Ripple Effects & Natural Disasters
How well do you know your target customer?
Do you know their pain points?
Do you know the cause and impact of these pain points?
As time continues to increase in value and become a premium people are not willing to part with easily, it is becoming more important for sales reps to ensure that when you are with a customer you are adding maximum value. The client is, after all, exchanging their precious time for the value that they are hoping you will give them in terms of service, industry knowledge, direction, insights, etcetera.
There is a growing trend, particularly when selling to larger organisations, where the decision makers are increasingly time poor, stretched across wider area, with greater expectations upon them to do more with less. When dealing with these people, they expect more from a salesperson. Your meeting formats need to be more than just following the stock standard old format of asking basic questions and following the old sales process. What they are looking for is somebody that can not only think deeper but also think for them.
What does this look like? It looks like being able to approach a customer with insights around the challenges they are likely to have, and an understanding of the common causes of these challenges. Additionally they expect the sales rep to understand the industry they are serving and selling into and to also understand the impact of taking the rep’s advice (& product or service) or of not doing something. Sometimes the lack of action has ripple effects through an organisation. For example, in my field if the problem is poor conversion rates, the cause could be poor lead quality, untrained sales reps, wrong target market focus, incorrect KPI’s, etc and the ripple effect looks like a lack of cash flow, burning through leads, time poor staff who are stretched and tired . Other times not dealing with a problem can lead to an avoidable disaster - H&S areas are full of examples of this. In my experience companies failing to take action in areas like key account management can be faced with the ‘sudden’ avoidable disaster of losing their best client.
A simple way to upskill your sales team and ensure they are adding value is to create a “Problem Identification Chart.” This has 3 columns and, with your ideal client in mind, you look at 1) All the problems you know these businesses are likely to have e.g. Poor conversion ratio 2)The impact the continuation of this problem has on the clients business e.g. Cash flow problems and 3) The possible causes of this problem e.g. Lack of sales rep training.
Having done this, it empowers you to approach a client and “sell backwards” and help the client “sell themselves” on action that is needed. (topics for a later blog). For now, create your own problem identification chart.
Here’s to your success!
