Crushing Your Sales Quota!
By Len D’Innocenzo,
co-author of The Agile Manager's Guide to Customer Focused Selling 2nd Edition
Ask any top salesperson what is the most important factor in crushing their quota and they will usually reply getting to the "decision maker." Knowing what to say to create interest with a key decision maker is where it all begins. With a little preparation you can create an "initial benefit statement" that can shorten the sales cycle and help you close more sales in less time.
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- Initial Benefit Statements Shorten Sales Cycles
A good initial benefit statement starts by understanding the job titles of the key decision makers in a position to justify, approve, and buy your products and services. Once you know where to go to create interest the next step is to think about the important business issues of these individuals. Depending on their job function, these business issues can be revenue growth or enhanced company image for a CEO, improved forecast accuracy or cash flow for a CFO, or aligning IT functions with business goals for the CIO. After you identify their important business issues, you need to know how your product and services can address their objectives and help the customer to achieve his goals. Only then can you create an initial benefit statement that
will create interest with your prospect.
Creating structured initial benefit statements will help you talk with each decision-maker. Salespeople that prepare good initial benefit statements will shorten their sales cycle, increase revenues, and exceed their quotas.
- Turning "Initial Benefit Statements" into Revenue
The key to an effective Initial Benefit Statement is to understand your prospect's business issues before you make contact. Then you can begin a customer focused sales interview to understand their specific needs, goals and priorities. Leveraging your relationships and using some common sense, will provide you with the necessary information from which to create good initial benefit statements. Then you can proactively guide sales approaches rather than pitching your product or service or reactively responding to a prospect's questions. This will result in a higher closing ratio.
For example, say your company sells software and you have successfully leveraged a relationship to arrange a telephone call with the CIO of a large, potential customer. Instead of asking the CIO to tell you his problem areas and then trying to address each one, consider using an initial benefit statement that includes three important business issues for the CIO (e.g., aligning IT with business objectives, improve systems performance and leveraging previous IT investments). If you also drop the name of a client where you have installed your software and addressed these same issues, you are in an excellent position to create interest and "sell" a face-to-face meeting with the CIO.
Now when go to that meeting, you can control the conversation by asking the CIO questions to identify, rank and explore the most important issues and determine how you can best address these with your software.
Here is a suggestion for your next sales meeting. Create a list of all the job functions of the people you and your sales team members need to reach. These can include decision makers and decision influencers. Then, on a flip chart or white board, brainstorm as many business issues you can for each person. Don't argue about any items - just let them flow. Then edit the lists and prioritize with the issues your company's products and services can address. Try to name at least one customer that has benefited from your products and services for each issue. These will be important when you structure your initial benefit statement. Then ask each member to create an initial benefit statement they could use to approach a targeted prospect and have
each person share their response.
Initial benefit statements are the smart tool successful sales professionals use to create interest with key decision makers and influencers. With a little advance planning and effort, you can greatly enhance the results of your prospecting activity, gain a distinct competitive advantage, and crush your sales quota! Good luck and Good Selling!
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The Agile Manager's Guide to Customer Focused Selling 2nd Edition by Jack Cullen and Len D’Innocenzo, two principles at CRKInteractive, have been sales managers for such companies as Zenith Data Systems, Okidata, and NCR. They now head CRKInteractive, a training and consulting company with offices all over North America. 128 pages. To order, please call 1-866-260-2055 or visit www.crkinteractive.com.
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