“There’s really three fundamental areas where the sales rep has failed to make a connection or has just believed what they’d been told rather than pressure testing it, which is not a condemnation of salespeople.” – Chad Sanderson in today’s Tip 94
How do you drive urgency?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Chad Sanderson. Chad is a managing partner for ValueSelling Associates. As an award-winning sales, marketing, and business strategy consultant, Chad has demonstrated over 20 years of proven results in driving revenue growth, facilitating market expansions and building high-performance teams. Most recently Chad was honored as a Top 5 Emerging Training Leader by Training Magazine and won a Gold award for Social Selling Initiative of the Year at the 13th Annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Chad is also the host of The B2B Revenue Executive Experience, a weekly podcast. Here he is with today’s tip:
Chad Sanderson: Urgency in the sales process, one of the things that we get asked about quite a bit. I often have sales reps and even executives coming up and asking, how are sales reps supposed to tap into urgency in the sales process? How do they effectively ensure a deal keeps moving at the speed that we wanted to? How do we keep an account from going dark? And so when we dig into this, what we see is there’s really three fundamental areas where the sales rep has failed to make a connection or has just believed what they’d been told rather than pressure testing it, which is not a condemnation of salespeople. We’re all moving extremely fast. We want to believe that the perspectives that are being shared with us are accurate. It’s easy enough, a kind of trap to fall into. But when we look at urgency, there’s three things that we really want to focus on. Breakdown as follows:
First and foremost, we want to understand what is the overall organizational objective. It doesn’t matter what level someone’s at, it doesn’t matter if their C Suite or manager or below, if they’re in finance or marketing, it doesn’t matter what they’re doing because everything they’re doing, regardless of role, is designed to roll up so the organization can achieve an overarching organizational objective. There’s really only a handful of reasons that organizations do anything, right? Revenue, quality, maybe CX, shareholder value, maybe it’s a margin play, MNA. There’s really just a handful of things that organizations target their objectives. Even in the nonprofit sector, it can be as simple as increasing membership, adhering to a mission, right? And achieving funding objectives. So, really what we need to do first is understand what is driving that organization. This has to come from research. Research on our end, not extensive research. We should be able to do this and 10 to 15 minutes of research on an organization tops to get an idea of what it is that the organization is focused on. Second, once we have that, we need to understand from the person’s perspective that we are speaking with. What is the number one time-bound and quantifiable thing they are focused on today, which has come to them, been assigned to them by someone who believes it is something that must be resolved for the organization to achieve its goals. So if you think about marketing individuals versus sales individuals versus IT individuals, each of them have things they have to do to fulfill the role duties of their job, fill the roles and responsibilities, but the things that were assigned that come down that people are focused on are typically the number one thing or a business issue that will resolve back to whatever that objective is that we uncovered. Even if the prospect we’re talking to does not know how that works or does not understand how that flows back up, they may not have that view, which is why for us, number one we have to understand the context. We have to understand the organizational objective and then when we get down into the organization, we have to understand that time bound quantifiable thing that person is focused on. Everyone will have a different business issue. Everyone will have a different view of how that impacts the organization, but everybody in an organization will have at least one thing that they are currently focused on that is time-bound and quantifiable. If we don’t have a time component, if we don’t have a quantifiable element and we don’t understand how that resolves to a larger business objective or organizational objective, then we have no way to drive urgency to create anxiety if necessary in order to ensure that the person we’re working with is focused on working with us to achieve a common goal. Time is the element that we often see left out. Quantifiable is another challenge and 9 times out of 10 what we see or that sales reps get focused on the problems that someone is viewing as keeping them from achieving this larger business issue that resolves back up to a business objective. We get sucked into those problems and we want to believe that if we solve those problems, we can get the funding for our initiative. They can get the budget necessary to buy from us. Yet we always forget to ask one simple word “Why”. If there’s a problem that someone is talking about, why has that problem important and drive it back up until you can find a time-bound, quantifiable, measurable, business issue the results to a business objective, and then put together a plan with the customer in writing to hold them accountable. And you’ll find that urgency is not as tricky to master as you might think.
Scott Ingram: How do you drive urgency? Share your ideas and insights at DailySales.Tips/94. That’s also where you’ll find links to all things Chad Sanderson including a link to subscribe to his podcast: The B2B Revenue Executive Experience.
Then come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Jeff Bajorek.