Here are links to the five posts from last week and things to steal for yourself and/or take back to your team. Click through on each title for more [each article has a voiceover as well].
To the articles:
The Decoy Effect and Pricing
The insight: Prospects don’t judge pricing in a vacuum. They compare each tier to the others, so your starter and enterprise tiers are there to make the middle tier look like the obvious choice.
Change this: Stop having reps present all three tiers equally. Use starter and enterprise as anchors. Cover starter quickly (”here’s what you’d be giving up if you went with this plan”), spend most of the time on the middle tier and use enterprise as an aspirational anchor.
The Discovery Phase Reps Skip
The insight: When a rep goes straight from hearing a problem to pitching and trying to solve that problem they fail to connect with a prospect. When you hear a problem, help the prospect understand the implications of that problem.
Change this: When a prospect names a problem ask what it’s costing them before you pitch anything. If that lands flat, shrink the question (”Does finance see this as a delay too?”) and keep probing.
CRM Hygiene or Gut Feel?
The insight: Unfortunately you still need CRM Hygiene. Just keep it simple if you want to stop harassing your reps on data entry (if you can’t automate it).
Change this: From day one track three things: a next step with an actual date, whether anyone besides the main contact has touched the deal in the last two weeks and whether it’s been stuck in its stage too long. Then review those three things in every forecast meeting.
Go Farther Than a Competitor Name
The insight: Getting a competitor name from a prospect is permission to dig deeper.
Change this: When a name comes up find out how far along that competitor is: demo done?, pricing discussed?, meeting happened?. If the prospect dodges, try “Help me understand what’s driving the comparison.”
To Have a POC or Not to Have a POC
The insight: A Proof of Concept without clear dated goals is free work with no guarantee of a deal. Constant extensions usually point back to a weak sales process.
Change this: Don’t approve a POC without a dated success goal (e.g. “green on all integrations by October 15th”) and cap it at one extension. Then work toward dropping POCs for any segment that doesn’t truly require them.
