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Comments or Suggestions?
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By Kevin Temple, President of ValueVision Associates.
"Most companies with complex solutions still make 80% of their revenue from 20% of their products. This is usually a challenge because the customer is not looking to spend more, and the sales person is usually not comfortable selling that portion of their solution portfolio," says Kevin Temple, President of ValueVision Associates, creators of the Value Selling framework.
The "Typical" Sales Process
The "typical" sales process is a sales process that is typically driven more by the customer than the sales person. This "typical" process would probably included the following steps:
- Dialogue Engagement to discuss Key Offerings
- Requirement to demonstrate viability of Key Offerings for Customer Need
- Customer compares Vendor Differentiation on capability and/or price
- Upon satisfactory differentiation and available budget, the vendor with the best capability/price ratio is awarded the business.
The question is how do you get a sales team to suddenly become proficient at selling other complex solutions?
Creating Demand for More
The secret to increasing your customer's demand for additional products or services is to discover how your product addresses their needs - this is actually simple in theory but demanding in discipline. Simply add three checkpoints:
- Dialogue Engagement to discuss Key Products
Why does the customer need the product to do? What problem(s) are they trying to solve? What other problems are occurring but are not mentioned? Arm your sales people with problems to probe for that can be solve by your other solutions. Uncover the value (in dollars) of these unresolved problems to prioritize the requirement for additional products.
- Demonstrate viability of Key Products for Customer Need
Customer requires that Vendor differentiate on capability and/or price
Upon Satisfactory differentiation, vendor is awarded the order
It is critical to understand why the customer needs a product, AND it is critical to take the opportunity to check for other problems that might require other solutions.
- Your Application
Consider your strategy for revenue growth. Does it rely on new products, acquired products to be sold by in integrated sales force, or previously stagnant products? If "yes", then take a minute to: (1) list the solutions you need to sell, then (2) identify the problem(s) it might address. Get your sales team to take the action to ask problem-probing questions.
How does this work when you are with a customer? A simple step to develop the customer's interest in the rest of your solutions is to identify the problems that the "new" solution solves, and simply probe to find out if that problem exists. If the customer agrees that such a problem exists, its an invitation to talk about an additional solution that might be of interest. (This is called "conditioning" the prospect to want to listen.)
For instance, if you decide that you want to increase your average
transaction size by selling professional services solutions with every
software or hardware sale, you would start by identifying the current
problems that can be solved with professional services.
Here's a few
Questions to use to probe further:
Can't find skilled people?
Recent layoffs making it difficult to get projects completed?
Trouble focusing on core responsibilities with non-essential tasks taking up your time?
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