Skip to main content
Cambridge | crobinson@sandler.com
 

This website uses cookies to offer you a better browsing experience.
You can learn more by clicking here

The best kept secret in selling

Brace yourselves, you may be expecting a stunning revelation and may initially be a little disappointed by what I’m about to reveal.
 
Find out what your prospects decision-making process is, whether its a 1 person or 10 person decision.
 
WHAT?!! Is that it?!
 
Yes and no. Having worked with many different individuals from professional sales to business owners this is often the most neglected part of the sale and trips people and opportunities up more times than you might imagine. In fact if you are already good at selling I would hazard a guess that for some of you this is the single biggest factor that affects your conversion rates particularly for bigger opportunities, and you may not be aware of it. 

I want you to expand your thinking of what your prospects decision-making process is. Everyone knows we need to find out who is involved in making the decision.  Important, but scratching the surface of what we should be uncovering. The big buckets to consider are:

  • When and why?
  • How
  • What
  • Who 

Consider these scenarios:

Prospects asks for a demo, proposal, samples, prices, concepts, email summary.  We have a choice to say yes or no according to how reasonable that seems BUT before we do that we need to uncover why they want that information, what will they do with it, what do they need included, when do they need it by (and why). It may well be that what are asking for isn’t really what they need. Then we can decide what’s the right next step based on what they are really asking for.
 
Roadblocks and objections. I often meet with business owners who tell me they (quite rightly) are highly cynical about working with ‘consultants/business advisors’, based on bad experiences.  Fair enough, but there is no point us getting into real detail about what working together would be like without having spoken about that further – it might be a deal breaker. As a minimum I need to know:

  • Would they ever work with someone like that again?  Why?
  • What would they need to see/hear to be convinced that me (or anyone else) was different to the others?
  • If they say value for money, guaranteed ROI – what does that mean?

Client already has an existing provider:

  • Why would they change? 
  • Why now?
  • How would they decide who to change to?  What criteria would be important to them in making?  What would their concerns be about changing (to anyone, not specifically you)?

This is a vast topic – once you become aware of it you start to see all the areas you should be exploring, provided you have the belief that time spent up front gathering more information will save you time later AND enable you to convert more of the bigger opportunities.
 
Here is a short list of areas that have tripped people up that could have been covered by questions about decision-making. Any fit with you?

  • Pitching – all pre-pitch discussions with only one of several decision-makers. Turns out that other decision-makers have very different priorities from the person you have been talking too
  • Which decision-makers/stakeholders involved in the delivery phase – same/different? Might make sense to involve those people earlier in the process to avoid them derailing it
  • Clients urgent priorities evapourating when it comes to a decision on a sale
  • Knowing that you don’t want to do a demo/sample but being pushed for one and not knowing how to handle that and still keep sale progressing
  • Client talking to more than one company before deciding who to change too (if anyone)
  • Clients taking your proprietary information/prices and using it internally or giving it to your competitors

If anyone of these resonate or you have equivalent examples then it might be worth spending more time asking more questions about your prospective clients decision-making process.

A slight exaggeration, but all I want for Christmas is for everyone involved in selling to spend much more time gathering this information before committing to share their expertise/solution with the client. 

Tags: 
Share this article: