The sales person showed that they understood my business issues and clearly articulated to me how to solve them.
Take a look at that statement carefully. How often would prospects leaving a meeting with your sales team be willing to say that?
Forrester conducted a study a little while ago asking business decision-makers to define a valuable meeting with a sales person. That statement was their number one answer. When they were asked how often sales meetings like that happen, those decisions-makers reported that it only occurred 13% of the time. Yikes!
The data says that the vast majority of sales meetings just aren’t valuable to prospects. And the reason seems to be that sales people aren’t connecting the solutions they’re selling to the problems that their prospects have. That’s some pretty scary stuff and could explain why so many deals seem to stall or end up in no-decisionland these days.
Luckily, if there’s any bright side in all of this, it’s that your competitors are likely facing the same struggles that you are. And at least that creates an opportunity.
If your sales team can do a better job at articulating the value that your products deliver—not just general value, but the specific value you can provide to each prospect—they’ll have the advantage. But, of course, you need to equip your team with the information and tools to do that.
Value-based selling is a very popular topic here at MindBrew–likely for this very reason. Here are a few guides and tutorials we have available that can help give you and your sales team the upper hand:
- Selling Value More Confidently in Seven Steps A tutorial on how to give your sales team the confidence to communicate and capture value
- Identifying Value Along Five Dimensions A guide to help you identify the value-drivers that can maximize the differentiation of your offerings
Good sales people are wired to want to understand what their buyers need and to make the connection with what they’re seeing. But they’ll often need some tools and customer insights to get them started.
If you’re not already working on value-selling with your sales team, now is a great time to start. It can’t hurt to give those future prospect meetings more than a 13% chance of success.
