11: Are you up for a challenge?

Once a simple task deceive , you know, the outcomes your prospect is looking for on each of your deals. Keenan talks about the CRM challenge in his book gap selling.

[inaudible]

welcome to the bite-size sales podcast where we believe that sales is the most important team in a B to B company. That complacency is the enemy. And taking bite-size steps each day to get better at your craft is the best way to improve results. I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and I'm using my 26 years of experience in B2B sales to bring you small, actionable ideas every day to help you get better.

[inaudible]

all right. Stick your hand up if you love doing deal reviews. Yeah, I thought so. So, you know, reps don't like doing them. Managers don't love them either. Um, we do them because we feel like we have to and we do want to try and help with deals, but we also know we kind of got to know what's going on in case someone asks. So we create this , this vicious cycle of trying to do them all the time to keep up to date. Um , and no one really love in the process of doing it. Part of the reason is that they're so boring, right? As formulaic as they happen the same way it pretty much every company I've been at. Tell me about the deal. Tell me about the size of it, where stage we at , things like that. So here's an interesting and quick tip from Keenan in his book. Gap selling and I'm reading I think has become pretty clear to you by now the gap selling demands. You get far more information from customers than salespeople traditionally asked for. Therefore, keeping track of all this information from your buyers , physical and literal current state to the unique problems to the impact of those problems and more. It can be overwhelming if you don't take copious notes and store them in your CRM. So can you pass the CRM and challenge, get your sales manager or one of your sales peers to go into your pipeline and randomly pick an opportunity you're working on without sharing with you the name of the account, the buyer, or any other identifying information, ask them to read you the notes. Can you then tell them which opportunity or refers to can you do that for all of your opportunities? If you cannot pass this test, you don't know enough and you've made your job a lot harder and you're in a bind, you're customers are moving forward on the sale, but now you're going to have to go back and get all of those important details out of them to make sure you know what's behind the sale, why they wanted to buy and their intrinsic motivation. Thus slowing down the momentum of the sales process. It will be awkward but necessary because if you don't know what's important to your buyer , how will you close the deal? How are you going to get the customer to recognize your solutions, the right solution without going back for that information? You won't. If you fail, the CRM challenge is a telltale sign. You're selling your product, not selling to the desired outcome. So I really liked this. The first time I read it, I wasn't as sure about it. Um, but I like the idea of it and the reason for that is it forces us to clearly articulate the problem and outcome that the customer is trying to solve. It's fun and center in our minds is front and center on the deal. Um, whether it's in the notes or maybe even a defined field that we all start at. You know, what I've seen commonly over the years in Salesforce or whatever, CRM is a similar structure where deals are labeled by company name, the products being sold, the size of the deal. Maybe the month is expected to close. And like that is all focused on us and you know , for good reason, right? I mean in a day CRMs are there for reporting reasons as opposed to helping reps actually sell things. Um, but it does create this focus on perhaps the wrong things. If all we think about is deal size in what we're selling as how we think about deals, then it kind of takes away the need to put the customer first. Um , and I'm wondering if there was a requirement to clearly articulate the problem early stage in deals before things move forward and state them clearly with metrics in a highly visible place for every deal, what the impact would be. And you know, you don't get asked in a deal review. Tell me about the deal at , at BP you're asked, tell me about your opportunity, where they want to reduce their spend on on premise hardware by 30% inside 18 months. What impact would that have on you as you're focused on your opportunities and even when you're sitting in front of customers, if you're trying, you know, shape deals and think about deals more by that lens as opposed to the internal lens. So my challenge for the sales leaders on this is to ask you, is this something you can put in place even if it's just in your team rather than company wide? Could you start refocusing your team on thinking about customer outcomes and being able to find them and articulate them as opposed to on product, company name and deal size.

[inaudible] .

If you want to get the book mentioned in this episode for free, simply go to bite size sales.com forward slash free book. If you sign up on that page for unstoppable dot du , we'll send you your book on us. Unstoppable gives you habit forming action notes on great sales books such as spin selling, never split the difference. New sales simplified the challenger sale and many more in there. You get the best ideas from these books, all organized in a straightforward and easy to implement way and designed for you to take action and transform your results. All of the equivalent of three cups of coffee per month. Start now and get your free book by going to bite size sales.com forward slash free book

[inaudible] [inaudible] .

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with anyone you think would give value, coworkers, teammates, your boss, your head of sales, even that guy you've worked with two companies ago who could probably do with some help. In fact, just overshare it. This is one of the few times it's cool to do that. Your podcast that we'll have a share button, please click it and share it widely .

[inaudible] .