Too many salespeople rely on their PowerPoint presentation, their marketing literature, their product brochures, social media or other collateral materials to get their message out. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because most new salespeople are indoctrinated with weeks, if not months, of product knowledge during their new hire orientation/training process so the only thing that they are comfortable talking about is their product. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t buy products or services. They buy solutions!
So what do the most successful salespeople do? They engage their prospect in sales conversations. Strategic, proactive sales conversations, not sales presentations! A sales conversation reveals critical information about your prospect and provides an opportunity for salespeople to formally introduce their company and its capabilities. It also ensures buyer and seller alignment. A skillful sales conversation will allow you as a salesperson to:
- Identify the title or functional area that you are targeting, the top five or six responsibilities of that title and specific “needs” they may have that your product or service could address. (utilizing our Problem Positioning Grid)
- Identify a specific product or service that you want to sell, job titles or functional areas that could benefit from that product or service and how their jobs would be made easier if they purchased your product or service. (utilizing our Solution Targeting Grid)
- Leverage existing clients in an attempt to “win” new business by using a four-step process to tell a new prospect about a challenge that one of your current customer’s had before purchasing your product or service, highlight specific reasons for their challenge, describe what your customer wanted to be able to do and then share the results that your customer was able to achieve as a result of using your product or service. (utilizing our Credibility WINdow)
- Identify the job title, functional area and vertical market that you’re trying to penetrate, the products or services that you’re trying to sell, why this prospect would buy from you versus your competition and as importantly what will keep this prospect from buying. (utilizing our Four “W” Strategy)
- Uncover “need” (either over the phone or in person) in less than four minutes. (utilizing BIO)
- Enable the buyer to buy! In order to do so salespeople need to verify the business issues, ask questions and analyze impact, link their unique capabilities and then unveil proof or unveil product before unveiling price. (utilizing VALU Builder)
The tools that are underlined in parentheses (at the end of each bullet) are introduced during our Sales Productivity workshops to help salespeople engage in proactive, strategic sales conversations.
It gives a business a strategic advantage to create libraries containing Problem Positioning Grids, Solution Targeting Grids, Credibility WINdows© and VALU Builders© for new hire orientation as well as for seasoned sales professionals. Businesses that have created these libraries have seen their salespeople become more productive more quickly which increases their return on invest while reducing turnover!
