How to Pull Prospects Through an Early Sales Cycle

β€œChange Happens When: The pain of the same is greater than the pain of change” – Tony Robbins

If you’ve been in sales for more than a few months I’m sure you’ve heard the old mantra, β€œSell the solution, not the product”. In today’s sales development world this couldn’t ring more true as the best reps are creating opportunity by creating awareness and educating prospects.

To create awareness in sales, sometimes you have to get your prospect to become aware of their problem. How do you do this you ask?

I teach my reps to ask β€œcurrent state” questions to uncover surface level pains. To get even more specific, we ask current state questions that lead to our benefit statements. For example, β€œWhat are you doing to reinforce your training right now?” – or – β€œWhat are you currently doing to measure learning retention?”

The point being, we can lead the prospect down a breadcrumb path. We’ve had this conversation 1,000 times already – this is their first. A good SDR should be able to anticipate where this conversation is going. BUT how can we create enough value, pain & urgency to pull our prospects from β€œobscurity” all the way to their organization prioritizing our solution as an initiative?

Here’s an example of a customer buying cycle for a new product:

Every sales leader out there wants to know, β€œHow can we speed up our sales cycle” – or – β€œHow can we get more leads deeper into the sales cycle”. I believe that Sandler has an answer we’ve been overlooking.

It’s fairly simple: USE THE PAIN FUNNEL

Pain Questions

I can’t stress enough how important this is. Surface level pain doesn’t get deals closed – It won’t cause urgency and it ABSOLUTELY will not make your new solution a priority. When we have high value-added conversations early in the sales cycle it helps us remove tire kickers, create more value and accelerate sales cycles NOT to mention CREATING them.

The difference between a rock-star SDR and an average team member is understanding where a prospect is at in their buying cycle and creating enough value/pain to move them from one stage to the next. For example:

Prospect A has never heard of Bizlibrary – has no idea what we sell. Yet, when we get them on the phone, we help them understand our value proposition with pointed questions. Then all of a sudden, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, we’re at a demo with a prospect, continuing to educate them on our core value propositions.

If we continue to ask the right questions, educate & provide solutions to their pain, then we’ve done our job. The point being, if you want your AE’s to have more at bats, make sure your SDR’s know how to execute the pain funnel ASAP.

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