When most of us think of sales, ‘certainty’ isn’t the first word that comes to mind.
Sales is a tough industry, buyers are tough to get ahold of, and we’re encountering more stakeholders than ever in every deal.
Yet, we have a product or service that makes the lives of our customers better, allowing them to achieve their goals faster. Instead of asking ‘why is selling so tough?’, we should be asking, ‘how can I build more certainty into how I sell?’
The easiest way to do that, according to Gal Aga, CEO of Aligned and former military policeman in the Israeli Defense Forces, is to let go of our ideas of what needs to happen to make the sale and instead focus on what our prospects need to know, learn, and decide. This creates a ‘customer-focused’ buying journey and takes a formerly ‘tough’ job like selling and places it into what is certain – the language, timeline, and world of our prospects.
Since we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it, and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.
T – Trigger: Gal advises a customer-focused journey to start not with your prospect, but with your customer. Because our goal is to convert prospects into customers, we need to ask what challenges our customers have in implementing our solution, how long it takes them to achieve ROI on their investment, and how this product or service benefits me.
Because these are questions customers have, they need to be built into our prospects’ buying journey.
These questions need to be built into our marketing materials and conversation points with our prospects once we are conducting outreach.
R – Repeatable: To make this process repeatable, Gal says to look at the following:
- What research will my customer do before making a decision?
This includes online research and questions they’ll likely ask folks in their network about you/your company. You’ll want to make sure you create the content they’ll be searching for and have it readily available during sales conversations.
- Who are the advocates and champions in a typical sale, and what questions do each of them have?
If you have sole decision makers for your product/service within your prospects’ organizations, map out the typical questions they’ll have. If you have multiple advocates, champions, or decision makers within a typical prospects’ organization, you’ll want to list out the concerns they have when deciding whether to purchase from you. Be sure to have responses, support material or even ‘how to’ guides prepared to aid them in deciding in your favor. - What is a prospect’s typical internal process for purchasing what I sell? How can I make that process smoother for my prospects?
This is not YOUR sales process, but rather the decision-making process of your prospects. What do they need to know, see, hear, or read to take the next step at each stage of the sale? And what speedbumps do your prospects typically encounter within their own organizations that tend to extend the buying timeline? Prepare material to help them better deal with those concerns before they encounter them.
I – Improvable: To improve a customer-focused buying journey, Gal says to understand your prospects’ buying journey is not linear. In an era of ever-increasing decision makers in every sale, it’s imperative that we examine every deal to chart where a deal stalls and ask ‘why?’ Patterns will quickly emerge, such as ‘I needed to conduct an executive review with my leadership team before making a decision,’ and those patterns can generate changes in your sales process and resources. Creating an ‘executive team FAQ guide’, for instance, could speed up your sale through a previous bottleneck in your pipeline.
M – Measurable: Gal says to be sure to measure not just standard sales metrics, but also the number and titles of stakeholders you’re encountering through your sales process and what challenges they have. This encourages us to break out of the linear sales mindset and ensure that you’re addressing customer (and stakeholder) challenges every step of the way.