The most critical impact on revenue generation in the current market is in creating need and avoiding stalled decisions.
 
In the recent past, most companies made their revenue goals with less than 20% of their product or service offerings. Now with fewer opportunities, each one has to be maximized. This means developing the skills in creating need for additional products and services that you offer to increase the average transaction size. Further, most sales executives have been losing sleep over forecast misses, mainly affected by stalled decisions.
 
So how does the sales person get the buyer's attention and create the need for their solution?
 
I'll illustrate the process with a real example that I experienced. I made a trip to a popular electronics store to purchase a home theater system. I noticed that they displayed each manufacturer's offerings with the most expensive model at eye level, the mid-priced model at waist level, and the lowest-cost model next to the floor.
 
I'm sure the sales rep had seen my behavior before, standing up, crouching back down, over and over, trying to compare features. After a short time he approached me and confirmed that I was trying to decide what model to purchase. When I acknowledged my intent, he said, "Let me ask you one question: Do you anticipate entertaining adults in one room or on the patio, while your kids watch TV in another room?" I thought about his question and agreed that this situation would come up.
 
He then pointed to the most expensive system and informed me that this was the only model that would allow two different channels in different locations.
 
Guess which model I purchased?
 
The seller followed a fundamental need creation and differentiation process:

• Identify a problem that only your solution can address, or can address it better than other solutions. Now the buyer is paying attention, because it is something important to them personally.
• Then link it to your unique capability or and additional capability that was not originally on the buyer's agenda.
• And the final step is to solidify their commitment to the identified capability by helping the buyer understand the value of the unique capability by asking some questions about how "the solution" might impact the buyer.

We worked with a company that was not achieving its goals for selling professional services.  While their sales people were regularly informing their prospects that they could provide professional services, unfortunately the prospects were not engaging them on the subject, and their sales suffered.
 
They changed their process by arming the sales people with some simple problem identification questions:

• Is the customer finding it difficult to recruit qualified people?
• Is their current staff up to speed on all the latest technology?
• What quantifiable impact were these unanswered issues having on the customer's goals?

Although this seems trivial, the results were outstanding. Their professional services bookings doubled in less than 6 months!

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Kevin Temple is President of ValueVision Associates.  For more information please contact John Salamone at valueselling@attbi.com
 
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