Understand your customer's business

- After decades of helping companies retool their sales processes and rebuild their sales messaging, I'm still amazed at the prevalence of what is known as the needs analysis. Now on its surface, the needs analysis would appear to make perfect sense. Ask the prospect a series of questions to uncover the opportunity for your product or solution, and then present your product or solution. Simple enough, right? Wrong. The needs analysis is tantamount to an interrogation to your prospect. The main reason for this is biology. They are operating just like you from a position of self-preservation. Their brain is hardwired for risk aversion and protection. They've been programmed through experience to view your needs analysis as a precursor to your data dump. They've seen that movie before and they know that it ends in a sales pitch. In addition to their self-preservation orientation, there's also the practical notion that the questions ask in most needs analysis are simply not very good questions at all. There are questions that you, the salesperson had you done even 15 minutes of research prior to the sales call would've had and should have had the answer to, already. The key to avoiding the dreaded needs analysis trap is to be prepared. Do your homework on your prospect. There's so much information available today at the touch of your fingertips, information like the prospect's name, title, work history, education, peer group, and that's just to name a few. Much of this can be attained simply through leveraging tools like LinkedIn. In addition to the actual person or people, you can also find information on the company. Things like company size, revenue, employee count, the company vision, mission, industry trends, markets they sell or serve, and in many cases, transcripts or recordings of shareholder meetings, 10-K filings, reports like that. Arming yourself with this information is key to asking more specific, problem centric, relevant questions when you're actually in the sales meeting. To take this preparation to the next level, I encourage you to do one more simple exercise. See if you can uncover the selling message that your prospects company is telling to their customers. Understanding what they sell and to whom they sell it to will give you a great deal of insight into some of their goals and challenges. Understanding a 360 degree view of your prospect by putting yourself into the shoes of the employees that you plan to meet with will naturally create questions that are more personal and relevant to your prospects. This approach will demonstrate empathy while at the same time, drive up your credibility by coming to them with topics that they already care about and then tailoring your questions around those very things. Now it may sound intuitive, but I've seen enough examples across multiple industries where sales professionals fail to take this approach and only show up armed with basic superficial knowledge, which causes them to ask basic superficial questions. Don't be that salesperson. Take the time to prepare, plan, and structure meaningful questions around your knowledge of your prospect and their business. It will make all the difference in the world.