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1. Insight.
Showing that you have insight to offer is so crucial to getting that conversation in the first place. We need to establish as salespeople that we have the authority, that we have the value, and that we're not just going to be taking, taking, taking, from prospects by asking them tons of questions, but instead we're going to be offering them some value at the beginning. This is a crucial distinction, and it's really about the early part of the conversation.
Whether it's on the phone or face-to-face at the beginning of the meeting, we want to start by kicking off the discussion with something different than, so what are your biggest challenges, or what's keeping you up at night? But instead, it is really focused on their world, on solving their challenges. So step number one within that is about your opening play. How are you opening that conversation? Having an opening play is not about using your value proposition but instead, using an approach that is talking about some of the critical challenges that they see in their world.
2. Disqualify.
If you've ever followed any of my stuff before, you'll know that disqualification is such a big part of a high-quality sales conversation. The typical idea that most of us have been taught is that we need to persuade prospects to do business with us. This idea takes that idea and flips it right on its head. We don't need to convince people to do business with us. Instead, what we want to do is not even qualify prospects. But instead, we want to disqualify. We want to come in with that doctor's mindset, we want our salespeople, or just ourselves, to come in with that doctor's mindset, where we're saying to ourselves, is this a fit?
That starts with the first piece, which is, understanding their challenges. You've shown some insight, you've brought some value to the conversation, and now you want to dig into those key challenges that the prospect is facing around the areas that you focus on, of course. You want to understand exactly what those challenges are, and this where we kind of get into our psychologist armchair mode, right, where we're just slowing down the conversation, and we're just letting them tell us about some of the key challenges that they're facing at the moment. So there are a lot of questions like, help me understand why you say that? Or tell me a little bit more about that? Or can you give me an example of that? Right, so you're just some basic questions that are going to open up the prospect and getting them talking about their key challenges.
3. Solve.
To have productive conversations, you need to show the prospect that you can solve their problems. This is really important to understand where we are in the sales process, right. We've already shown insight, we've disqualified people to the point where we know that this person at this point is a good fit, and now we're demonstrating that we can solve their problems. And that's where a case study presentation comes in.
People are persuaded so much more by stories. If you start to throw out tons of facts, or features and benefits, or you're trying to tell them the solution, they're much more likely to resist. But when you tell them a case study, or a story, where maybe there were results as a result of that story, now they're engaged in the conversation. They can't fight with the facts of the story, so we want to be using case studies in our presentation, particularly at the early part of the presentation as a way to demonstrate how our solution will help their organization.
There are the three keys to sales conversations that close deals. And if you enjoyed this video, then I have an awesome free training on the data-driven approach to help you crush your sales goals.