Nov 01, 2013 By Craig Elias

How to Repeat Your Biggest Sales Wins

in Featured, Sales

The number one way to repeat your biggest sales wins is to conduct a special form of sales analysis.

A lot of salespeople have been taught by their sales managers that “if you lose the sale you never want to lose the lesson” and as a result, they may conduct a Lost Sales Analysis hoping to learn how they can win more sales.

Since salespeople want to repeat their wins – not losses – they are better off conducting a Won Sales Analysis™. Conducting a Won Sales Analysis tells salespeople exactly how and why they won the business and who are the best prospects to focus on so they can repeat their biggest wins.

When you ask the right questions during a Won Sales Analysis, just like when you start noticing the car you recently purchased, you will magically start ‘seeing’ those decision makers who are five times more likely to become your customer: Those the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) identifies as being in the Epiphany Stage.

The Best Questions to Ask

To maximize the value of a Won Sales Analysis, ask the following four questions:

“What event or events led up to this purchase?”
When you ask this question, you typically learn the Trigger Event that afforded a prospect the time to look at what you have or the money to purchase it. While this information is good, what you really want to understand is the 1^st Trigger Event – the one that created dissatisfaction with the Status Quo and got them thinking that now is the time to change.
“When did these events happen?”
When you ask this question, you are listening for the Trigger Event that created the desire to change. Asking this question allows salespeople to know what Trigger Event came first and then reach decision makers early enough that they can help define the problem, design the solution, and start developing a relationship with a decision makers before the competition even knows there is an opportunity.
“What made you choose us?”
Notice I did not ask, “why did you choose us?” That’s because I‘ve learned that "why" questions tend to make people defensive. The reason you want to ask this question is to understand how the prospect did "mental gymnastics" or combined your sales content with their context to make your product or service relevant to their objectives. Once you understand the real reasons a prospect becomes your customer, you can take that information and spoon-feed it to future prospects and make it easier for them to become your customer.
“What can we do to make it easier to become our customer?”
To become your customer prospects need to find you, understand the real value of being your customer (answer to question #3 above) and then make the purchase. Asking this question will provide insights into the hurdles/barriers the prospect had to overcome in order to become your customer. Sometimes these are internal hurdles related to your selling process. Either way, removing the obstacles in the prospects way not only makes it more likely they will make the purchase but they are also more likely to make their purchasing decision quicker.

If you want to do a more detailed form of won sales analysis you can check out STEP by Pros.com. STEP uses a statistical method called, "win-rate elasticity" to identify the attributes that lead to a higher customer willingness to pay (e.g., transaction size, geography, industry segment).

This is my third in a series of seven blog posts on the top seven ways to harness the power of technology to sell more. The list is shared David Letterman style – starting with #7 and working my way to #1. In my last blog post I shared how you can harness the Trigger Events that make decision makers more like to buy and how you can leverage a Trigger Alert service like iSell to learn which decision makers recently experienced these Trigger Events.

Next month I’ll share which of your sales wins are the best ones to analyze.

Craig Elias is the creator of Trigger Event Selling™ and the chief catalyst at Shift Selling, Inc. He writes about sales for salesforce.com, insidesales.com, Canada’s national newspaper the Globe and Mail and has 12,000+ subscribers to his blog – http://ShiftSelling.com.