One of the things that I found astonishing many years ago when I was working with Bill Daring was his uncanny knack of teasing out and discovering the hidden issues from a business owners that he had never met before, and how that person would open up to him. It really was a case of drawing on a lot of experience – and a great process.
The essence for the approach was drawn from Spin Selling. The Spin Selling Fieldbook and Major Account Sales are required reading if you want to understand the process of creating opportunities and realising them in sales. For Small and Medium Business owners – many of whom are technical rather than sales specialists – it becomes a vital process.
If you have not come across it before, SPIN covers 4 key parts to a sale:
Situation: what are the facts you need to know about a customer and their environment to determine if your product or solution will be a fit for their business. This might be a question like, “how many staff do you have”, “what is your turnover”, or more direct “what is your experience in dealing with a business like ours?”. Best to do your homework prior to seeing a customer if you can, so that you don’t spend the meeting with the prospect feeling like it is an interrogation.
Problem: Having established the environment, the key next step is to explore problems that the customer might be experiencing. You must have thought about your product and service, and the types of problems it solves for customers. As an example, such a question might be, “are you having challenges attracting and retaining staff”?
Implication: Generally this is where the probing is really starting to add some value for the prospect in the conversation – as much as it may be causing a bit of discomfort.
For example, the above question might have yielded a response such as, “Yes, it is challenging. We continue to advertise and are getting staff through”. You then need to be able to ask the question, “If you do advertise and it doesn’t work out, what is the implication on service levels for your customers?” or other similar question that probes the next level of depth – the aftermath of the course of action not solving the challenge.
Need – payoff: At this point, a great outcome is a client saying, “I hadn’t thought of that, I need to get that sorted out. At this point, your first instinct may be to launch into how you will do that. Just don’t.
The next question is, “well, if we able to eliminate that as a problem for you, what would that do for you?”. This key question is vital to ensure that the prospect has a real problem to solve and will add up the business case for making the change. Without the prospect thinking it through, there is not point going to the next step of a proposal.
Notice that during this process you have not been selling or even talking about your product at all?
This is the hard bit for most business owners who get trained up in or developed the product, absolutely love it, and want to share their passion about their product to the customer. The customer, of course, is only interested in their own problem. If you just focus on closing in a complex sale, chances are you will be nowhere near as successful as you could be. So, grab those Spin Selling books, I highly recommend them.
Some shortcut key points:
1. Systemise your Business Development Processes. If you can systematise your process, you have a more rapid way of fulfilling customer enquiry. I have found that by responding with a solid proposal quickly, you stand a much better chance of success. Many companies do not really track the time from enquiry to delivery of proposal, conversion rates, or the time to develop a proposal and aim to shorten it.
2. Market Segmentation – be clear on your customer profile / avatar. You just simply can’t sell to everyone, but the question becomes who to really focus on, and in depth.
3. Analytics and KPI’s – Looking at what data you capture and make sense of it. Check the trends and see where they lead. Are you closing more or less prospects, are proposals getting larger in fees or lower, is the profitability increasing or shrinking?
4. Database clean up and management – and integration. In your business, you probably have a bunch of people referred to in different parts of your business as customers, clients, debtors, creditors (if they both buy from you and sell to you) – and probably all in different databases, accounting systems, and email clients. Now more than ever integration is easier to enable
5. CRM – most CRM systems are frustrating, just in different ways. Typically a poor implementation is the culprit. Determine and resolve the people and process issues first, then define the process. Only then can you implement effectively. Our experience is that this needs to be very much customised to the individual company rather than trying to meld the company to the software.
Getting the sales process right is absolutely critical to achieving success for any business and as a part of our business coaching we run a 90 day Sales Improvement process.
