In OOH Sales Mastery, we teach and relentlessly reinforce a simple principle, an impossible-to-forget idea that carries massive implications for optimal revenue production: qualify hard, close easy. One of the big problems we see, though, is that people sometimes imagine they’re qualifying hard, but aren’t. Why not? Because they aren’t completing a non-negotiable element of qualification: qualifying the potential buyer’s Pain, (or in layman’s terms…their problems, issues or concerns). If we haven’t done that, we have no place making any formal recommendation or presentation to the buyer. And, as a result, we can’t expect to close easily. When we qualify effectively their Pain, what are we doing? We’re clarifying, in emotional, practical terms that resonate for the buyer, exactly what all the potential costs are for not taking action on a problem that’s keeping them from getting where they need to go next in their world. One of our most famous tools for clarifying the emotional impact of those costs is known as the Pain Funnel. It’s a powerful series of questions that is designed to allow the prospect to self-discover not just what is happening but why it is happening and most importantly, how does that issue affect the bottom line.
Make no mistake: It is a game-changing tool. There’s a reason this iconic sequence of questions has remained famous, and widely used, by top-performing sellers for as long as it has. OOH sales professionals trained in this methodology have been using this powerful interviewing model for more than a half-century now – because it works! It does the job. But here’s the problem: it does not, in and of itself, finalize the Pain step.
Unfortunately, even sales teams who have been trained and reinforced in this method sometimes forget that. They don’t continue the conversation. In short: they don’t connect the dots. They skip the important action item of leading the conversation with the buyer toward a clear, quantifiable, monetary cost, for leaving the problem that’s just been identified unsolved. The Pain step is not complete until they do that! Qualifying without quantifying the monetary impact is not qualifying hard. It’s a recipe for failure. Once we complete the Pain Funnel, our job is not over! These are going to vary dramatically depending on the situation, which means that, unlike the situation where we deploy the Pain Funnel questions to begin the Pain conversation, there is no one simple template we can follow in this situation. We have to use our heads; we have to collaborate in real-time with the buyer in a way that reinforces what we’ve learned and makes them feel listened to. We can’t use a checklist. This is not a checklist-driven part of the conversation. But it’s vitally important.
Now here comes the big question. Given that we teach this in OOH Sales Mastery… we reinforce this relentlessly in OOH Sales Mastery … and we practice this relentlessly at OOH Sales Mastery Group, because yes, we’re salespeople, too … why do so many of the OOH sales teams we work with often fall out of the habit and skip this step? Why is this critical part of the qualification for Pain left incomplete at so many organizations, even though the teams “know what to do”?
The answer is as simple as it is fixable: Head trash. You know; when you know what to do but you still find it hard to make yourself go there? That’s called head trash…we all have it in some form or fashion. If you think you don’t have head trash, that’s head trash about not having head trash! We’ll leave that topic for another OOH Sales blog to come…in the meantime, qualify hard, close easy by making sure that we not only qualify the prospects “Pain” but we also quantify just what it costing them to leave that issue unsolved!
Need help with sales skills or coaching to take your out of home company to the next level. Learn more about OOH Sales Mastery at oohmastery.com or Contact Dan Nausley at dan.nausley@sandler.com, 423.702.5579.
Lisa & Dan Nausley and Reggie Piercy of Sandler Chattanooga have developed the OOH Sales Mastery Program after more than a decade of training/coaching and purchasing scores of OOH Operators across the country in sales, leadership, and executive coaching.
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