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Introduction:
Heres to your selling success!
Is it possible to shorten the learning curve when it comes to selling complex solutions, and can we increase sales success faster?
Mike Schultz President The answers (as you may have guessed) are yes and yes. We've worked not only to provide the premier process for the complex sale, but to improve the process of learning to become a RAINMAKER a
1. Build Real Rapport 2. Uncover Aspirations and Afflictions 3. Make the Impact Clear 4. Paint a Picture of the New Reality 5. Balance Advocacy and Inquiry 6. Build on the Foundation of Trust
With intensity
7. Plan to Succeed
Make the Impact of Success Clear Uncover Aspirations Build Rapport True value gap
Trust Influence
Copyright RAIN Group 2011 7 Critical Factors for Successful Sales Conversations
Success Factor #1
Success Factor #1: Build Real Rapport with Prospects
Ah, I see you have a big fish on your wall. Are you a fishing enthusiast? Lets talk about trout.
This is a surefire way to snap your line and lose your big catch. Our emphatic response to this approach: dont do it.
Yet the fundamental, underlying need for a buyer to connect with a seller or at least to generally like him or herexists and must be attended to.
Take a look at the survey results from our benchmark report, How Clients Buy. Here, you see the likeability element factors strongly in the decisionmaking process:
With stats like these the need to build real rapport can not be overstated.
1. Be genuine: Before the first day of school, first jobs, camp, and any
family get together my dad would always say, Just be yourself and everything will be fine. Same goes for generating rapport with prospects and customers. Dont try to be anything you are not. Dont create a new persona, and dont adopt a sales-like tone. Just be yourself and relax. Good things will follow.
Tune into what your prospect is saying. Tune everything else out.
Success Factor #2
Once youve established rapport, you now have the opportunity to begin the discovery process of learning what issues the prospect has and how you can help.
Uncovering your prospects afflictions is a crucial step in the business development process.
The reasons are simple:
If the prospect communicates his business afflictions to you, then it is likely that he will want them to go away if its
possible, and if it makes sense to invest the time, money, and brainpower to get rid of them.
Uncovering and discussing one affliction can lead to other afflictions of which the customer may not have been thinking in the
first place.
In this situation, uncovering afflictions and helping to solve them with your products and services is your core goal. 2. Future seeking: Buyers are in the future seeking mode if they're
looking to grow, make their companies better, or somehow improve their current circumstances. In other words, maybe what's keeping them up at night is not a problem in their business at all, but the excitement that stems out of innovation, growth, and endless possibilities.
In this situation, helping prospects see how you can help them achieve their aspirations is a core goal.
Copyright RAIN Group 2011 7 Critical Factors for Successful Sales Conversations
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where you can help and sell the full solution set.
So the next time you are preparing to find the areas of the buyer's pain and problems that you can fix, try focusing on his aspirations as well as his afflictions. You'll find the conversations to be richer, your relationships deeper, and your sales success greater.
Once youve established rapport and then uncovered afflictions, you have created an Initial Value Gap: the
To uncover the full set of needs and to widen the value gap, focus on aspirations as well as afflictions.
Uncover Aspirations Initial value gap with aspirations and Afflictions
difference between where they want to be and where they are now.
Most sellers stop here.
Build Rapport
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Success Factor #3
Success Factor #3: Make the Impact Clear
While emotional impact on the prospect is of great importance, you need to be able to make the business case for engaging you, your products and services, and your company.
How to Make the Impact Clear So You Can Sell More with Less Resistance
When you understand the impact of helping the prospect reach their aspirations, you establish a new baseline for where the prospect could be. When you understand the impact caused by your prospects afflictions you establish the true business obstacles that they present. Make the impact clear, and the prospects perception of the gap between where they are and where they want to be grows to its widest.
Make the Impact of Success Clear Uncover Aspirations Build Rapport True value gap
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1. Calculate the Dollar Impact: Each affliction that you solve, and
Prospects cannot know what the value of working with you will truly be unless you clarify what the impact is as it relates to their aspirations and afflictions.
each aspiration that you help a prospect realize should have a financial impact. Simply put, make the case for the financial effects of engaging your products and services whenever possible.
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The right story or case study can be a powerful demonstrator of impact and a strong positive influence on the ultimate sale. 6. Demonstrate Impact Tangibly: The more you can make the
impact tangible, the stronger the case for the impact will be. In essence, you need to paint a picture for them so they can see, as tangibly as you can depict it, what is going to change for them if they engage your products and services.
In the next section, we will show you how to approach painting this picture of their future state, thus creating for them a new reality.
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Success Factor #4
Success Factor #4: Paint a Picture of the New Reality
Since you are selling something complex, prospects often have a hard time knowing exactly what they are buying and what value they will get in return. One of the most important skills in selling complex products and services is to
Become the Renoir of the Complex Sale: Paint a Picture of the New Reality
Whatever your complex product or service may be, you must be able to show your prospect that working with you will somehow change their world for the better. In other words, show them how you will create a new reality with
them.
To do this well, you need to:
Translate your solution into a case for moving forward with you
Paint the picture of the new reality so they can understand it and its
value
help prospects understand exactly what outcomes they get as a result of working with you.
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1. Establish the New Reality Benchmark: In the end of a wellmanaged sales process, your job is to create a new reality that will be the best for your customer, given their specific aspirations and afflictions and the impact of doing (or not doing) something about them. This process can start even before you have engaged your complete needs discovery and solution crafting process. Ask them what they want the world to look like once your work is done.
Questions that get the prospect envisioning the future are a good way to get the creative juices flowing.
Don't be surprised if the prospects first answer to these questions is, I don't know. If this happens, do not jump right in. A little silence indicates that youre listening, and theyll often start thinking out loud if you give them the room to do so.
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3. Translate the New Reality: Whatever the new reality is, you need to communicate it to the customer.
For example, you might tell them they will:
Save 22%, or $1.2 million on costs of XYZ Widgets Improve their cycle times by 13 days, cutting out major inefficiencies in their operational process Set up new operations for them in a new city that will improve quality levels by 17%
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4. Paint the Picture: It is now time to put the new reality into your
proposal to the prospect. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a chart, a graph, or a table is worth at least that many words and probably more. The goal is to paint a compelling picture. You do not have to rely on just one picture. As much as is appropriate, you can present the new reality in both in qualitative (descriptive or conceptual) terms as well as quantitative (financial or other numerical-based measure). Purchasing complex products and services can be as difficult as selling them. It is tough to get a handle on what to buy because it is difficult to differentiate between competing providers and their solutions. For the buyer, understanding and communicating to their colleagues the value of moving forward is where the difficulties often surface.
If you follow RAIN SellingSM and paint the picture of a compelling new reality, your prospects will know the solution is you.
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Success Factor #5
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Why Do You Talk Too Much? Many sellers fall into the talk too much trap' for one or more reasons: I need to show my expertise I like to hear myself speak I get nervous, so I talk I have no plan or objective I easily get distracted I don't talk too much, I am lively The key is to understand why you talk too much. That way you can develop a personal plan to cut down on the soliloquies.
What Youre Not Hearing When Youre the One Doing All the Talking
Isn't it important for my prospects and customers to know what I know so they can understand what I can do for them?
This is a perfectly legitimate and common question. While its important to showcase your expert knowledge and articulate nature, here are 3 opportunities you can miss if you talk too much:
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If you do not give the prospect a chance to tell their story, they feel ignored, overwhelmed, and unheard.
This is not a very good way to start the relationship.
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conversations Think about balancing advocacy and inquiry Ask open-ended questions Become overtly conscious of your air time Practice your conversations Seek coaching Be genuine in your approach
We all know the more we listen to our customers, the more we can help them. So listen to your customers even before they are your customers. Ask open-ended questions.
And be wary of talking too much. Balancing advocacy and inquiry will help you win more customers.
Less is more.
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Success Factor #6
Success Factor #6: Build on the Foundation of Trust
The building blocks of a strong business relationship are: trust, need, solution, and value.
The stronger and broader the foundation of the relationship, the higher and sturdier your selling success.
The question then becomes, How do we build this foundation?
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1. Trust: Trust begins with the initial rapport that we develop with each
prospect. We need a certain amount of rapport just to get a conversation started. As the prospect begins to feel that we indeed are competent and professional, he or she will start to let us into their world.
2. Need: It is with this block that we find out what kind of needs our
prospect might have in our general area of expertise. Often these needs exhibit themselves as pain or afflictions. But they can also be a goal or aspiration for a brighter future (see success factor #2). In either case, your job is to uncover as much need as you can in order to develop a solution.
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4. Value: In order for your solution to be considered you must make the
value tangible. From working with you, what specific value will the customer gain? This value can be articulated in dollars, in efficiencies, or in quicker resolution of their problem. When you stack these blocks one on top of the other, you create and move up the sales relationship hierarchy.
Each subsequent step up the hierarchy needs to be broader than the one above it in order for you to be successful in selling.
Simply put, even if you develop a fair amount of trust but the uncovered needs and proposed solution are far beyond the trust level established in the early stages of the sale, your blocks will topple over and youll lose the sale:
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You close the deal and succeed with flying colors in your delivery of Phase 1. As you move on and propose
the remainder of the solution your trust block is now wide enough to support a more lucrative relationship.
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Success Factor #7
Ask yourself these six sales call planning questions before every sales conversation:
Sales people with written goals and plans succeed more often than those that dont.
If you find that you don't know enough about the situation yet, ask yourself what research you can do before the meeting so you can 1) move quickly through situational discovery that can bore a customer, and 2) demonstrate to him that you are the type of person that does his homework and goes the extra mile to make sure the customer gets the most value out of each contact with you.
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2. What are my goals for this prospect? Different goals for your
prospects will make for very different sales conversations. Questions you can ask yourself include: Is this a 'discovery' meeting in which we get to know each other and build rapport while learning how I can help? Is this a current customer to whom I am introducing a new set of solutions? Am I looking to cross sell or up-sell products and services because I see how they can add value to this customer?
Always enter the meeting with a clear goal for this particular client or prospect.
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With good preparation and call planning you can have your responses to 'objections' and tough questions ready when you need them.
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and have driven significant revenue growth in your organization through your skills as a rainmaker. What does it say? How
did you do it? What were the defining moments? To give you a little push, we have started the article for you on the following page (and provided a happy ending)
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Contact us to learn how we can help you improve sales performance. Call 508-405-0438, visit www.RainGroup.com, or email info@raingroup.com.
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