like these, it’s important to remember...
Why Sales Fails at Selling Change With Success Stories & Needs Change Stories/Questions
Success stories are only effective as proof late in the sales cycle once a customer has decided to change. Early stage customers, on the...
From Sewer-line to Pipeline with Insight Selling
Here’s a story about how a VP of Sales resurrects her pipeline by showing her team how to lead customers to value with insight...
Neuroscience Confirms We Buy on Emotion & Justify with Logic & yet We Sell to Mr. Rational & Ignore...
Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says that 95% of our purchase decision making takes place subconsciously (aka System 1). Despite widespread agreement amongst...
Sales Training Doesn’t Improve Bottom 80% So Invest In Best to Train Rest
The goal of every sales training program is to improve the bottom 80% of salespeople, but that’s not what happens. What happens is that...
Challenge the Status Quo & Create Value With Insight-Based Directed Questions
When customers understand their problems, it’s easy for salespeople to lead them through discovery, because customers don’t need salespeople to shine the light of...
How Can I Deliver Insight to an Executive with 25 Years of Experience?
Today, most sales and marketing executives would agree that they should deliver insight to customers. But they question how can they deliver insight to an...
The Status Quo Bias: Why Customers Deviate From Rational Economic Behavior
The value to buy your product is overwhelming, and yet the customer decides not to buy. Why? The optimism and status quo bias block...
Can your salespeople articulate value or does it sound like magic?
After nine years of working with companies on sales messaging, I have found the number one inhibitor to salespeople articulating value is they don’t...
Neuroscience Proves We Buy On Emotion & Justify With Logic & Why Deals Get Stuck In No Decision
The expression that “People buy on emotion and justify with logic” has always made intuitively sense to me, but rationally it seemed like BS. You...
The Godfather of Insight Selling – An Interview with Geoffrey Moore
Everyone in technology knows of Geoffrey Moore as the author of “Crossing the Chasm.” His book has sold over 1 million copies, and crossing...
HBR Article On When To Sell With Facts And Figures, And When To Appeal To Emotions
I just had an article published in the HBR. It’s neuroscience meets sales, and it bursts the biggest misconception is sales (click here for...
Six Reasons Why Success Stories Fail at Selling
Success stories are effective to use as proof and reinforcement late in the buying cycle once a customer has already formed a complete buying...
Example of a story that Flops vs. Pops
By recognizing the difference between an insight scenario (i.e. an insight based story) that “pops” versus one that “flops,” you can see for yourself...
Selling Value With Insight Storytelling
Imagine if your salespeople could shine a light of insight on today’s empowered customers so that they no longer underestimate the cost of the...
Six reasons why Stories trump Verbal Persuasion
1- Puts the customer’s ego to sleep With an insight scenario, you can deliver insights that will only challenge the customer’s thinking, and not the...
Whiteboard Selling – Insight Selling – Story Selling
In this whiteboard on Insight Selling, we’ll explain why we believe the following three hypotheses are true. Salespeople must deliver insight to sell value. The…
Why buyers push-back on insight selling & what you can do about it.
Even though insight is what buyers need, it may not be what they initially want. By the time buyers engage with a salesperson, they...
It’s amazing that 10-20% of salespeople can actually sell value
While many companies complain that 80-90% of their salespeople can’t sell value, they are spraying their sales force with product presentations, and praying that...
Gartner study- buyers rate sales conversations dead last, but there’s hope- tell stories.
Imagine running a sales team where the last person that your customers want to speak with is one of your salespeople? That’s the conclusion...