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Storytelling and Sales

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  Storytelling can be noted down as the most powerful skill that you can learn in Sales. A story is like an idea planted in the mind to open up new possibilities in a more human way. A story can also be used as a mode to change a mindset. For eg, when you share how you helped someone with a similar problem, you come up to be more persuasive than just telling them, you can help! That's the power of stories and the ease it brings in the sales process. Story Telling, Simplified! A great story follows a well-defined framework. Pixar is famous for its 12 acts. But we will stick to the storyline where there's a beginning, middle, and end. In Sales and in Life, simplicity is the key. So, let's jump right into it:- 1: Beginning – The more personal, the better. The beginning is when you will need to set a context to help your prospect connect to your current user via a story. Do keep in mind not to share intricacies. It's always better to describe a similar persona by name, titl...

Aligning Sales & Success

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Customer Success, a department that technically did not exist 10 years back. Then why do we need it now and why does this particular department matter in today's businesses? Especially SaaS, also, why is Sales and Customer Success a power couple? Let's further dive into these aspects of Customer Success! What is Customer Success? - Promise to Reality Customer Success is an aim, which is further departmentalized. We can further define, Customer Success as a set of processes created by highly empathetic people to make sure, a customer gets the best out of your product. In order to dive deeper into Customer Success, we will need to define "Success", which does differ from organization to organization. But, in general, there are two bifurcations to Success which can be a metric to the usability of the product. 1> Proactive Success 2> Reactive Success (Support) We will mainly talk about proactive success in this article. If the proactiveness towards customer success ...

The Chemistry of Sales

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  Is Sales an Art or Science? That's the first question that comes up in all of our minds. Selling is definitely an Art. But Art is an applied Science. If you ask me, then dressing up well and looking sharp on that product demo web session is an art, after and before that, everything that happens is pure science. Why is Sales considered to be scientific? In Chemistry, we all are aware of chemicals being mixed which further results in a chemical reaction resulting in a third chemical altogether or, of course, a big bang! The same idea is applied in Sales wherein:- Opportunity is Chem A that enters a flask of Sales and the result is Chem B or a closed-won/ lost opportunity. But, when we talk about the flask of Sales then that's a mystery and varies from org to org. Let's break down the flask of Sales here. As per this image, we can see that an opportunity was poured in the flask of Sales after which meeting 1 took place followed by meeting 2 which then resulted in calls/ emai...

Solution Selling helped me achieve 163% of our sales quota!

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  My experience with Solution Selling and how it helped us sail through the COVID-19 times! Smart buying is taking over in the 21st Century. We all have an amazing tool called the “Internet” that enlightens and guides us with unlimited knowledge at our fingertips, leading to better decision-making regarding problems' solutions. So, how does a Salesperson go ahead with Solution Sales in the first place?  — The answer to this is by probing! The more a Salesperson probes, the better chances he has to know the pain point (problem) that his prospect is facing. What’s Solution Selling? When it comes to Solution Sales as a Selling method, let’s read how Wikipedia explains it. As per  Wikipedia , “Solution selling is a  sales  methodology. Rather than just  promoting  an existing product, the  salesperson  focuses on the customer’s problems and addresses the issue with appropriate offerings (products and services). The problem resolution is what...

The four-letter code - BANT

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What's BANT? BANT is a sales qualification method. BANT stands for B = Budget, A = Authority, N = Need, T = Timeline. It was introduced by IBM to help it's Sales team identify if leads were Sales Qualified or not. Here's what the  IBM website  has to say. A brief about BANT Budget - Does your solution fit the budget of your prospect? On a Sales call, a metric to qualify a prospect by the means of knowing the budget of the prospect is crucial and helps a salesperson determine whether or not the prospect has the budget to buy your solution or product. 2. Authority - Is your prospect a decision maker/ stakeholder? A qualification metric that comes into purview under BANT, is to understand if the prospect is the decision-maker or not. 3. Need - Are you catering to the pain point of your prospect? This metric helps in understanding a prospect's pain points better, which then leads to  solution selling . 4. Time - How soon will the prospect actually give you a green flag? Kno...