Too busy with other things? Need brings drive to the sales process
Too busy with other things? Need brings drive to the sales process
Is your prospect busy elsewhere? Not with us!
The need on the customer side acts like a catalyst in the sales process: it ensures greater speed, shorter deal cycles and higher turnover. If the need exists, the prospect takes the initiative and actively drives the process forward.
By focusing on the customer's needs at an early stage, you can prevent costly disappointments in the sales process. After all, you have invested a lot of time and effort in a promising opportunity. Of course, sales always means making advance payments. But despite all the uncertainties, the result has to be right in the end. This makes it all the more annoying if the company puts a purchasing decision on hold or contact persons simply disappear after the discovery call. The best counter-strategy is to consistently uncover the pain and then not let it subside, but intensify it.
Don't fail due to a lack of urgency
The lack of urgency is all too often the deal breaker for salespeople: Yes, your solution has real added value. It also looks good and is user-friendly. Whether cold calling on the phone or discovery calls with inbound leads: You hear these statements several times every day from your counterparts.
But what is it worth in the end? Usually far too little, because that doesn't mean that your offer will ultimately win the race. And we don't even have to think about competing offers. The pressure to change is often simply too low. "The grass is always greener on the other side": Anyone who sees even a superior product as a nice-to-have hardly has the right attitude to stand up for you in the company. On the other hand, you need real champions on the customer side who not only overcome their own inertia, but also internal resistance.
Lack of need in the sales process eats up resources
It does not always have to be the case that the prospect stops activities in your field completely or turns to a competitor's offer. Delayed but ultimately positive decisions can also cause damage. Even with the best discussion documentation, you will then make additional loops that are not really necessary - and waste valuable resources in the process. Not to mention picking up the ball again after a deadlock or starting all over again with new contact persons. The sales process drags on unnecessarily and blocks your capacities. The person who is actually interested is not helped either: They receive their solution later than necessary and your employees lose valuable working time.
Need in the sales process as a wild card when setting priorities
Project budgets, deadlines or internal capacities: With your offering, you are competing for the resources of potential client companies. What are the organization's current priorities and how can your offering contribute to improvements? You yourself can only guess.
You need champions for your project to gain momentum. They help to demonstrate the full scope of the challenge - and thus make your solution all the more valuable. Without these ambassadors for the need and for the benefits of your solution, you have a poor hand in the sales process. Companies tackle those challenges first that they face on a daily basis and whose solution unlocks great potential. This is precisely the area you need to address with your offer! The aim is that the prospect would have liked to have introduced your product yesterday, because every additional day until implementation costs them hard cash. We'll show you how to get there.
Your priority for more need in the sales process: Discovery Call
Creating urgency - only salespeople who see the situation through the eyes of the interested party can do this. What challenge does the other person need to solve in order to develop their team in the desired direction? Does the person have the task of freeing up capacity in the department for other activities or finding a way to achieve their own goals? The first step: you need to have exactly the right solution in your luggage.
The discovery call reveals the extent of the lead's pain in the field of application of your offer. You certainly won't get any reliable information from flat questions. You need to approach the topic carefully during the conversation and use the right questions for the discovery call to gradually gain new insights for both parties. Once you have uncovered the pain, you can move on.
Expand problem pools
Put yourself in this situation: Yes, inadequate warehouse management software is a nuisance for the lead. Of course, there have long been much better solutions on the market. But although it is a source of annoyance, the existing solution at least works reasonably reliably. You will hardly be able to convince someone who thinks this way to buy your modern software. Even if you manage to do this, it's over when the budget is approved at the latest. After all, anyone who spends a lot of money wants to solve real problems. So your proposal is in competition with other projects. Your task is to uncover the tangible problems resulting from the inadequacies of the existing software. With the resulting costs, you can quantify your value proposition even more concretely.
You must uncover this measurable benefit in the sales discovery call. This means thinking through the negative consequences of the current situation together to the end: there is often a much more serious consequence behind the superficial problem. Ultimately, your offer will provide the solution to this far more serious problem. If it ain't broke, don't fix it: This is how you take into account the approach of really busy leads. The pressure to act and the willingness to cooperate in the subsequent phases of the sales process change abruptly once the need is underpinned at these levels with arguments that arise from the lead's situation.
Sounds like quite a lot to consider in the sales process. Need some food for thought?
Convincing use cases reinforce the need in the sales process
An example: In an initial discussion with a maintenance manager at a manufacturing company, you explore the benefits your online tool can provide for spare parts management. Instead of taking orders from the field offices by phone or email as before, the distributed maintenance teams could use it to report their requirements online. As a result, your contact person's team no longer has to manually enter orders. Thanks to automatic data transmission and a prioritization system, critical cases will receive their parts with minimal delay in the future - with a decisive advantage: expensive downtimes due to missing spare parts are significantly reduced.
What the previous production losses have cost the company and what reductions are possible? These are the key figures that unite Pain and your value proposition. Whether it's a product demo or a business case: use the specific wording and the corresponding key figures to tailor your messages as individually as possible to your prospect. The more specific you make it, the easier it is for those involved to understand the situation. As decision-making processes usually go through several instances, you need to be able to convey this need right up to the management level.
Need as a driving force in the sales process
Bring pain and added value together as early as possible in the sales process. In this way, the need becomes the driving force in the sales process: the awareness of having to act creates the necessary momentum. Prospects then adhere to agreements and become active themselves in order to accelerate the process. However, you must not rest on your laurels later in the sales process: By keeping the urgency high, even when new stakeholders appear, you can overcome many hurdles to closing the deal - and do so directly, rather than via energy-sapping detours.
