Three bad habits you might need to break.
By Sandler Training
Your prospect interaction strategies, or lack thereof, have a greater impact on your chance of closing a sale than the actual features, pricing and benefits of your products and services. Good strategy should become a habit. But bad strategies, or not having a strategy at all, can also easily become habits! We’ve recognized three “bad habits” that are common but also breakable and replaceable with practice!
No. 1: Explaining “what” rather than finding out “why”
Many salespeople, those without an end strategy in mind, begin by talking about their company’s capabilities, their experience in the prospect’s industry, their length of time in business. They continue with a listing of their products and services, along with the accompanying features, benefits, functions, advantages, etc. What’s wrong with that, you might ask? It wastes time – yours and theirs – if the salesperson isn’t coming from a place of first finding out what the prospect truly needs, if anything, from those long, wordy lists of products and services, features and benefits.
These salespeople are afraid that if they give away too much information, the prospect, fully armed with knowledge, will have the ammunition to fix the problems themselves without the salesperson’s product or service, OR will take the information to a competitor who will inevitably undercut their price.
What these salespeople fail to recognize is that there’s an important difference between discussing solutions and revealing the specifics of implementing them. It’s necessary to discuss concepts, especially if it helps prospects reveal new perspectives on their challenges; prospects have to “buy” into the true need for the solution before they’ll “buy” the product or service to address it.
Prospects don’t just want to know how much you can DO, but how well you can FIX their pain. You must be absolutely clear about how your solution meets their need. Without making a clear connection between your “what” and their “why” you’ll lose the opportunity to a salesperson who does.
No. 2: Not asking enough questions or the right questions
Therefore, the key to closing more sales is uncovering pain, or a level of discomfort on the prospect’s part that’s enough to inspire action. You’re not creating the discomfort, you’re shining a spotlight on something that already exists and letting them tell you about it.
A simple and effective way to uncover a prospect’s pain is “reversing,” or answering a question with a question, with a strategy in mind. Your goal is to dig deeper, mining for the prospect’s pain. Reversing actually helps you find out if they actually have pain or not!
Let’s say a doctor is thinking of adding a lab to his practice and asks you for products, equipment and services you would recommend for a start-up lab. Many reps would instantly jump at the chance to list all the lab equipment, assays, tests, cabinetry, disposables and add-on products they carry. But we recommend you respond with something like, “That’s a good question. We carry a wide variety of lab products, and it would take a great deal of time to go over all of it. Can you tell me more about why you’re thinking of adding a lab?”
The doctor explains that he previously offered some lab services that just didn’t make sense for the practice. Would you be tempted at this point to explain the intricacies of billing, which tests are profitable, which are the most performed? Instead, reverse again with a question of your own.
“I’m sorry if you experienced a loss of any kind. Would you be comfortable enough to tell me a little bit more about it?” After a couple reverses, the doc starts to share a personal experience. The story involves giving up an exam room to have the space to create a lab. It also created changes in personnel, in hours and in time spent seeing patients.
Now that you have a little more information, keep digging and pose questions like, “How did that impact you?” or “What did the personnel changes look like?” or “How did seeing fewer patients make you feel?
The doctor might share personal impacts such as having to let go of a staff member to afford a lab tech, getting up earlier and missing gym time to accommodate lab hours, or feeling disconnected from the community by seeing fewer patients.
Do you see the strategy in this type of questioning? To relieve pain, you must get the prospect to reveal pain, and to relive it on a personal level. Now you can ask good questions about the prospect’s budget and other time and personnel resources, and providing answers on the solutions you have to fit their needs.
No. 3: Being uncomfortable talking about budget (and that’s not just money)
Some salespeople will over complicate their offers. They believe that they must present complex solutions in order to establish value. That is, they think the more elements and layers in the offer, the more the prospect will perceive the value and effectiveness of it.
Other salespeople over complicate the offer as an attempt to justify the “price tag.” They include a number of “value added” elements that aren’t essential to what the prospect said they need; they’re included to artificially up the perceived value of the offer.
The truth is that prospects appreciate simple and concise solutions and presentations. Simplicity makes it easy for prospects to connect your solution to their needs. The easier you make it for them to see that connection, the more likely you are to make the sale.
Costing out the problem (COP) is an advanced sales technique in which you use facts and numbers and questions to help prospects discover exactly what their issue is costing them, in hard dollars, then using that expense to leverage into action their emotional pain with the current situation.
When prospects see their challenge in terms of how much it’s costing and will continue to cost them, that annoys them. Annoyance is a negative emotion. Negative emotions are in the category of pain. Pain compels people to buy.
So if you find that your strategy is that you’re engaging in one or more of these “common” habits, consider this: common habits are for common salespeople who are satisfied with common results. If disappointing results have become a habit, perhaps it’s time to change them!
Interested in building better habits both professionally and personally? To schedule a complimentary 30-minute advisory session on questioning techniques, goal-setting for success, or other sales or sales management challenge, send your request and contact information to SalesTips@repertoiremag.com with “Free Consultation” in the subject line.
Sandler Training: With over 250 local training centers around the globe, Sandler is the worldwide leader for sales, management, and customer service training. We help individuals and teams from Fortune 500 companies to independent producers dramatically improve sales, while reducing operational and leadership friction.
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