“In today’s session, we’re going to talk a bit about what this looks like from an organization perspective and most of us, we’ll talk about this in the context of a sales process and I’ll use the catalyst sale process, which is our traditional solution oriented approach.” – Mike Simmons in today’s Tip 65
Are we actually talking with the right person?
Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!
Mike’s LinkedIn
Catalyst Sale
Mike on Daily Sales Tips 56 – Mapping the Customer Journey
Mike on Daily Sales Tips 57 – Mapping the Sales Process
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips Podcast and I’m your host with a compromised voice, Scott Ingram. Today, Mike Simmons is back to share the last part of his three-part series that we started in tips 56 and 57. There are also videos that go with all of these, so I encourage you to click over to DailySales.Tips/65 where we have the whole series linked together with the videos.
Mike Simmons: This is Mike Simmons again from Catalyst Sale. We went through previous sessions on this. We talked a bit about the customer journey, like how does the customer go through their decision-making process. Then we went in and we talked a bit about how do we as sales reps continue to execute in a repeatable format, and this was the sales rep approach where we identify, we engage, we establish objectives or next steps, and then we call folks to action and we continue that looping process. In today’s session, we’re going to talk a bit about what this looks like from an organization perspective and most of us, we’ll talk about this in the context of a sales process and I’ll use the catalyst sale process, which is our traditional, a solution-oriented approach. You know the first step in the process for us is validate. That’s to determine do we really, are we actually talking with the right person? Do we see an opportunity for there to be a business engagement between our organization and that organization? The next piece is qualify and a common mistake that people make here is they qualify from the perspective of trying to qualify people out. Yeah, making sure that you spend time with the right people is really important, but qualification from by perspective is really more about understanding the Who, the What, the Why, the Where, the When and the How of that person, their story, their organization’s story. Sometimes this requires getting that information from multiple people in the organization, but the second piece here is qualification. The third piece is fit. Once we get into this stage, what we’re looking for is we’re saying, based on what I understand about the customer’s problems, can I actually solve their problem? Does my solution fit? The piece that follows that is feasibility, and these are if-then statements, but feasibility is if we can solve the problem, can the customer actually implement? Because imagine one of those situations where you sell something to a customer, you dilute, you’re delivering a solution and they’re not able to execute either because of some technical issue or some security issue or some other kind of issue they’re not able to implement. So fit is a looking at it from an internal perspective. Can we solve the problem? Feasibility is can they actually implement? Then we move into proposal. This is where we take everything that we’ve learned so far about the customer, about their organization, about the problems that exist, our suggested solution. We put that together into a package, a story that will highlight how we will help them execute and include things like pricing. Then ideally after successful contract negotiations, we moved to closed one and then we go to confirmation. Confirmation happens after the sale. This is that activity that a lot of us miss on. We forget to go back to the customer and confirm that we delivered on what we said we’re going to deliver and I know most of you guys are in organizations where you may transition that over to customer success or you may move it over to another segment of the organization. It’s really important to still go back and make sure you did what you said you were going to do and if you didn’t do what you said you were going to do, now you’ve got a chance to fix it. If you did do what you said you’re going to do, here’s your opportunity to ask for a referral. So at confirmation, this is where I like to go in and ask for referrals and you’ll see my spelling is almost as bad as my English, but we’ll go through that real quick. Its validation, qualification, fit feasibility, and this feasibility is kind of an if then this is some back and forth. This is really where pricing comes up first. We don’t jump to make the mistake of going right from validation to “Hey, we’re going to go ahead and give a proposal.” This is wrong. If we do that, that’s going to create some mistakes and then to tie all three of these together, the distinction between the customer journey, the sales rep approach and the sales process, the common mistake that most organizations will make as they try to blend all three of these things together. What you’re doing there is you’re trying to blend, take three different perspectives on a problem and you create this risk or this potential for confusion. If you can separate these items into individual parts, you can execute on each of these three items. You’ll increase your predictability and success in your sales cycles, customer journey, that’s their decision-making process, sales Rep approach, that’s how you go about working your role and go about your business and then the sales process piece, that’s the repeatable thing that is used to help forecast predictability inside your business.
Scott Ingram: Remember to click over to DailySales.Tips/65 and come back tomorrow to see if my voice has gotten better or worse.