The Customer's Process Rules: A Sales Rep Pop Quiz

Whatever you're doing right now, stop.

Put down the phone, quit fiddling with your iPad, and shut down your Tweetdeck while you're at it.

It's time for a Sales Pop Quiz, hotshot.

Here's the rules: Without looking at your CRM system, think of your highest-probability deal in the pipeline right now, and answer these questions.

1. Name the specific title of the last person at the account you spoke with on the phone, and the department they work for.

2. Give the name and title of the person that the Person in Question #1 directly reports to.

3. Give the name and title of one of the people that reports to Person #1.

4. Give the name and title of the person that's going to write the check/drop the corporate credit card/put the final signature on the PO when your prospective sale closes (if you're lucky, the answer will be the same as Question #1).

5. When was the last time the Persons in Questions #1, 2, and 4 met together to discuss the problem your product/service is going to solve?

6. What paperwork/research/data did they have in front of them when they did?

7. Who else was in the room?

8. How long is it going to be before they meet again?

9. How many other vendors are they considering?

10. Who are they?

11. What features/benefits/advantages of competing vendors are most appealing to them?

12. What's their "drop dead," point-of-no-return deadline for implementing any purchased products or services?

13. Which of the Persons in Questions #1, 2, or 4 is setting the budget? Or is it someone else entirely?

14. If it's someone else entirely, do they even know your company is in the running for a major purchase?

15. What is the budget they've set?

16. How is your product service emotionally making life better for the Persons in Questions #1-4? This isn't about features and benefits, it's about the direct connection to how you're going to emotionally change their lives, their jobs, their daily tasks. From Day 1, how is what you're about to sell to them going to make them enjoy their job more/hate their job less?

17. How is your sales data, case studies, testimonials, research, and best practices justifying the emotional reactions of the Persons in Questions #1-4?

18. Based on Questions 9-17, are you even in the running for this sale, or are you clinging to false hope?

19. Are you tracking the progress of the deal based on your internal sales process,, or on how the prospect is actually approaching the purchase?

20. Based on Questions #5-19, how accurate is your current closing forecast?

21. If your sales manager knew the true answer to Question #20, how would that change what you do for the next 14, 30, 90 days?

It may seem a bit didactic, but the point is if you didn't have answers to more than four or five of these questions, it's indicative of a mindset.

Are you really focusing on the prospect's needs? Are you approaching the process of the sale from their viewpoint, their decisions, their company hierarchy and culture? Based on your action items, are you making the decision to purchase your solution harder, or easier?

It's these every day questions that ultimately lead to a customer-centered, rather than a seller-centered buying cycle, that will lead to more success.

By : Steven_Watts

Give Pain to Get Pain When Making Cold Calls

Regardless of where you are in a sales cycle, it is critical that there must be identified pain in order for the opportunity to be qualified. This is because regardless of the relationships that you have established and the cool things that your product can do, if there is no pain there is no reason to change. Thus, you will want to find pain and find it as early as possible and one way accomplish this is to give pain while making cold calls.

Giving pain to get pain refers to sharing a story of how someone else has experienced a challenge to a prospect and exploring if they can relate and have seen anything similar. This is a probing technique and can help the prospect to become more self-aware and share information that they might not if you ask them directly without the story of the other company.

A Brief Demonstration
An example of this would be to tell a prospect that a lot of your clients have complained about not being able to produce financial reports that have data from all their international operations. You can go on to share the impact of this challenge and how it prohibited the companies from having visibility across the entire organization and that impacted the quality and timeliness of decision making, which impacted the ability to manage labor costs resulting in decreased profitability.

From there, you can ask the prospect if that is something that they have had any similar challenges with. The prospect will then either share similar pain, will share pain in a different area, or will not admit to any pain. When you reach this point while making cold calls, you can either drill down into pain that is shared or if there is no pain uncovered, you can continue on to give pain from another example in another area.

Latent Pain
One of the reasons that giving pain can help to get pain is that many prospects are not fully aware of their pain. And when making cold calls, since you are calling them, any pain they may have, whether they are aware of it or not, it is not the top of their mind. When this is the case and the prospect is not actively thinking about pain in an area and trying to fix it, we call this "latent pain".

In order to improve sales effectiveness, we need to uncover this latent pain and bring more attention on it. One of the ways to accomplish this is to ask very direct questions about it. The downside to doing this is that either the prospect can fall into denial and avoid acknowledging it or the prospect could feel attacked by the questioning and get defensive.

This is an example why giving pain to get pain can be powerful when making cold calls as you give the prospect an example that helps them to become more aware. You also bring it up in the context of another company so not only do they not get defensive by feeling attacked, they also can feel comforted by knowing that they are not the only company out there in that scenario.

By : Michael_Halper