“There’s nothing wrong with getting a ‘no’ answer on a purchase decision as long you get that answer early in the sales process.” This admonition came from a VP of Sales I worked with. He wasn’t being glib. “No” answers are a sales fact of life. The VP recognized the strategic importance of knowing how to vet opportunities before the scarce resources of time and money were committed.
The common term for this process is qualification. What’s uncommon is thinking about qualification from a strategic perspective, and then managing the associated risk. Many companies leave qualification to the tactical discretion of the sales force. The results are clearly mixed. Some salespeople languish by pursuing unknowingly risky opportunities that other salespeople might quickly reject. Some salespeople may readily reject opportunities that might be valuable for the company because their commission plans don’t provide an adequate reward. In any case, when a sales force is experiencing disparate achievement results, qualification processes should be on the radar as one probable cause.
The symptoms will be manifest in statements like these, taken from my own selling past:
“They would have purchased, but they told me they couldn’t afford my proposed solution.”
“They selected a vendor whose Senior VP is the brother-in-law of their VP of Operations.”
“They postponed their decision. It’s not a priority for them now.”
“They can’t buy anything until they replace their legacy IT infrastructure. They expect to change over in about two years.”
Successful sales organizations understand that vetting the best sales opportunities requires the same strategic visioning and thought as how to invest in new product development or how to fund expansion. Why? Because selling requires the commitment of significant scarce resources—mainly time and money. Companies that excel at managing sales risk early in the process possess a key advantage over those that don’t.
How do companies formulate qualification strategies and the questions that follow? They begin with understanding the value their products and services provide. That understanding yields insight into what prospect companies and opportunities might benefit from them the most. Those insights are converted to profiles of organizations or persons, and those profiles can be further described by more detailed attributes. From there, qualification questions can be created.
Executives should ask themselves “Do we have a set of qualification questions that is consistently effective for identifying the most valuable opportunities for us to pursue? What are the greatest selling risks that we face? How do our top performers qualify opportunities? Are we disqualifying potentially valuable opportunities? And last—but not least—“Does our sales incentive plan encourage our sales team to pursue opportunities that are valuable to our organization? ”
But building effective qualification doesn’t stop there. Qualification questions are never static; they are refined by reviewing sales losses and wins. For losses, the top question is “What didn’t we know at the time the purchase decision was made?” (With that in mind, it’s not difficult to determine the questions that should have been asked early from the list of sales outcomes above.) For every win, the questions should start with “Why did this customer buy?”
What are the best questions to ask? In over twenty years of selling of high technology products and services, I uncovered risks in sales outcomes that can be mitigated through asking the following set of questions, which I term the Four Green Lights. (Note that all questions have a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer.)
1. Solution fit: Does my prospective customer have a strategic challenge or operational issue that can be solved using my product or service?
2. Access: Can I get access to the person or people who have the authority to commit and spend the financial resources to procure my product or service?
3. Money: Will my prospective customer pay me what I am likely to charge for my product or service?
4. Timeframe: Will my prospective customer purchase from me within a timeframe that matches my planning horizon?
How should your company manage the risk? The answer depends on your appetite for it. Even four “yes” answers doesn’t begin to address all the sales risks that could be encountered. But one or more “no” answers might represent a risk level that is clearly higher than a company can financially accept. For example, if I don’t have access to the people most influential in making a purchase decision, the likelihood of a successful sales outcome is very small (based on my experience). Today, I wouldn’t pursue such an opportunity, so it’s imperative that I uncover that condition through early qualification. A situational analysis of your company’s competitive position might cause you to eliminate some of these qualification questions and add others.
How does your organization view the connection between strategy, risk management, and sales opportunity qualification? Are your processes related? Do your qualification steps support your business strategies? What do you believe are some best practices?
Showing posts with label lead qualification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lead qualification. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Friday, August 15, 2008
Don't Bother Me With Social Media Strategy--I Have to Sell Something
By Andrew Rudin, Outside Technologies, Inc.
It’s old-school thinking, but I hear it all the time:
“If we can just get our product in front of the right people, it sells itself.” Or “we just need to get our foot in the door!”
To carry out that mission, does the image of a money-motivated, aggressive salesperson jump into your mind? Maybe a salesperson who “has the right contacts?”—codespeak for someone with a shortcut to a decision maker, obviating the need to perform other sales and marketing fundamentals.
What fundamentals am I talking about? Knowing where your company’s voice must heard, and developing strategies to get in the conversations.
Until just a few years ago, we assumed conversations meant face-to-face communication. In a group setting, we needed a few drinks along with great icebreaker patter to help us get into a dialog.
We don't make those assumptions anymore. With Web 2.0, or Social Media, conversations aren’t just face-to-face. Technology plays a big role, and it means everything to salespeople who can’t afford to wait for an invitation to join in.
For salespeople, why has participation in Social Media conversations become so important? First, through online conversations, people discuss problems well in advance of the salesperson’s first call. In Social Media conversations, as with face-to-face conversations, questions are raised. Insight develops and becomes shared. Social connections are made inside and outside of organizational boundaries. Patterns of influence are established. Issues are aired and ideas are exchanged. What’s different from face-to-face conversations is that in many cases, the discourse is completely open and public! In a metaphorical sense, as a salesperson, at what point would you want to pop a breath mint and sidle up to enter the conversation? If you said “when I’m telemarketing from a prospect list,” you might want to examine how your strategy pits against your social-media savvy competitor, who has participated in the discussion since it was a wee, little thought.
Second, today’s social-media conversations are larger than we ever imagined—called a network effect, according to John Todor, an expert in using Social Media for business strategies. In one example he mentions, “over 50,000 people (sites) have RSS feeds to ezinearticles.com and many of these sites re-post content and are picked up by thousands of others through their RSS feeds.” You’d need to shake hands very fast to make that many contacts at your next business council meeting.
What does this mean? Three things. First, companies must re-think the boundaries of their sales process. Those that have defined the process as beginning before the salesperson’s first call have a healthy advantage over those stuck using the old-school paradigm in which selling begins with the first prospecting call. Second, salespeople—not just Marketing—must adopt technology tools that provide the Internet equivalent of joining a conversation. Reciprocally, Marketing must recognize that the “one-to-many” vs. “one-to-one” delineation of Marketing vs. Sales blurs with Social Media. It’s not heresy for salespeople to initiate and manage one-to-many conversations. Third, Social Media shifts control of conversations outside of selling organizations. Salespeople must learn how to manage when that control is relinquished. They must learn new ways to use Social Media conversations to gain insight and exposure. What change could be more profound for those of us who grew up selling when we owned the information and were constantly coached in better ways to direct discussions?
Building sales and marketing organizations ready for this challenge requires shifting energy away from leading discussions through features and benefits messages to ones in which meaningful questions are asked. Social Media’s power can be fully harnessed when organizations discover how to exploit signals from these conversations for new strategic or tactical directions.
When it comes competing more effectively on today’s sales gridiron, which emerging Social Media technology tools can salespeople take into their own hands and use? Stay tuned. That’s the subject of my next blog
It’s old-school thinking, but I hear it all the time:
“If we can just get our product in front of the right people, it sells itself.” Or “we just need to get our foot in the door!”
To carry out that mission, does the image of a money-motivated, aggressive salesperson jump into your mind? Maybe a salesperson who “has the right contacts?”—codespeak for someone with a shortcut to a decision maker, obviating the need to perform other sales and marketing fundamentals.
What fundamentals am I talking about? Knowing where your company’s voice must heard, and developing strategies to get in the conversations.
Until just a few years ago, we assumed conversations meant face-to-face communication. In a group setting, we needed a few drinks along with great icebreaker patter to help us get into a dialog.
We don't make those assumptions anymore. With Web 2.0, or Social Media, conversations aren’t just face-to-face. Technology plays a big role, and it means everything to salespeople who can’t afford to wait for an invitation to join in.
For salespeople, why has participation in Social Media conversations become so important? First, through online conversations, people discuss problems well in advance of the salesperson’s first call. In Social Media conversations, as with face-to-face conversations, questions are raised. Insight develops and becomes shared. Social connections are made inside and outside of organizational boundaries. Patterns of influence are established. Issues are aired and ideas are exchanged. What’s different from face-to-face conversations is that in many cases, the discourse is completely open and public! In a metaphorical sense, as a salesperson, at what point would you want to pop a breath mint and sidle up to enter the conversation? If you said “when I’m telemarketing from a prospect list,” you might want to examine how your strategy pits against your social-media savvy competitor, who has participated in the discussion since it was a wee, little thought.
Second, today’s social-media conversations are larger than we ever imagined—called a network effect, according to John Todor, an expert in using Social Media for business strategies. In one example he mentions, “over 50,000 people (sites) have RSS feeds to ezinearticles.com and many of these sites re-post content and are picked up by thousands of others through their RSS feeds.” You’d need to shake hands very fast to make that many contacts at your next business council meeting.
What does this mean? Three things. First, companies must re-think the boundaries of their sales process. Those that have defined the process as beginning before the salesperson’s first call have a healthy advantage over those stuck using the old-school paradigm in which selling begins with the first prospecting call. Second, salespeople—not just Marketing—must adopt technology tools that provide the Internet equivalent of joining a conversation. Reciprocally, Marketing must recognize that the “one-to-many” vs. “one-to-one” delineation of Marketing vs. Sales blurs with Social Media. It’s not heresy for salespeople to initiate and manage one-to-many conversations. Third, Social Media shifts control of conversations outside of selling organizations. Salespeople must learn how to manage when that control is relinquished. They must learn new ways to use Social Media conversations to gain insight and exposure. What change could be more profound for those of us who grew up selling when we owned the information and were constantly coached in better ways to direct discussions?
Building sales and marketing organizations ready for this challenge requires shifting energy away from leading discussions through features and benefits messages to ones in which meaningful questions are asked. Social Media’s power can be fully harnessed when organizations discover how to exploit signals from these conversations for new strategic or tactical directions.
When it comes competing more effectively on today’s sales gridiron, which emerging Social Media technology tools can salespeople take into their own hands and use? Stay tuned. That’s the subject of my next blog
Friday, May 23, 2008
Asking to Send Literature is not Lead Qualification
Here's a link to my latest blog on CustomerThink:
http://www.customerthink.com/blog/asking_send_literature_not_lead_qualification
http://www.customerthink.com/blog/asking_send_literature_not_lead_qualification
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
