How To Get Your Prospects To Identify Problems They Didn’t Know They Had

To date, my articles ‘Why Your Sales People Need To Reassess How They Sell’ and ‘How To Sell To A Diverse Buying Group’ have explored how the world of B2B sales has changed. These articles also consider who the key stakeholders are that your salespeople need to be engaging with in your prospects’ businesses.

If you are that salesperson and once the relevant stakeholders in your prospect’s buying group have been identified, you then need to convince each of them that they need your company’s product or service.

Everyone’s product is apparently the market leader, that’s also the message your company’s marketing team is probably promoting to win over potential new clients. But what if I said that B2B selling is not about how a customer perceives your business or your product but how they better understand their own business?

What do I mean? If your prospect doesn’t really understand or cannot agree, at group buying level, what the most pressing issues are in their business, then it’s likely that your product or service will only solve part of the puzzle and only for one or two stakeholders in your prospect’s company. Potentially, that leaves 4.8 other stakeholders holding a piece of the puzzle aloft, whilst uttering; “I don’t see how this proposal fits with my needs?”   

Start With What Your Client Needs To Accomplish

To encourage consensus in a diverse buying group, you must first identify at least one challenge in the business that each stakeholder agrees is important and which is aligned with a degree of inherent urgency.

The questions you now ask of each stakeholder are vitally important. Your objective is to find common points of agreement, amongst the buying group, which can be directly linked to the solutions your company provides and which are unique to your firm's offering.

You need to prove, to each stakeholder, through the positioning of well-supported commercial insights, that the solution they are currently using is simply not good enough and that a change is required – immediately.

There are 3 questions you need to consider at this point:

1. Do I understand what our unique and sustainable product strengths are (your unique value propositions)?
2.  If I do understand our UVP’s, which of these seem to be unappreciated by our customers/prospects?
3. What is it that the customer/prospect hasn’t considered about their own business that means they have failed to see the value in the solution I’m offering?

The Problem With Most Sales Approaches

We have all had it drilled into us that to get a customer to buy, we must clearly articulate the value and superiority of our solution, compared with our competitors. The challenge with this approach is that even if the customer believes and agrees that our solution is better than the rest, if they don’t fundamentally appreciate that they have a problem to begin with and one big enough to warrant discussing urgently with each of their key stakeholders, then we will not encourage them to change – they have no reason to buy, other than the fact that your product is better.

The only way to get your customer to think differently about your solution is by first getting them to think differently about themselves. To achieve this, you need to share commercial insights that don’t just paint a picture of how much better life will be with your solution but that the client’s current situation is not good enough and that it is costing them money; inefficiency; high employee turnover; low customer satisfaction or any another problem you have helped them identify.

Using Mental Models* To Change Your Prospect’s View Of Their Own Business

Remember, your goal is not to convince your prospect about the value of using your solution, not yet anyway – research has already proved that this is insufficient to motivate them to change the view they hold that what they’re using now is actually good enough.

Your goal is to get the prospect to view their business differently, so they identify a problem they didn’t realise they had and for you to create a direct link between that problem and solving it with your company’s solution. This is achieved by using an approach known as the Mental Model* (see fig 1).

Using a Mental Model with your prospect (I wouldn’t recommend using the term mental model with them), allows you to investigate and more importantly, better understand what your prospect believes about their business.

Take the model in the image above and working from right to left, your goal is to ask your prospect what their most important and pressing business challenge is - keep this high-level and bigger picture for now. In the example shown in Fig. 1. this prospect’s objective is to improve sales.

If your company provides a solution that will improve sales, then you’d be forgiven for thinking, ‘great, I have just the product for you!’ and then you dive headlong into your pitch! This is too early.

What if your prospect believes that what they’re doing now is ok - it perhaps isn’t the best they could be doing but it does deliver new sales, just not as consistently as they’d like. However, the client does not perceive this to be an urgent need, even though they can see the value in your sales improvement training.

The mental model approach requires you to dig deeper, before pitching your solution. This is achieved by getting the client to understand and articulate what’s causing the lack of sales that they have said they want to improve. This is where good coaching questions and helping the client identify the drivers (pain points) that your solution can help manage is critical.

The model in Fig.1 shows that the first primary driver identified is that the sales department doesn’t have a consistent pipeline of quality prospects. A good coaching question here would be to ask the client to define what they mean by a quality prospect and what they mean by a pipeline?

By considering the drivers that are resulting in a lack of sales, your prospect is now focused on a specific pain point and has a tangible point of reference to which a solution could be applied.

Next, you need to dig deeper still by asking “what are the main (sub) drivers that are preventing your sales team from generating a quality pipeline of new prospects? And if these are not dealt with, what will be the outcome in the next 12 months?”

Now the client is forced to examine what the root cause is of not having a consistent pipeline of sales leads. In this case the client has now identified that the cause is a limited source of new prospects (Sub-driver 1) and poor research, by the sales team of prospects prior to meetings (Sub-driver 2), which is leading to poor quality leads being entered into the company’s CRM system.

The same approach is then applied to the second primary driver and sub-drivers for poor closing techniques.

This line of questioning rarely requires you to dig much beyond the primary and secondary drivers. If you do dig too deep, you could end up creating too many problems, which you’re unable to effectively solve and may create further confusion.

What Just Happened?

Consider what the mental model approach has achieved? Through effective questioning, your prospect has not only stated their objective but really had to consider the drivers that are creating this problem. Often, the prospect will put forward drivers, they had not thought about before, especially if you apply effective coaching questions.

Now it’s time for your pitch - your solution must deal with the drivers (removing the pain points). Let’s examine this from the perspective of my own specialism, which is LinkedIn and social sales training.

If, at the first point of meeting my prospect, I was to simply state that LinkedIn will help them increase sales and even quote some of my case studies, the prospect is probably thinking “that would be a nice situation but I’m sure my sales manager will turn things around or there may be other solutions and less expensive ones, which I might want to consider?” That’s the end of my sales pitch.

No matter how much my prospect believes me, when I state how useful LinkedIn would be in helping the business improve sales, this is still insufficient motivation for them to want to take action and to do so now. It’s certainly not enough motivation to warrant them involving other members of the buying team at this stage.   

However,  by using well thought through coaching questions, designed to help the client understand the drivers that are causing the problem of low sales and the pain these issues are creating, then I have got the client’s attention – I can now introduce my solution as follows:

“Ms Client, you told me that you need to increase sales and that the issues that are preventing this from happening are; a lack of a consistent pipeline of quality prospects, caused by not having sufficient sources of new leads, further compounded by your sales team not researching those leads properly. The result is that you end up with a low number of poor quality prospects to promote your products and services to. Is that correct?”

“Let me explain that LinkedIn will help your sales team to quickly locate, connect and engage with potentially hundreds of highly targeted potential clients and you will have access to insights about these leads that will ensure they’re of the best possible quality. I can provide you with case studies of clients I have worked with and the measurable sales results I have achieved for them. The result is that your business will have a continuous pipeline of high quality leads to market to. This is the outcome you’re looking to achieve I believe?”

By helping your prospect to identify problems in their business that they didn’t realise they had and that can be aligned with your company’s solution, means that you significantly increase your chances of making a high-quality sale.      

The task now is simply to replicate this mental model with each of the stakeholders in your prospect’s business. This is of course slightly more challenging and the topic for my next article in March. 

*The analyis and insights presented in this article are taken from extensive research undertaken by Gartner Research and its subsiduary CEB (formerly the Corporate Executive Board).

Many thanks for viewing my post and would you please share it with anyone you feel would benefit from the advice provided.

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