Is Your Sales Process Modern?

You’ve seen stories about industrial or even military espionage where a competitor or enemy gets hold of some cool piece of technology from you and then takes it apart to reverse engineer their own development of a competing product.

Now consider reverse engineering your sales process.

Pre internet, customers answered about 20% of their questions before sitting with a sales person.

Now the prospect has answers to 80% of their questions before meeting a sales person.

Prospects use the internet, social media and friends to learn about you and your product before they see you.

The challenge is the prospect who is already busy, already has 80% of what they need to know to make a purchase, and who is sitting with a sales person who has answers for the first 80% and does not know what the last 20% of the questions are.

If the sales process burns up the customer’s patience and time with the 80% and fails to answer the last 20%, sales are impacted negatively.

The 80% is what we know about our features and benefits from the club side. The 20% resides in the prospects. We can even ask, ‘Do you have any questions?’ but this has 3 problems:

• It is asked after we have reviewed the 80% they already know and their attention span is short.
• Prospects may not know the last 20% of questions. This is the often false assumption in market research: ‘The customer knows what they want.’ Frequently, they do not. If they did, they would have told Apple they want a tablet or a computer in a phone.
• Even if the prospect is deep down in touch with their core emotional needs and drivers, they are often unwilling to articulate and expose these in the sales process.

Too often the member only has two conversations with the club: when they buy and months later when they leave.

Add a third one right after they buy – ideally within 24 hours – an in-depth post sale interview.

Open ended questions from a skilled, unbiased interviewer who establishes deep rapport will begin to reveal the last 20%. A sales person or sales manager could be too biased and defensive to do these interviews well.