One of the most effective sales strategies is information disparity, knowing what your prospective client doesn’t know. If your contact already knows everything you tell them, it is difficult to create value for them in the sales conversation. This is one reason why buyers refuse a second meeting with a salesperson.
Yet, most sales methodologies have no concept about creating value, believing their solution is their entire value proposition. At some point, your solution may create value, but that can happen only after a successful conversation and a signed contract.
A salesperson cannot be consultative without providing the council, advice, and recommendations that might position them as a trusted advisor. A would-be trusted advisor should provide their counsel before the client is harmed, which can happen if they make a bad decision. Part of knowing what you need to be consultative can also help you predict the future, preventing your contacts from making the mistakes that harm their businesses.
In an insight-based sales approach, you use your information disparity and your insights to guide your prospective clients through their buyer’s journey, ensuring they can make sense of their decision. This approach will improve your ability to book a second meeting and increase your odds of winning the client’s business.
Building Insights
To execute this approach, you have to do the work to build a set of insights valuable to your buyers and decision makers. Then, you must transfer your information and insights to them in the sales conversation. You’re here to help them with their decisions.
You can start building insights by recognizing what your contacts don’t know. Determine what you think they should know as they face their decision, and focus on that. By looking over your notes and the questions your contact asks, you can start to build insights that your sales champion and their stakeholders will need to succeed.
Once you practice this approach, you can provide even greater value for your clients by preventing harm and predicting the future.
From Insights to Foresight
You might have discovered that you know things your contacts don’t know. When you realize your knowledge is valuable to your contacts, you are on your way to being One-Up. The concept of being One-Up describes a person who provides their prospective clients with information and insights that can improve their results. See Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative.
The most valuable insights often focus on a client’s strategic outcomes. In sales, you will notice your prospective clients are missing information they need to successfully pursue these outcomes. One problem with the legacy approaches that many sales organizations practice is that salespeople don’t recognize there is an information disparity they can use to help their clients. By adopting a more client-centric, modern approach, you can tailor the sales conversation so you recognize what your contact knows and what they don’t.
One overlooked benefit of a modern sales approach is that it helps salespeople develop foresight, allowing them to correctly predict the future and see around corners. Without your insights, your clients have no way of understanding what the future holds. If this doesn’t sound familiar, read this blog daily, and you will start to catch up.
Exploring Strategic Outcomes
An average salesperson will sell their solution. A good salesperson will ensure the solution works for their clients. An outstanding salesperson will ensure the strategic outcomes the client needs. If you are new to this thinking, remember that buyers buy holes, not drills.
We know of no other sales methodologies outside of our own that focus on value creation and a conversation about strategic outcomes. No one wants to buy sales training. Instead, they buy net new revenue or goal attainment or quota attainment.
To get from selling your solution to becoming a consultative salesperson, you must learn to discern what your clients need in terms of insights to help your contacts with a conversation that will allow you elicit the root causes that prevent the results they need. Your questions and insight combine to create a sales experience that shows your clients what they need to do to improve their results and their strategic outcomes.
Capturing Mindshare
Nothing you say about the greatness of your company will register. Nor will a conversation about your clients and their results. Any attempt to talk about your solution without a value-creating conversation will fall flat.
The way you capture your client’s mindshare is by sharing your experience, knowledge, and insights, focusing on those that are new to your champion and their team. By definition, a trusted advisor is trustworthy and has advice, two elements missing from most sales approaches and their sales methodologies.
This is what a modern sales approach looks like. The salesperson acts as a consultant, something more than a salesperson. Go here for help with this approach.
From Insight to Foresight: Crafting Strategic Outcomes
This is not the future of sales. This is how sales works now. Too many salespeople who are often forced to use a less effective approach instead of a modern, insight-based approach. The sales organizations that mandate a legacy approach will have an even more difficult time winning deals in the future. As globalization and the business world adapts, demand will change. Many of these companies will fail, not because they don’t have a good solution, but because they don’t sell better than competitors.
It’s important for sales leaders to pay attention to what is going outside their window. Deciding the changes in B2B sales will not touch your company may lead you to trouble. Your best approach to the future is to recognize what your buyers need to know and understand. You must provide them with the sense-making that gives them the confidence and certainty to move forward. Those of us helping others to change should recognize the need to change how we sell.
Leaving this article, assess your sales methodology to determine if it is legacy or modern. Assess what insights your sales forces needs to provide their contacts so they can succeed and to buy from your team. If you need help, go here.
.jpg?width=768&height=994&name=salescall-planner-ebook-v3-1-cover%20(1).jpg)
