The most successful sales professionals are able to take the tools provided and leverage them for higher sales and commissions. The question becomes, what are those tools and how do I get my hands on them? Let me begin with a simple sales process. There are seven stages in my simple process.
- Qualify
- Discovery
- Prove of value / presentation
- Proposal / Business Case
- Due diligence
- Close
- Post sale follow-up
During the qualification phase, a sales professional must ask questions to determine if the prospect meets your marketing criteria. In other words are they a viable candidate to sell to. There are many tools to help you determine this beginning with Business Intelligence Systems like InsideView or ZoomInfo for example. They will tell you at once the annual revenue, number of employees and latest news out there. In addition they will match the people in the organization to your LinkedIn account, Outlook or Gmail accounts and other sources of contacts like Facebook. Obviously a web search and review of the website it a good idea as well.
Once you identify qualified prospects try a Value Hypothesis to open the door. This document is basically a quick ROI to be sent ahead of a phone call. It should make assumptions based on similar size organizations and laid out in a simple graphically rich format. It should contain at least three sections: Issues summary complete with estimated values delivered, Cost of status quo and decision delay, and a basic summary of economic impact. Use this tool to both open a door and do a quick ROI when you need to communicate estimated values delivered.
Assuming the prospect is qualified you will need to perform a discovery session. (Perhaps many) Discovery is I believe one of the most critical steps in the sales process. You really only have a short period of time to get all of the data you need to determine if you can help this prospect. Once you pass the point where you are now selling, returning and asking more of the discovery type questions makes you look incompetent and even sometimes desperate. Good discovery tools are a key success factor. It is important to be consistent across your sales team. Use automation like ROI Selling to capture the key financial information and help you determine issues, cost of status quo, and whether you are able to resolve the prospects issues. Here is where ROI based questions are important. If you can measure the cost of status quo and monetize your value you are ahead of the competition who showed up with a legal pad and asked questions willy nilly.
Proof of value and the presentation requires you to demonstrate you can resolve the issues your prospect is facing. Here is the point I tried to make earlier. Once you move to the presentation phase, you lose your opportunity to identify additional issues through demonstration. You ought to be focused on the issues you have identified and show proof you can resolve them by reducing their costs, avoiding other costs or improving the prospects revenue. The presentation phase is where you can use Economic Impact or ROI tools to establish goals, measure cost of decision delay and cost of status quo. Have the discussion on threshold for pain or tipping points. This critical phase of the sale is basically your last opportunity to prove to your prospect you are the vendor to buy from. Once you provide the proof and the price, the prospects interest will likely begin to wane. From here on in, you have no more cards to pull to spike interest. This is why without great discovery tools and an economic impact model, you lose to status quo.
The presentation phase of a sale is the one opportunity for you to reconfirm issues, pains and goals that were determined in the discovery phase. It also provides a forum to gain agreement on the current cost and threshold for pain, or tipping point. Once you have gained agreement and discussed tipping points, demonstrate your value. Remember to use your discovery document to guide your presentation. Stay focused on your resolution. Don’t waste your prospects time on “cool” features.
In the Proposal Phase (Business Case) it is critical to restate your findings along with your solution. Be sure to include economic impact analysis. Look for metrics that your impact that your prospect cares most about. For example, if your prospect has a heavy payroll and you impact labor costs, be sure to demonstrate your impact on revenue per employee, or payroll as a percentage of revenue. Both are great metrics labor intensive organizations use to measure their financial health.
Due diligence is usually done toward the end of a sale. If you utilize a 360 degree ROI tool, then you can use the data that you have collected over the years to share with your prospect. If you do not, be sure to have your references lined up, and your team ready to answer any questions.
Closing a sale is sometimes one of the most difficult things for a sales professional to do. So many things have to go right for you to win the sale; identify issues you are able to resolve, demonstrate and prove your value, beat the competition, provide a comprehensive Business Case, Negotiate a contract and of course deliver the solution you promised. A lot of stars must line up. Use your discovery tools, Value Hypothesis, and Business Case as guides to keep your prospect focused on your value not your cost. Keep the prospect engaged with reports that spell out the issues you are resolving, the value are delivering and set their expectations for success
Post-sale follow-up should consist of a visit to your prospect between nine and twelve months after their deployment of your solution to measure your progress (success). We use the very same tools you used in discovery to measure their current situation and compare it to their situation when you first performed discovery. This exercise will help improve and enhance your customer relationship, provide a means of measuring success and offer potential revenue opportunities. Simply stated, it is a good practice to get into. Also it keeps the prospect focused on why they bought from you in the first place.
Here is the bottom line: Use a Value Hypothesis, Discovery tools and Value estimation tools to gather important prospect information and monetize your value. Then use a Business Case to present a proposed solution and a 360 Degree ROI to perform a follow up session after the implementation is completed.
(from: http://topsalesworld.com/blog/resources/successful-sales-professionals-use-toolshere-are-the-best/)
