Part 1: The complete lifecycle of a lead
- Selling CRM - what is my methodology?
For a long time, I just couldn’t figure it out. Some sales people seemed to get so much deeper into the conversations with customers than I was able to, even after I was really happy with some of the conversations I had had. I made it my mission to find out how to do this, and what their secrets were. This article is the result of that.
My most profound understanding struck me after a conversation I had with a friend, who is incidentally also a sales person. We talked for a long time, and he helped me figure out some pieces of the puzzles I had been trying to figure out since I started the mission - how to get really deep into the understanding of customers situation, and how to use this knowledge to make the situation more effective.
This is a 4-part series, and in it I will explain what I call “The Deep Understanding” phase of an interaction that a sales person normally has with a potential customer (I will call it prospect in this article). This phase, if done and if done well, does not only help a sales person understand the prospect better, but it also helps the prospects get a more valuable experience from their conversations with the sales person, and in the end a better fitted solution for their needs. The Deep Understanding phase is, in my opinion, what consultative selling is really about.
The complete life cycle of a lead and where I will focus
Before getting into my hands, a prospect usually starts out as just a company name among many others in a campaign. The first step it goes through is profiling, where some contacts in the company are found. After that, I have to find the ones where there is a pain - something the customer is not satisfied with, and we can help them with. Generally, this would be “finding or creating interest”. However, CRM is so well known by now, that it really is more about the finding interest than the creating of it. In todays world, company decision makers are savvy enough about CRM to know whether or not they are interested in investigating other systems, without me convincing them. So for me, this is really about finding a prospect that is open to exploring how they would benefit from improved sales processes or from a new CRM system.
The next step is what most people call “qualifying”, but this is where transactional selling (at least in my mind) first separates itself from consultative selling. In my view, qualifying is really the step I just did - it is to see if someone is willing to talk to me about their needs in a particular area to see if I can help them. If they are, then in my view they are qualified, and it is time to go into the step I call “Basic Understanding”.
Basic understanding differs from the traditional meaning of “qualifying” in the literal sence. The word “qualify” implies that we are hostile towards our prospects until they have proved themselves worthy of us. Even if this is not how most (serious) sales people really view it, I believe that the words we use do affect the way we see the world. “Basic understanding” instead implies that we are all standing on equal ground, and I will do my best to understand what the prospect needs and if I can help them achieve it.
The “Basic understanding” phase is where we try to get a general understanding of the pains of the company and the prospect. For a CRM-related case, it might be things like “it’s difficult to have an overview of the data or what the salespeople are doing”, “I can’t forecast accurately”, “it is difficult to follow up the campaigns”, or “we don’t have firm sales processes in place, every sales rep does it his or her own way”. This is also where we ask all the typical questions about budget, timeframe, decision making process and number of users. This stage is often over fairly quickly - it can take anywhere between 5-10 minutes. Once we have found that they are in a situation where we would probably be able to make their lives easier, it is time to take it to the next level. And this is where things really get interesting.
Introduction to the “Deep Understanding” phase
After going throuch the Basic Understanding phase together with a prospect, it is time for the step I simply call the “Deep Understanding” phase. So to summarize, a prospect usually goes through the following stages:
1. Profiling.
2. Finding interest.
3. Basic understanding.
4. Deep understanding.
The Deep Understanding phase is what I really wrote this article series for - it is where consultative selling is really done, it is where we really differentiate ourselves from our competitors, and where we give the real value to the prospect. It consists of 3 main parts, and I will go through each of them in the coming 3 parts of this series.
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