Jun 27, 2014 By Tibor Shanto

Sell Smarter: How Impacts Can Reveal Buyer Objectives

in Sales

During The Objective Seller Sales Influencers’ Webinar I did for salesforce.com, and the lead-up post on the salesforce.com blog, I encouraged sellers to abandon their focus on pain and needs when engaging with prospects, and instead focus on buyer objectives as a more direct path to winning clients and growing revenues and relationships.

As a step to executing this well and consistently, and in a way that allows you to stay current with evolving objectives, I urged salespeople and organizations to adopt a disciplined approach to reviewing all opportunities that made it into their pipeline. This includes all wins, loses, and “no-decision” outcomes. This will enable leads with buyers’ objectives and allow you to demonstrate impacts you can deliver in driving those objectives.

One common question was the number of opportunities sellers should review. The answer is review as many as you can in order to glean maximum insight to execute with confidence. I am often asked if that means reviewing all opportunities through the pipeline; the answer varies based on volume and the tools or methodology you use for the review.

Tools for Success

Let’s look at tools first. I recommend you build the discipline right into salesforce.com, making it part of a daily routine that allows you to focus on a core set of relevant data and information related to the opportunity, coming directly from the buyer/prospect. Quantifiable elements can include length of overall cycle, and sub-stages of the cycle, type of company, buyer role, source, etc. These are supported by questions focused on less-quantifiable, yet recurring, elements that drive objectives and actions. Here's a sample set:

How did you directly support specific goals?
What were the biggest obstacles/issues you were able to help resolve?
What specific risks did you mitigate or remove?
How did you add value to their services?
How did you enhance their reputation (with market or their customers)?
How did you help them reduce their cost of doing business? (this does not mean reducing your cost, but how using your offering they improved productivity, improved time to market, etc. that improved their cost structure)

To accurately answer the above, you have to go back and talk to those who bought—and, more importantly, to those who didn’t. A good practice for lost opportunities is for organizations to involve someone other than the salesperson in the interviews. It is much too easy to blame the decision on price; if another person does the review or follow-up, they can usually get past price to more meaningful answers (especially if the salesperson was a factor).

The more you complete the exercise, the more input you’ll have toward identifying buyer objectives—which, in turn, you can leverage in the future. You’ll also continue to fine-tune the process of aligning with objectives in a more meaningful way, driving more of the right opportunities.

The most meaningful information you'll learn is the impact you’ve delivered for clients—along with how that impact helped them achieve their objectives. The more direct impacts you can speak to, the more engaged buyers will be. More clarity and confidence around impacts allows you to focus and drill down on those objectives likely to bring engagement and eventual commitment.

Remember the actionable definition of value presented in the webinar: "Buyers will see value in those offerings that remove barriers, obstacles, and/or help bridge GAPS between where the buyer is now and their objectives." So while objectives are the goal, impacts and outcomes are the means to achieving them. The impact is what they buy from you to reach their objective.

Being able to address and speak to objectives will get their attention. But in order to act—more specifically, change—they need to buy into your ability to deliver tangible and measurable impact, not just understand their objectives.

Integrating this into your day-to-day sales flow saves time and effort since much of the demographic data and information will already be captured through the lead and opportunity stages. Time is a key concern for sellers new to the review process; having it in salesforce.com as part of the salesflow keeps reviews under 10 minutes for each opportunity. It's a small cost to more quickly spot and respond to trends or subtle changes in the market and buyer expectations.

Finding the Right Volume

How many should you do? Let’s assume that you close one of every four opportunities in your pipeline. One win; the other three are either lost to a competitor, or made no decision. If you need to deliver five or fewer deals per month, this means at most/worst 20 reviews over the course of the month—less than an hour a week, a small price. (How much time do we spend on football pools?)

If you are in a more transactional sale, and with the same close ratio, but you have to close five deals a week, do a representative sample. You don’t need to review all 80 opportunities each month; instead, review say 18-20 of them—a sample size that is significant, but not overwhelming.

The success factor here is mindset, not the extra few minutes per day this will require. It's time you'll get back due to efficiencies gained through better buyers and/or shorter cycles. The effort required is much less than the effort consumed by bad or missed opportunities. In short, simply knowing more about the impact you're having can go a long way toward helping you better achieve your objectives.