Oct 062023
Corporate Visions is a provider of corporate sales training. My team members, and I, participated in a two-day CVI training session last month. It was applicable and systematic. With that said, here are a few instructions from the course:
- Executives’ business is their business and not your products. Talk in terms they care about.
- The seller will get delegated down to who he or she sounds like. Sellers need to speak to something the person cares about personally. If not, they would delegate you to someone whose job it is to do that specific thing.
- Be specific to your customers. We can save you $ a year based on this/that calculation, which itself is based on research you have done on them. This shows your competency and your compelling proposal.
- Do the math and show them the numbers that are specific to line items they care about as proof of what you have just told them or asked them. “I saw your presentation and specific to you we can deliver ROE of/a market share of x%…”
- Ask yourself whether what you are saying is what your competitor is probably also saying.
- A lack of budget does not mean a budget cannot be made available if the problem is worth it and seller can create a buying vision. Get executives involved early on.
- You don’t need a complete answer. You need to create the custom answer alongside the customer.
- You need to know more about their business than about your products (elsewhere and outside of the training the salesperson needs to know enough to generate credibility).
CVI has done executive research and advises that the framework for a conversation is DIQ. This stands for Data, Insight and Question.
- Share Data related to an external factor e.g. a relevant research stat
- Share Insight e.g. problem or opportunity or risk they may not be aware of and
- Ask a Question that may be hypothetical, comparative or prioritization type that provokes a conversation and leads to your solution without directly ringing up your solution because customers care about their business not what you are pitching. For example, “A customer on one channel may be the same customer on another channel. In fact, research from ABC shows that is the case 20% of the time. Yet, you think the earlier customer has left your site. Why would you limit yourself to not following customers through unique IDs even if they are guests? How are you preparing for monetization in an omni-channel world?”
Things That Need To Go Away: Being generic, not citing $ or % regarding the customer and not personalizing for your customer.