Your big summer vacation is just around the corner. Your family and friends decide to go somewhere new and fantastic but where? You decide to go to Scotland and so the planning begins. You want to get the best plane fare and hotel rate. This means planning, coordinating, and even doing some research on the area. You want everything to be perfect because this is your biggest summer vacation to date.
Just as preparation makes your summer vacation come together perfectly, preparation also makes your sales meeting successful. At this point, you’ve identified and qualified your prospect, you’ve come up with a business case, and you’re eager to show your prospect how your solution can help with their bottom line.
However, you can’t just call your prospect and show up at their door without doing your research first. What are your client’s pain points? What are their business goals? How is your client stacking up against their competitors in the marketplace? What are your prospects strengths and weaknesses in relation to their peers? How are the company’s executives compensated?
These are all important factors that impacts a lot of CxO decision making. If your client is already doing business with one of your competitors, show how your solution outweighs the benefits of your competitors.
Find out as much as you possibly can about the company or individual with whom you are meeting with. From a marketing and strategic approach, a thorough understanding of your prospect’s business processes and challenges gives you the crucial insights you’ll need to offer specific, workable solutions your prospects can use to improve their bottom line. Knowing this information demonstrates personal commitment and boosts your credibility with your prospects.
Finding performance gaps with your prospect’s peers is essential to know. Evaluate the information you find about your prospect’s competitors. This will tell you whether there are gaps in the market you can exploit. It should also indicate whether there is a saturation of suppliers in certain areas of your market, which might lead you to focus on less competitive areas.
Write a list of everything that you've found out about your potential client’s competitors, however small they may seem.
Put the information into categories:
- What your prospect can learn from and do better than their peers
- What areas your prospect is excelling in
- What their peers are doing the same as your prospect
- What areas your prospect can learn from their peers and improve upon
If you are sure your prospect’s competitors are doing something better than your prospect, address these gaps and build a business case around making some improvements. It could be anything from days in inventory, customer churn, improving logistics, or updating infrastructure. Show your prospect how you can help innovate and add value.
Do your research, understand your client’s business and the business of their competitors and speak in a language that is important to your client in a way they understand.
Then comes the true magic! Deliver a compelling business case that can give your prospect an edge in the marketplace. All these strategically thought out ideas, can help you gain your prospect’s attention and shows you care about their business and want to become more than a sales person but a trusted advisor. It gives you the power to sell adaptively and puts you ahead of your competitors.
Strong sales are driven by emphasizing the benefits that your product or service brings to your clients. If you know the challenges that face them, it's much easier to offer them solutions.
It's also worth keeping an eye on future developments in your customers' markets and lives. Knowing the trends that are going to influence your customers helps you to anticipate what they are going to need — and offer it to them as soon as they need it.
In addition to these sources you’ve already used, consider another powerful resource: people. If you’ve already formed a relationship with key people in your target company, you can ask them for referrals to influencers in other departments of the organization. Your contacts at an organization have inside knowledge and will usually be able to tell you whom to talk to if you want to close the deal. If they’re satisfied with the service you’ve been providing, these contacts are often happy to give you the names of others who might be able to use your solutions.
Learn how ClientIQ can help you build your business case further. Watch our on-demand demo.
