As promised I’m continuing the series with the four phases of a sales meeting. This is the third article and you can read the previous Why are B2C and B2B sales so different and Contacting Potential B2B Customers by clicking on the links.
Based on my experience and on the SPIN Selling book the 4 phases of a sale are:
The most important one for me is the investigating phase but I will share why later. Now, let’s start with short description about the phases.
The most important one for me is the investigating phase but I will share why later. Now, let’s start with short description about the phases.
- Preliminaries is the phase where the warming up things happen. These are the initial small talks, how you present each other and how the conversation begins.
- Investigating - where you are figuring out facts and hints that will help you make the sales.
- Demonstrating Capability - showing that you have something valuable to offer.
- Obtaining Commitment - a successful sale will end up with some sort of commitment. It depends on how big the sale is. Details later.
Why to focus on the investigation phase?
Let’s elaborate on the most important phase - the investigating one. The name suggests that here you should ask questions that will get you the information needed in order to make a sale. What type of questions though you should ask and in what order? How should you structure the conversation? These are important questions and the SPIN selling methodology has proven that if you ask certain type of questions the chances for success improve significantly. The SPIN abbreviation comes from:- Situational questions - these are data gathering questions with which you start. Ex. “For how long are you using this machine?”, “How big is your company?”, “What is your position in the company?”. Although situation questions have important fact finding role they can easily irritate and bore because they are one way questions. Only you are benefiting from them. So try to make your research beforehand and ask such questions as little as possible.
- Problem questions - after the data gathering is over you should start asking questions to explore problems and difficulties which your products/services can fix and improve. Ex. “Are you satisfied with the quality of your supplier?”, “How often this machine gets broken?”, “Are there many bugs in the code you deliver?”. Experienced sales people are really good in these.
- Implication questions - these are the ones that are key for getting the larger sales. In smaller ones the Problem questions are mostly enough but for larger ones you need to increase the damage felt in the potential customer. You have to explore further the effects and consequences of the problem. Typical questions are “Does having the machine most of the time broken lead to sales lost? How about decrease in the utility rate of your workers and higher costs for fixes?”, “Are the many bugs you deliver demotivating the developers? Are they leading to bad reviews from the customers?“, “How will this problem affect your future profitability?”. These questions are super hard and even experienced sales people don’t ask them enough. However, you should be aware that asking too many of them may depress the customer and that’s why the last type of questions are coming.
- Need - payoff questions - these questions make the customer tell you what benefits they are expecting. Ex. “If your machine is on all the time, how will you benefit?”, “If there were no bugs, what would this lead to?”, “Would it be useful to speed this operation by 10%?”.
