Filling the Funnel: Assessing Needs

This is part four of a seven-part series. In this article, we discuss how to make the most of your appointment.

Hopefully, by the time you set the in-person appointment, you already have a great idea about what your client is looking for. With the complex sale, however, just connecting with one contact doesn't mean you're ready to present your proposal. An in-depth needs assessment is the purpose of this stage of the sales cycle. If you read the previous article about Qualifying Prospects, you know that you're talking to a qualified company. You have asked about their key concerns, have identified how your company can address those concerns, created a system for managing the relationship with the company, and are crystal clear about which concerns you cannot address. Now that the prospect is qualified, how do you make the most of the appointment?

1. Identify who needs to be in the meeting. Just because you have a verbal commitment from Sally in marketing doesn't mean that the CFO is going to cut you a purchase order. Ask who the decision makers are and whether they can attend the meeting. If not, you might have to schedule multiple meetings to ensure that the needs of all decision makers and influencers have been heard.
2. Conduct research to identify gaps. Often, your customers will have a very clear idea about what their needs are. Other times, they might be unaware of market trends, industry changes, or internal issues that could impact their team and your ability to meet their perceived needs. A little research about the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT Analysis) can help you with your conversation, particularly if you are not very familiar with the industry. You don't have to conduct a complete SWOT Analysis, which could take months of research. Having enough information about the most obvious item in each of these categories is enough so that you can ask the right questions and get to the core of each decision maker's needs.
3. Set an agenda -- loosely. As the vendor or consultant, arrive at the meeting with an agenda and communicate it clearly. It lets the prospect know what to expect and communicates that you respect their time and want to be prepared. Also be prepared to revise that agenda on the fly. The start of the agenda should include lots of questioning. If you're spending more that 15% of your time in the meeting talking about your company or doing your presentation, you're talking too much. Stop the spray and pray. Let the prospect's responses determine the direction of the meeting. I've done many sales presentations where we never even looked at my presentation. Those are the instances when I'm most likely to close the sale. That's why #5 below is so important.
4. Practice the art of deep listening. When listening to answers to questions, keep an ear open for the language nuances, corporate cultural cues, and unvoiced frustrations in the conversations. Observing body language and seemingly unrelated comments can reveal unmet needs that might not yet be identified by the prospect. Deep listening can help you sniff out opportunities that go beyond what the client is asking for. For example, a consultant was asked to provide interior design services for a well-known property developer. With deep listening and asking the right questions, she was able to identify a gap in the developer's purchasing process, which saved the developer tens of thousands of dollars in the development of a high-rise. As a result, the developer hired the consultant to provide purchasing services in addition to design consulting for their next multimillion-dollar property development.
5. Don't leave without a leave-behind. As much as we would like to think that companies read our web sites, many of the decision makers in the complex buying process will not. They often don't have time to surf the web or dig through email attachments to read about your company. A leave-behind sales kit that contains critical info about your company and its advantages can make it easy to share with other team members on their own time (i.e. as they eat lunch or ride the bus/train to the office). The sales kit should make it obvious why they should choose your solution over the competition. I'm an advocate for saving as much paper as possible, but it's a fact: people read and retain information better when it's on paper than when it's on the screen. Even if you walk someone through your web site or DVD presentation, the repetition in the sales kit will help them remember what you talked about in the presentation. If you're a good salesperson, you probably didn't even get the laptop started up. It helps to have a sales kit with a copy of the presentation in it can be critical to keeping you top of mind as they make their decision.

Next edition of this seven part series, we'll review how to write and revise a proposal. If you want a head start on the complex sale before the next article comes out, join us for True Lies: Five Ways to Get Real About Landing Large Accounts on June 17, 2008.