Sales Strategy, Simplified.
Sales strategy, sales tactics, or refinement of sales skills—there’s typically no shortage of advice. But too often sales training focuses on superficial tactics, when actually it’s an inside job. A simple mindset shift can change everything for your sales efforts, and your relationship with your prospects.
Sales training often focuses on how to close deals through various methods and tricks of the trade, such as objection handling or negotiation tactics. But the most effective shift to get a salesperson from good to great is if their focus is on what they can do for a customer, not on the proposal or what the customer can do for them. As they say, “If you want to come into my office to sell me something, you have twenty minutes. If you want to come into my office to help me solve my problems, you can be here all day.”
To reinforce that mindset shift, to really understand the dynamics, pressures, and decision influences involved in the customer’s world, it helps to have the proper tool.
Enter the decision grid.
This tool will not identify the correct sales strategy for you to win the deal, but it can help you uncover the decision-makers, and the criteria they will use for making decisions, and give you an organized structure that will reveal and clarify your next steps. It’s a tool that’s centered on studying and documenting your client’s highly matrixed and pressured world. What steps do they need to take to make a good decision, and who will they seek out for advice, regardless of the provider they choose? When will a decision be made?
The document, downloadable here, is simple to follow. A salesperson simply inquires with each contact to find out who else is key to making a decision, the role they play, and the criteria by which they will decide.
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I was first exposed to this line of thinking when I was running my own IT company. Like a lot of companies, we had a robust pipeline where deadlines somehow kept getting pushed out further and further. I knew I needed to draw a line in the sand, so I told my salespeople they had two weeks to fill out a decision grid on every opportunity in the pipeline. If that task couldn’t be completed, we’d stop putting resources towards the deal. As you can imagine, not everyone loved the idea.
One of those people was a salesperson trying to close a deal with the CIO of a mall developer. We were bidding for the right to install a communications system, the type of project that was a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. Yet like a lot of other deals, it had been in a state of permanent stall.
On a lark, I decided to accompany my salesperson at his next meeting with the CIO, decision grid in hand. Using the parameters of when, who, and how, he and I both discovered something we would have never known to be true if we hadn’t come equipped with the mindset inherent in the tool: The CIO was new to the job, a little inexperienced, and had been hesitant to ask the CFO to clear such a big purchase.
We knew we were talking to the right person to complete one of these steps, but before this meeting, we had no idea there was a step beyond that one. The grid’s layout itself prompted us to ask the questions we would need to fill the next line on the grid. Once we did, we knew exactly who had to sign off next and what criteria we’d be graded on. And as it turns out, the CFO was in the building and agreed to meet with us that day. Remarkably, he gave the OK for the project before we’d left to return to our office.
It was great for us, and it was great for the CIO who needed to get moving on this project that was on his must-do tasks.
This wasn’t mere objection handling. This wasn’t a negotiation tactic or some newfound form of solution selling. This was a shift in mindset: From concern over the state of our deal to a focus on the prospect’s world. What ultimately occurred was in our best interest, but it wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t come in with a sincere interest in the struggle felt by our counterparty. We came in with curiosity and empathy when we recognized he was blocked. The CIO knew what it would take to get the deal done, but he never would have told us if we hadn’t shown up and asked questions with curiosity that demonstrated we genuinely wanted to help him.
A sales leadership tool
Sales leadership can benefit from this as well. It’s a tool that can create accountability and visibility to sales managers the degree to which any opportunity is truly being explored to its fullest. A completed decision grid will also make clear the priorities of each decision maker, and surface if those priorities have shifted or not, as they often do over the long sales cycles we encounter in big B2B enterprise sales. The more boxes of client-validated information you can accurately complete, the greater the likelihood you can win the deal. You will know what is required because you’ve taken the time and consideration to really get to know your client and understand their needs. This process, when done correctly, means you’ve secured the most valuable thing possible in any sort of relationship: Trust.
This trust can create wonderful opportunities to unblock issues that are in the way of closing the sale. I once worked with a senior team at a big prospect. In asking each one of them about their criteria for the purchase, I found their answers were actually at odds with one another. With trust, I was able to surface this and work with them to find solutions to their disconnects.
There are, of course, more practical things to know about the decision grid beyond just that it requires a change in mindset. For instance, you have to go beyond mere names and titles to actually understand the political positioning of each person to which you’ll be presenting. Likewise, you must know the company strategy to understand the criteria they’ll be judging you on.
But each of these best practices is subservient to the larger goal: To get to know your clients well enough that they see you not as just a salesperson but as a trusted advisor.