Do the Hard Work First
I’ve laid out a pretty solid strategy for you thus far. You might be thinking, “Great, Jeff, but how do I act on this? How do I ask so many questions, so often, through so many channels, of so many people?”
Well, I’m glad you asked…
The work before the work
One of my favorite Jeffrey Gitomer one-liners is, “Most salespeople aren’t willing to do the hard work necessary to make the selling part easy.” This is normally because of a lack of patience. I’m going to lay out the strategy for you, it’s actually pretty simple, but you’re going to need to give yourself the time, space and permission to do this work. Are you ready?
Go back to the fundamentals
In The Five Forgotten Fundamentals of Prospecting, I wrote that you need to know what you bring to the table. By that, I mean know:
what makes you different
what makes that valuable
why that matters
Knowing these differentiators and the outcomes that only you can help create is vital to helping your prospects.
I also wrote that you need to know who you should be talking to. That means knowing:
who they are
why they would buy
why they wouldn’t
The answers to these questions will help you provide the context necessary to make your differentiators mean something to your prospects and their respective situations.
Brainstorm your questions
Questions start conversations, right? And you want to start conversations that center around how you can deliver unique value to your prospects, right? Then you’re going to want to ask questions that would lead to discussions centered around your differentiators.
So what are those differentiators? Following the framework I gave you from The Five Forgotten Fundamentals, do you have three or four things that objectively separate you from your closest competitors? (If not, then the best way to use your next team meeting is to discuss what they are. You can thank me later).
Take each one of those differentiators, and think of three or four questions that would lead to a conversation with context about what makes you different and how you can help. That sentence is a bit of a mouthful, so let me break it down for you with an example.
I help sales teams with professional service firms sell more by helping reps simplify their sales processes. The difference for me is not so much in the way I train, but in the way I help reps rethink the way they sell. This removes a lot of the barriers that would normally get in their way, rather than simply training them on skills- a very different way of helping salespeople improve.
One of my questions might be, “Do your salespeople need better skills, or do they just need to get out of their own way?” This is going to provoke some thought in my prospects, and lead to a conversation about my approach to improving sales performance.
If you can come up with 3-4 questions for each one of your 3-4 differentiators, you now have anywhere from 9-16 separate questions that you can ask in your prospecting campaigns. That’s just about one for every touch in the sequence (and another great use of a team meeting).
Download the 8 Reasons Your Team Isn’t Creating More Opportunities white paper at https://jeffbajorek.com/8reasons
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