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Know Your Customer - SMB Success Series Step 1 

In what I like to think of as the three Ps of Sales - Persuasion, Performance and Prediction - it is the third of these skills that really makes the difference between an effective sales effort and thrashing about in the dark. The ability to predict which prospects will buy, and which will not (and how much of what you are selling they will buy) is fundamental to success. 

 

But, many specialised sales people struggle with this. Most small business owners aren’t even sales people by trade, and come from a wide variety of backgrounds - accounts, marketing, HR etc. So how can SMB owners develop these mission-critical skills and instincts to grow their business?

This series of blogs seeks to answer that question and provide SMBs with a methodology for predicting a solid sales future. These are the must have and obvious skills of anyone in a sales role:

  • Persuasion: convincing your prospect that your product or service is worth investing in. Many salespeople have the gift of the gab.

  • Performance: fine tuning your performance to maximise the possible revenue out of any day, week, month or quarter. Again, many salespeople are highly driven.

There’s more to selling than talk!

But, the gifted salespeople are able to predict which prospects will buy, when they will buy and how much.

  • Prediction: This gives the business as a whole an accurate picture of the income stream. It’s called forecasting, of course. And, it’s the key to raising the effectiveness of both Persuasion and Performance. Which prospects do you invest your time in? Which ones will waste your time? If you understand why your prospect might buy, then you know which buttons to press in the sales pitch.

In this series we share techniques and methods for getting this right. For instance, I always start by judging a prospect by where I think they fit on the following very simple model:

 Know your customer blog series 1 - image 1

This is basically a question of whether the purchase of your product has a proactive or a reactive driver. It involves four broad types of behaviour: 

 Know your customer blog image 2

When you understand from which of these directions your prospect is coming, you can make an informed decision about your strategy.

In the red zone, speed is of the essence. But, realise that the ultimate spend will be the bare minimum because the business will not have allocated budget and will be raiding funds from elsewhere to pay for it. In the green zone, your prospect wants the best they can afford and is keen to learn how to make the most of what you sell.

Plan like a Chess Grand Master!

A comprehensive Discovery phase is critical to discovering which of these tendencies your prospect is displaying - which means asking questions and listening to the answers! This interesting recent article at Inc.com explains how an effective sales strategy should resemble that of a Chess Grand Master: i.e. you should be able to predict - like Gary Kasparov - up to 14 moves ahead. This means knowing what questions to ask in advance, what follow-up questions the answers trigger, and of absolute most importance - LISTENING.

When you’ve been able to plot your prospect on the grid above you can categorise them in your Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) accordingly. This way, you’ll find yourself wasting far less time approaching the wrong kind of prospect with the wrong type of strategy and your effort-revenue ratio will suddenly start improving, as will your overall job satisfaction!

Look out for more best practice sales techniques from us soon (and follow this conversation on Twitter at #SalesforceSMB). In the meantime, why not download this Salesforce Sales Cloud eBook