I’m a baseball guy and like to use baseball analogies. For instance, in baseball, pitchers throw as many as 9 pitches including a 2-seam fastball, 4-seam fastball, cut fastball, sinker, slider, 12-6 curve, traditional curve, knuckleball and change-up. In order to have success against any pitcher who may throw 3 or more of these pitches, hitters must be able to identify the pitch and adjust. **According to this NPR article all of that must happen in fewer than 450 milliseconds.
Similarly, there are 18 varying types of prospects and salespeople must be able to recognize them and adjust to have success. They include:
Decision Maker for a Potential Current Purchase who is:
- Not Interested
- Resistant
- Open Minded
- Going to Buy – but from someone else
- Going to Buy – but undecided about from whom
- Going to Buy from you
Influencer or Underling for a Potential Current Purchase who is:
- Not Interested
- Resistant
- Open Minded
- Going to Buy – but from someone else
- Going to Buy – but undecided about from whom
- Going to Buy from you
Decision Maker, Influencer or Underling for a Future Purchase who is:
- Not Interested
- Resistant
- Open Minded
- Going to Buy – but from someone else
- Going to Buy – but undecided about from whom
- Going to Buy from you
That’s 18 types of prospects and before you do anything you need to know what and who you are dealing with.
The problem with prospects who are not interested, resistant and open minded is that they either don’t have or don’t know that they have a problem you can solve. When a salesperson comes along with a traditional pitch, demo, quote or proposal (all transactional approaches) those approaches will rarely move those prospects from their starting points. On the other hand, a consultative approach could move a prospect from open minded to going to buy from you; and the same approach could move a resistant or disinterested prospect to open minded.
The transactional sales approach described above will cause a prospect who is going to buy – whether from someone else, you or undecided – to focus on price and features instead of solutions and providers. If you have the lowest price and a full feature set, that could benefit you. However, there can only be 1 lowest price in your space, it rarely represents a full set of features, and it’s probably not you so forget about using a transactional approach. Once again, a consultative approach will help the prospect focus on the problem that needs to be solved, the provider who best understands that problem and recommends the best solution at a needs and cost appropriate fee. In other words, if they were already predisposed to buying something now, the salesperson who best executes the consultative sales process and methodology should earn that business.
We also need to account for when you are with an underling instead of the decision maker. The only difference is that the underling must reach the state of must have in order to get the decision maker engaged. Most salespeople rarely accomplish that because using a transactional approach gets them only as far as nice to have.
What if your prospect has stated that they want to buy from you? Can you use a transactional approach then? It depends on how solid you want this purchase to be and how long you want to retain them as a customer or client. If you care about having the deal close and retaining them beyond the first order, you must use a consultative approach because a transactional approach simply shows your prospect that you guys are like everyone else in your space. Someone else could come along and change their mind and if someone comes along with a better price it’s easier for them to justify leaving you.
I get it. The transactional approach to selling is much easier to execute. Tell ‘em about your product or service and give ‘em a quote. How’s that working for you? If you closer fewer than 75% of your opportunities I would say it isn’t working very well. While the effective execution of a consultative approach is significantly more difficult and requires advanced listening and questioning skills, you won’t need as many opportunities, you’ll close more, the order/deal/account sizes will be larger, the sales cycle will be shorter and you’ll retain more of your customers. It’s a no-brainer. However, I completely understand if the payoff does not justify the amount of work required for you to get there.