Why Buyers Have Lost Their Ability to Reach Decisions Survey today’s Business-to-Business (B2B) salespeople, you will most likely hear rumblings that selling is more arduous, takes more effort, with more drawn out, longer sales cycles than ever before. What happened? Did customer really lose the ability to make decisions? How can this be addressed by Read More
Sales Process
Implementing a best practice sales process has a positive effect on win rates, forecast accuracy, and productivity per sales person. This is especially true for companies with expansion strategies. But, a sales process is only as effective as the sales people’s adoption of it.
Is getting your salespeople to change their processes like trying to get a 2-year-old to eat his broccoli? You are not alone.
Even if it’s obvious the current processes are time-consuming, costly, and unproductive, it’s difficult to successfully motivate salespeople to implement new ways of performing.
Throughout my sales career, I had prospects I was certain were going to sign on the dotted line…
And then the deal fell through.
Disappointed and surprised, I moved on, lamenting the loss of that potential client, and the fattened commission that would have come along with it.
After a few of these happenings, I began to analyze each instance, and realized there were signs I missed that these deals were going awry. Over time, I became savvy in recognizing these “clues,” and adept at circumventing the sale from going down the drain.
Typically, there were seven signs the deal was falling apart. Here they are, along with valuable intel on how to save them:
Ever since I was promoted to sales management in the late ‘90s, I’ve been confronted with the measurement of weighted pipeline and forecast methodologies.
When I first started out as a sales manager, I had a pretty good close rate – with one record quarter after another.
Until one devastating quarter… where almost 50% of my team’s deals either slipped or were lost for good.
It crushed us.
We couldn’t make any sense of it. After all, we hadn’t done anything different.
I spent days trying to find out what went wrong… until my manager pulled me aside and asked me one of the most eye-opening questions of my career:
Rizan, in all the deals that slipped, how many of them did you meet the Economic Buyer?
The answer was clear:
After a quick check I was able to find a direct link between meeting the Economic Buyer and whether we won or lost the deal.
You may have a killer pain, a strong champion, and powerful metrics. But if the the EB isn’t on your side, there’s a big chance your deal won’t close.
In today’s article, we cover:
In our last article, we talked about how to discover real pain points – ones that will drive customers to take action.
Today, we want to talk about Champions – the people in your accounts that drive the projects meant to solve these pains.
A Champion is the person within your client’s organization that will sell on your behalf when you’re not there.
They will guide you through the decision making process, introduce you to key players and decision makers, and alert you when things go wrong.
They are probably the most important person in your sales campaign, and they’ll fight hard for your cause.
So, how do you identify the right potential champions? And how do you discover what’s driving them, so you can build them up and leverage their power and influence?
In our post, Identifying the Real Pain, we talked about what qualifies as ‘real,’ deal-closing pain points and what doesn’t.
We received great replies from our readers stating that customers many times don’t disclose this kind of information so easily.
Well, it’s not an easy task.
If you want to find pain points, you need to uncover them – inch by inch – and earn the right to learn about your customer’s pain.
And the key to developing customer rapport…
There is no deal without a pain.
Pain is the driver. The ultimate reason why customers will act and buy your solution in the end.
It may not be obvious to begin with, but there is always a trigger that gets decision makers buy:
Something they need to solve, grow, improve, or reduce.
However, too many sales people don’t know what the real pain is or how to find it.
In this article, we’ll cover exactly what qualifies as a real pain, what doesn’t, along with real world examples of pain points that were strong enough to close a deal.
There’s no question:
Improving the effectiveness of sales teams is a top priority for sales managers everywhere.
But there’s only 24 hours in day, and a million (and one) things you have to stay on top of:
Maybe you’re facing more “No’s” than ever. Or the churn rate of your sales people is climbing higher and higher.
But you don’t have the time to deal with that, because you’re stretched to your limits hiring new reps, managing the pipe and making sure your team is closing deals and hitting their numbers.
It’s more than most managers can handle.
That’s why I teamed up with Steve Ammann, Managing Director of the Sales MEDDIC Group, to put together some action items to help sales managers overcome the number one problem facing every sales team:
There’s no doubt:
The right sales process can make the difference between a sales team that’s shattering its goals vs. one struggling to hit quota.
That’s why we scoured the internet for you to find the best sales process information out there and created:
Sales Process: The Definitive Guide to a Higher Win Rate
This is the go-to resource for anyone looking to build, improve, or transform their sales process.
