Tibor Shanto does professional development for professional salespeople, specifically working with B2B sales forces of all sizes as they focus on business acquisition and transitioning into business sales.
Here are the highlights of my conversation with Tibor:
What is the GAP?
Sellers may have this tendency that you’re focusing on one segment of the market at the expense of ignoring an entirely larger segment of the market
Then there are buyers that you know they’re going to have to make a purchase decision but they feel they don’t have to make the decision for some time down the road. Basically, they still have an x amount of time left before they have to make that decision.
Status quo market- These are the complacent buyers making up 70% of the market where they’re not really interacting with the market.
Buyers or companies have objectives and there are gaps between where the buyers want to be and where they are now.
How to identify the buyer’s challenges:
- Assume the medal of a subject matter expert. Understand why you win and why you lose.
- Understand why a lot of the stuff that goes on top of the funnel just doesn’t come out at the other end.
- Explore what happens within your pipeline and you’ll begin to see which certain objectives are common and which objectives people are willing to invest money in.
- You will begin to understand how they define those objectives and how you can influence how they look at it.
- You will understand which questions you should be asking during the discovery phase – What can you learn from them and what they can learn from you
- Lead with outcomes.
- Explore the relationship between the objectives they’re trying to reach and the impact they have on their business.
- Then frame your discussion around those impacts and then you can work backward to the gap.
Example: Let them talk about all the things they see as where they want to be 18 months from now.
- Discover the gap.
- Get down to the actual discovery element of the discussion until they give you the gap for you to work on. So you’ve actually mined the gap.
- By asking the right questions, it makes them share more information and what they really think is behind it.
Example: Help me understand why we’re not there now.
- Get them to emotionally re-invest in their objectives.
When people don’t achieve success towards their objectives, they begin to give up on the objectives and scale them back. So you have to get them to emotionally re-invest in where they want to be. You need them to articulate out loud what would be the upside if they achieve their objectives.
- Go deeper with the customer.
Don’t just stay at the surface level when working with your customers. Go a bit deeper and they will tell you what’s in it for them.
- Follow up with the risk of inaction.
Follow up the discussion with what’s the risk of inaction. People’s propensity if they’re in the status quo is to not act because the alternative will always seem less safe than where they are even if it’s not perfect. Again, get them to articulate this. If it comes from their mouth then they would have to own it.
- Let them understand your monetary worth.
Ask them what’s the worth of your product from a monetary point of view. Get them to articulate the value of what you bring to the table and extrapolate on that with your benefits.
Tibor’s Major Takeaway:
You want to be a subject matter expert but don’t be worried if you can’t. Think about two or three areas you might want to explore. Make an honest effort and you’ll get further than trying to be that perfect, smooth-talking person.
Episode Resources:
Connect with Tibor by giving him a call at 855-25SALES or for international call +1-416-822-7781. Or send him an email at tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca.
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