One of the worst Sales 1.0 habits is the tendency for salespeople to rush to prescribe their solution before properly diagnosing the issue, and without ensuring that the prospect is convinced that it is worth spending money on to solve.
It’s one of the primary reasons why losing to a decision to “do nothing” is now one of the most common outcomes to traditional B2B sales campaigns. It’s no wonder that - according to CSO Insights and others - Sales 1.0 win rates have been declining.
A Key Qualification Criteria
That’s why the most effective Sales 2.0 salespeople focus instead on ensuring that they can help the prospect to establish a compelling economic reason for change before they invest a great deal of time and effort showing how they can address the issue.
Making a successful economic case for change involves establishing provable, measurable negative consequences for allowing the status quo to continue - and developing a solution-independent financial justification for dealing with the issue.
Creating an Economic Case for Change
Creating the economic case for change can only be effectively achieved as a partnership between the prospect and the vendor, and involves answering the following questions:
- What’s changed to disturb the prospect’s status quo?
- What trigger event caused the prospect to start searching for a solution?
- Why does the issue need to be dealt with now, rather than later?
- Who else within the prospect organisation is going to be affected?
- What would be the consequences of failing to deal with the issue?
- How can these consequences be expressed in financial terms?
In fact, many of the most successful Sales 2.0 organisations insist that these questions are addressed by the sales person before allocating significant resources to the opportunity.
Our Approach
We work with clients to establish an exploratory questioning framework that enables sales people to work collaboratively with prospects to establish a compelling case for change - and to implement qualification rules that prevent poorly qualified opportunities from being pursued.
We could help your sales and marketing organisation to achieve the same. To find out more, please call us on +44 118 975 0595, email us at info@inflexion-point.com, or contact us here.