In our last article, we discussed about the various stages of a B2B sales methodology that is more viable and sustainable in today’s and perhaps future’s markets for the next few years. Unless AI has alter the landscape completely, the stages that are :
- Discovery
- Initial evaluation
- Formal evaluation
- Onboarding
- Initial adoption
- Power usage and growth
- Renewal
Today let look at
The DISCOVERY stage
Sales teams must take time to train their SDR or BDR at the junior level to determine how “educated” their potential customer is. They also need to determine which groups will need to be involved in this sale, and they need to consider whether they can provide the customer with asynchronous education before the first meeting. Interestingly, 19% of buyers want to talk to a sales rep when first learning about a product.
I know this will be a big ask but you need to move away from the old school mindset of BANT “qualification” and view your role as “consultation”, with a goal of understanding many factors, including intent and education.
How much knowledge do your potential customers have?
In your customer journey map, you should map how customers come to this point of your sales process. Perhaps through multi touch marketing or an outbound telemarketing effort has led this person to book a discovery call to learn more. This person may have no background in this area or may be very well prepared to discuss details. You need to be prepared for either scenario and assume that they are somewhere on the spectrum between fully educated and cold.
When you are mapping this part of the sales experience to your customer experine, make sure to think through this! It is the most common miss as most sales folks are trained to only focus on BANT qualification before ever showing the features of the product/solutions. There are many factors that contribute to a buyer’s decision process, which is why the discovery stage is so critical.
To move onto or qualify a lead onto future stages in the process, you need to think about which actions are critical for the customer to take at this step. You will want your junior SDRs or BDRs to capture the following:
- Whom am I speaking to, and how do they fit into the org? This shouldn’t be an interrogration, just a casual open-ended question to understand what this person does to match to a typical persona. This is key, as not every purchaser possess the same defined persona.
“Could you kindly share more about your focus/goals/responsibilities in your current role for your company?”
- What is their level of education of the problem, and how much vetting have they done to date?
“Could you enlighten me more about this current problem on how this have affected your current operations and what are some other solutions that you have tried previously?”
- What are their key challenges?
Upon gathering all these info, be ready to address how your company typically solves their problems, and if they have them, at a high and deep level. (FYI, usually this is where a potential SDR get discovered for their sales potential! Often I see SDR passing to their sales personnel for fear of upsetting their appointment setting KPI.)
Be ready to lay out the next steps in the process clearly and concisely based on their intent level. The stronger the intent, the more details required in the subsequent process. Mimic their energy!
From my years of experience, at least with Singapore clients there are a few questions that I will ask to determine my sales aptitude to any lead.
- Decision making path: According to Gartner, the average B2B buying decision involves 6 to 10 people, each of whom is armed with more than four pieces of information they have independently gathered as part of their own decision making process.
- Intent level : As discussed earlier, you must know how educated and energized they are about the various solutions to their problem And what step they are in the buying process.
What’’s super important to know here is that you do not need to get all of this in your first conversation if it does not fit the conversation. Instead, you have to think about how your best-fit customers find you and move through your specific process.
For example if your best customers always have a budget set aside for purchases like yours in advance, it make sense to look at historical data and discuss about budget straightaway during the first call.
If your customers usually come inbound with someone looking to gather information, then establishing the decision making process may be critical upfront. Each customer journey is different, so in this first stage of the process, you need to map what is ideal for your buyer. If you do not have enough data, that’s fine as well ok. Make basic assumptions and test them over time to optimize.
WHAT ARE THE CUSTOMER’S NEEDS?
If a customer do not meet the sales criteria that you have set, its important to have a talk track or digital experience in place to give them alternatives. Your job is to be a “consultant” to help customers make the best decision possible, whether with you or not. (Confident salespeople will share a suitable competitor to meet the client’s need than to force a sale because they value the connection more. This is the Hallmark of a great salesperson but often get undermined by their sales leadership)
Additionally when you have a customer that is not ready or does not feel they have a need or issue now, that’s more than fine. In these cases, it is important to leave the customer with a few potential scenarios, which, when encountered, means that you should re-engage the conversation. One example I used in my prospecting days:
“It seems like things are going well and that business is thriving right now. If ABC happens over the next two to three months, then it make sense that we should reconnect then to discuss a potential plan forward.”
Often than not, this work extremely well for me when I checked back in a few months as I have given myself “a way back” from earlier prospecting.
“Glad that you reached out again! We actually have had ABC happen and it might make sense to connect.” Doing this leave the door open to potentially new conversations in the immediate future and also makes the customer keenly aware of the problem that you solve. Now they will form an idea of where you fit in their daily brand category and understand how you can help them effectively and decisively!
WHO ELSE MAKE PURCHASING DECISIONS?
If your first point of contact was with someone higher up the chain, they will want to loop in the team that will be using the product. If you start with one person in a key group, most likely they will want to loop in a broader team before wanting to introduce you up the chain. Again this isn’t universal. You need to map your experience to the cold, educated, and vetted buyer.
But many times salespeople push this process and try to force meetings that don’t fit with how customers actually vet and select solution providers. But it is critical to be selective to understand the process of how people really make decisions, the more the customer view you as the expert.
Discovery is the most important part of most customized sales journeys, and is the ability to understand where someone is in their intent level so you can move them quickly through the process. If you do not take the time to think about what the discovery process should look for in buyers that come with various intent, you will just recreate the old-school, one size fit all BANT discovery process that treat people the same.
Disclaimer note:
The opinions expressed in this post are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of any company and their associates.
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