3 Sales in One

From SalesDog.com:

Understanding Your Customer's Decision Criteria
by Julie Thomas

To seal the deal you need to make, not one, but three sales. Find out what they are and how to succeed.

Has this ever happened to you?

You have the perfect prospect. You've created a brilliant action plan for closing the business. You've identified a number of activities to prove to your prospect how wonderful your capabilities are. You've brought in resources, made demonstrations, provided trials and supplied references. You think the deal is in the bag. You're going to close this week. You've forecasted the business to your manager, only to find out that the prospect had different decision criteria than you thought.

The result? Your deal stalls. Worse yet? You lose to the competition.

Instead of a deal, you're left with a number of questions:

• How did I miss knowing the customer's decision criteria?



• What does the customer need to know and see to make a decision?



• Who needs to be involved to make this decision?

Next time, begin to view the sales cycle as involving three sales:

The first sale
Begin by establishing a key business issue. Identify the problems that your capabilities are uniquely qualified to address, and establish that there is enough value to justify the customer's taking action. You'll know that you've completed this step adequately when the customer agrees that there is a reason to change. Avoid doing demonstrations of your product at this point. A demonstration too early in the process can slow your sales cycle down and be counterproductive.

The sale within the sale
Getting selected as the vendor or partner to address the issue is the second sale. This is the time to create a mutual plan with your customer. The plan should include the demonstrations and additional criteria that will address the customer's buying criteria.

Probe the customer for everything they need to see, experience, and witness to be convinced. Confirm with the customer that all the steps are articulated and the plan is complete.

Put the plan in writing, and have it be a mutual plan as opposed to your plan. Involve the customer in developing the plan, and create action items and activities that the customer is responsible for so there is buy-in to the result and the objectives of the plan.

The collaborative plan should not only prove your capabilities, but also identify the anticipated results, the value and impact of the solution, and finally, the people who need to be involved in the final decision. Your plan should not end at the close; rather it should take you and your prospect through implementation and milestones where the value is actually realized.

To the extent that you can make your prospect a mental user of your product or service, and have that experience be a positive one, you will be setting yourself up for a successful third sale or close.

Once the plan is complete, this is a perfect opportunity for a trial close: "If we do what we said we can do, can we move forward?"

The close
Once you have been selected, the close is a natural outcome. Closing is the logical culmination of the activities to which you and the customer have agreed. The path is clear for the purchase to be executed and the sale to be complete.

Sales executives have the power to allocate, delegate, and assign resources to prospects and opportunities. Often times, we underestimate that power. As a result, we bring resources in too early in the sales cycle. By being more deliberate with demonstrations and more disciplined in how resources are allocated, you can actually shorten your sales cycles, waste less time and money, and close more business!

Julie Thomas is President and CEO of ValueSelling Associates, the creator of the ValueSelling Framework™. Since 1991, ValueSelling Associates has helped FORTUNE 1000 business-to-business sales organizations compete and win in markets crowded with seemingly similar products and services. For more information, visit www.ValueSelling.com.

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