These 2 Drive Everything

Two skills are paramount if you’re going to achieve lasting success in the complex, competitive sale.

They are: (1.) the ability to find pain & impact in areas where you have differentiation and (2.) the ability to develop multiple coaches at multiple levels.

Let’s unpack both of these:

Being able to find pain & impact where you have differentiation

Pain can be defined as a problem they’re experiencing or a goal, something they want, that’s not been achieved. Impact (a.k.a. consequence) is the cost of that problem going unsolved. Costs that are measurable in terms of dollars lost are more powerful than those that are harder to measure like employee frustration. Your differentiation can be absolute (no one has anything like it) or relative (a competitor has something similar, but yours is vastly superior).

Every piece of this is critical if you want to win. Here’s why:

(1.) Some prospects won’t divulge their problems, as they know that’s what every salesperson is looking for. Others are happy to verbalize them. But that doesn’t mean they’ll pay you or anyone else to fix them.

(2.) The pain has to be strong enough overcome the gravitational pull of the status quo. Change is hard and there’s risk of exposure if something goes wrong. No impact, no sale.

(3.) You have to assume your competition can uncover pain & impact like you. To win, then, you have to be able to find pain & impact in areas where you have competitive advantage. Because all meetings have a time limit, the most successful salespeople ask questions that uncover pain in areas where they have a differentiated solution early in the conversation. That’s their strategy & they’ve mastered a series of questions to do that.

Let’s move on to the second essential skill.

Being able to develop multiple coaches at multiple levels 

A coach is someone with inside client information who wants you to win. “Multiple levels” refers to different rank on the org chart and/or members on different committees involved in the decision process.

Why do you need this?

(1.) There is so much important stuff going on behind the scenes that you’re not privy to. You need someone to let you know what’s going on & to help guide you. Winning strategies requires good intelligence and a good coach can provide that.

(2.) Everyone with inside information doesn’t want you to win. Some prefer your competitor. Others don’t really care. Those that want you to win do so because by you winning they benefit.

(3.) Some stakeholders want you to win but they don’t have access to inside information. It’s good to have their vote but they’re no help when it comes to strategy.

(4.) Even those who want you to win & have access to inside information rarely have unfettered access. They may sit on the evaluation committee but not the steering committee, for example. You need a coach at that level too to have competitive advantage. The ideal is to have a coach at each level of the decision process.

If you want lasting success, if you want to greatly improve your probability of winning each deal, master these 2 skills.

Until next time…

Bob

*Note: These two skills are so important I have separate mini-courses for each one where you can learn a process to master the skill. And, in honor of Thanksgiving, if you enroll in November for Developing Multiple Coaches at Multiple Levels subscribers can get in at half-price. And, you get lifetime access to the course – including all updates! Class would start on December 5, 2022. I’ll be setting up a page that gives all the details, but in the meantime, if you’re interested, send me an email: [email protected]