Does it feel like your business just stopped growing? Or maybe there is a continuous decline in your number of sales? Or is there a feeling that you can not reach out to your targeted audience no matter what you try? You have tried various ad campaigns and worked through every sales funnel, and yet - no results. The possibility is you do not have an established sales methodology.
You may think that you have done the best you could and still be wondering without knowleшьпdge about the possible issue. This might be frustrating but don't worry. We've got you covered in terms of all the ground info you need to improve your sales and lead numbers.
In this article, you will learn what a sales methodology is, why you need one and get acquainted with the most efficient and reliable sales methodologies.
Making a sale is not as easy task as it might seem at first. It includes various stages that are interconnected with each other and need to work accordingly to make an actual sale. This is impossible to achieve without a proper sales methodology. Here's how implementing a sales methodology can boost your business sales:
Improving your customer connection. A proper sales methodology can help create a better customer experience and establish stronger customer relationships.
Work efficiency. With a specified sales methodology, you can improve the sales process as well as build a better decision-making strategy. This will decrease the amount of time and effort of your sales team.
Simplified data collection and analysis. A rightfully implemented sales methodology will ease parameter collection along the sales process. This can mark wicker sports, track east employees' performance as well as collect and compare information on every new feature.
Improvement and Training. A clear and understandable sales methodology will ease the process of new employee training. You will have a guide map for the incomer to help with education. Later in the training, it will help to highlight areas that need possible improvement.
Consistency. Implementing a standardized sales methodology will help all employees to follow the same guidelines without missing any important step along the way. This way, you can get the best results as well as increase customer trust and affection.
Before learning all the best sales methodologies, it is best to learn the definition to clearly understand how each of them works and which one will be the best for you. A sales methodology is a process of converting your potential leads into actual buyers with instructions to guide your sales representatives. An organized sales methodology navigates the sales process and establishes the actions of the sales team during all sales stages.
To reach the final mark - the actual sale and revenue increase - there are many steps to take beforehand. Though each sales methodology offers its unique approach, there are main stages that are included in every one of them to help you at every step. These include:
Targeting and brand awareness - to establish potential leads;
Reaching out to a potential lead - to build a connection and turn a potential lead into a certified lead, create a database;
Reaching out with a sales prospect - to locate selling opportunities for the specific deal;
Guiding through making a decision on a sale - to convince the leads and turn them into customers.
By choosing and implementing the right sales methodology to guide your team, you will receive an increase in efficiency numbers at each sales point.
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Try NowTo find out which of the sales methodologies will suit your business best, at first, you need to look into several key points. These will determine your next steps in raising the efficiency of your business based on the gathered sales data.
No matter what industry you are working in, everything should be about the customer and for the customer. Since the market of any product or service produces at least 20 alternatives, there is always an option to switch to.
Unfortunately, most customers are willing to pay more to receive the service or product they need immediately than pay to fix the present one. This is why you need to look into possible pain points and decide which can be fixed to create the best service you can provide.
You can locate your pain points in 2 ways:
Collect data from the customers
Collect data from the employees
Gathering customer feedback can be time-consuming yet very efficient. Only they know their preferences and can show you examples of better implementation methods. Ask questions like what can be changed in the product, how can we improve customer service, what was the most annoying and bothersome part when using the product?
On the other hand, you should also reach out to your customer support team. They know about customer's pains more than anyone in your company. Ask them questions like what problems are reported most, what are the most complicated issues the customer faced? Give them some time to gather the data and present it to you.
Every product requires its own approach. Based on what, where, and when you sell, your strategy will differ every time. Every sales methodology has its own feature that can work for one product and lead to a complete failure for another.
Thus, before diving into your possible options, you need to learn the most important points about your product or service. To help you do this, answer the following questions:
What features make your product unique?
Who is your target audience? Can you enlarge it?
What cons or issues does your product have?
What are the pros and advantages of your product?
What is your product's position on the market?
How does your product solve a specific problem? How can it be useful?
How does your service or product work?
For every sales methodology you choose, you need to keep consistency as the main point in mind. After settling on one of the approaches, every person in your sales team will have to work according to it.
It might take time to transition to it, but only by repeating and sticking to the chosen option will you achieve results. When choosing a sales methodology, remember that your team will have to stick to the new routine.
Your decision must be based not only on the one's features and possible outcomes but also on the abilities of your items. By setting unreachable goals and setting an impossible routine, you will never achieve the desirable results.
Now that we have learned more about sales methodology, it's time to dive into the list of the best and most popular sales methodologies and choose the one for your business.
This methodology is all about personalization and customization. Your brand should resonate with a customer on many different levels, thus creating a special connection. Let's dive into how you can achieve this and what parts to focus on.
Your company message. This part provides a clear message about why and for whom. Why did you create this brand, and what makes it unique? Who are you, and why can people relate to you and your product? The way you deliver your message is important as well. You need to pick your own style, language, and people to represent the product to make it stand out.
Customer personalization and separation. You need to clearly understand why a person decided to use your product and what issue it can help solve. By focusing on the specific ad unique feature of the product, you can create a personal experience for every customer based on their needs.
Customer communication. Your sales contact should perfectly align with the customer's buying process. Every contact should be made at a perfect time and walk the customer through a sales funnel. All your conversations must be engaging and resonated with a customer at every step of the process.
Involving. Keep gathering new knowledge about your customers, their goals, and problems, and change accordingly. You can change or update your business message and the way you reach out to people based on how you and your customers have evolved over time.
This methodology focuses on the customers' problems. When choosing this methodology, your main goal will be diving into the issues that lead to buying your product and it can resolve them.
The main focus of your sales team should be on shoving all the ways your product can help and convince the person to choose your company. Here are some tips on how you can achieve this:
Encourage the person to list all the problems you know your product can solve and provide solutions to all of them.
Make emphasis on all the benefits of your product beyond problem solving.
If your product is made for B2B market, make sure to talk with the person in charge of the decision-making.
Do not force the person into buying the product. You should rather focus on guiding them and providing helpful information along the way.
Divide the process into specific phases. There should be distinctive measures for each of the phases to measure its success.
Implement specific tools and education to improve the effectiveness of the sales team.
For the most part, the sale process is perceived as a salesperson convincing the potential buyer to acquire their product or service. This perception is the opposite of what the Sandler System is. For this methodology to work, both the seller and the buyer should be equally interested in the sale.
When choosing this system, your sales managers work with the client by going through their issues and suggesting possible solutions by being a kind of advisor. You should only work with the lead of your product or service that could actually solve their issue. The focus must be on building a connection with the customer and making sure this lead can 100% benefit from your product.
Such an approach can be a game changer for your company if you understand the whole process to the core and can implement it correctly. When using the Sandler system, the conversation should seem like the customer reached out to you first.
The main points for you to keep in mind to make the methodology work:
Mutual interest;
Thorough lead research to ensure the interest;
Discussing customer's issues;
No forcing the customer;
Reconnect after the sale to ensure the established contact.
Inbound selling methodology mostly focuses on the marketing channels. The potential lead usually gets in touch with you after seeing one of your promotions. It can be via email, social media posts or ads and blogs.
With inbound selling, your customers come to you. Such customers also tend to research your product on their own before contacting you directly. They look into all the information that can be found online, like posts, reviews, deals, and prices. So when the person actually contacts you, keep in mind that you are dealing with a known, knowledgeable lead.
The person can contact you at any point of their learning journey, so keep all contact points available: social media, chats, forms, emails, phones, and the selling page. To lead a person through the sales funnel, you need to keep in mind the stages of any decision making during inbound sales:
Specify the buyer. With inbound sales, your main focus should be on the active buyers. Collect data about leads that went further than just researching the company. They could have contacted customer support with questions about the product, asked questions on social media, and filled out any forms on the website.
Create a personal connection. Reach out to the specified leads with a personalized message. To create one, you can look through their social media to get into their interest, gather data about what pages on your website they were mostly interested in and/or propose a special deal.
Get involved. This phase is more personal than the other. Your goal is to learn more about the lead's personal issues and goals. By doing this, you will strengthen your connection and get insight on how your product can help.
Suggest the solution. After gathering information on the previous stages, provide personalized advice on how you can help the lead with your product. This will show that you actually care about them and listened to everything they had to say, and at the same time, you want and are able to help.
By using inbound selling, you can create a successful sales model. The most important thing to keep in mind is that your main goal is to create a personalized conversation with the customer.
These days, people do more and more research about the product before diving into the buying process. Challenger sale methodology focuses on providing more knowledge and insight into the product and the industry in general than the potential lead could know.
The sale is usually coordinated by the 'Challenger.' These sales managers focus more on providing extensive information on the product rather than building a relationship with the customer.
Here are the main points of Challenger sale to keep in mind:
Teach the lead. You need to educate the potential lead about the product and the industry. You always need to know more than them.
Tailor the message. The information you are teaching should not be all over the place and should be tailored to the customer's specific issues and needs.
Be in control. Your sales manager should be the one in control of the conversation and keep pushing it forward. It's ok to be a little bit challenging and change the trajectory of the conversation if necessary.
This approach mainly relies on tech data collected throughout all your platforms to outline the sales process. The focus of MEDDIC methodology is enhancing productivity by making data-driven decisions about proceeding the lead. Since all decisions are made based on the tech-collected information, leads can be sorted in the first stages of the sales funnel.
The name of the methodology is an acronym and stands for the main parts of which it consists:
Metrics. All lead decisions are based on specific metrics and KPIs that show how exactly the product can help them.
Economic Buyer. Contact must be made with the person who actually makes the final decision for the company.
Decision Criteria. Dive into what is important to the customer in the product and what the defining criteria and factors are.
Decision Process. You need to be clear about what criteria influence the final decision of the client.
Identify Pain. Understand what is the issue or pain and what product can solve for each client.
Champion. This part includes finding an ally or a 'champion' who is going to stick by your side and advocate for your company in front of the real decision-maker.
The MEDDIC methodology focuses on the best possible leads to increase the efficiency and likelihood of success.
This methodology was created by the Harris Consulting Group as a replacement for several outdated ones. The NEAT methodology focuses on the needs of the lead and aims to create a mutually interesting connection between the buyer and seller. The NEAT acronym stands for the main elements of the methodology:
Need. You need to lead the main pains of the lead to show how the product can be of help.
Economic impact. Ask the buyer about how much money they are losing on the problem your product can fix. If their knowledge is limited, provide insight on an approximate number.
Access to Authority. Gather knowledge on who makes the decisions in the company. In case you are not able to reach out to this person, find a 'representative' inside the company to present your company and advocate for you.
Timeline. Create a sense of urgency for the customer to make the decision in favor of your product as soon as possible. Understanding how the product can help in the nearest future can be a great help.
The main focus of this methodology is diving into the customer's pain points. You have to dive into all the issues and provide accurate solutions.
The SPIN acronym stands for the main types of questions to ask your customer:
Situation Questions. These are needed to understand the current company's standing alongside possible issues and needs.
Problem Questions. These questions are needed to get the outline of the customer's issues.
Implication Questions. These types of questions will help provide the consequences of not solving the current problems and showing the amount of company losses.
Need-Payoff Questions. Show how implementing your product can improve the company's standing, what benefits you can provide, as well as other possible outcomes.
SNAP methodology's main sales point is simplifying the explanation. In a busy environment with information overloading our brains throughout the whole day, this approach can be the key to sales success.
Sale techniques in SNAP selling methodology are intertwined to create a simple and understandable way of addressing the issue. The main points are hidden in the SNAP acronym and include:
Simple. Do not only simplify the way you address the issue but also show how easy it is to use and implement your product.
Invaluable. Be a personal expert to a buret and list all the benefits of the product as well as the ways it can help the customer. Keep in mind that they do not have time to learn about every feature, so you are the one to provide thoughtful insight.
Align. Have an understanding of the customer's current needs and issues to align with them and provide a timely and necessary solution.
Priority. Learn the customer's most timely practices and make them your own to achieve better results by providing the solution they were searching for.
SaaS stands for sales as a science; another name for this sales methodology is winning by design. This methodology was created by the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and is mostly used by such companies as well. This is why it is based on collecting various metrics and analytics to make data-driven decisions.
Using this methodology is also helpful in tracking the whole process and learning which areas need updates on improvement. Here are the main steps for establishing the SaaS Methodology:
Creating a sales funnel.
You need to outline the whole sale process, including all the stages, possible pain points, as well as benefits of each stage. You should also correctly divide the responsibilities inside the sales team.
Creating a guide.
One of the parts of the SaaS methodology is creating a detailed guide for all members of your sales team to follow. It should navigate the action of a salesperson along every stage of the sale. This Guide will also serve as a collection of all the best methods, templates, and practices.
Focus on the customer.
Instead of spending time on understanding customers' issues, for this methodology to work, you should focus on personalized messages and conversation to create strong customer relationships. This way, you will receive insight into some specific issues and connect them to how your product will solve them.
As usual, the definition is in the name. The GAP methodology focuses, to no one's surprise, on the gap. You, as a salesperson, create a gap between the customer's current position and what he wants to achieve and focus on this gap.
Your product will serve as the perfect way to reach the customer's desirable destination by implementing customer centric sales methodology. Here are some tips on how to make the GAP selling work for you:
Understand customer's potential needs;
Gather information on the current state of the customer's company;
Create a sense of urgency;
Address the possible negative consequences of not implementing your product;
Provide insight on the possible monetary loss;
Provide solutions tailored to the specific issues of the customer.
To put it simply, Conceptual selling, or Miller Heiman sales methodology, focuses on selling the thought of a problem's solutions instead of focusing on the price of your product or service.
You must identify the problems (or problems) that cause the main revenue decline and are the most painful ones. Identifying the customer's decision-making process can help in doing this.
Here are types of questions to help your sales team with implementing conceptual selling methodology:
Confirmation. Confirm all the received information and re-ask something if necessary. The main goal of these questions is to make sure you and the customer are on the same page.
New information. Try to gain as much info about the customer's needs and view of the ideal product with suggestive questions.
Attitude. These questions are needed for a deeper understanding of the customer and his personal connection to the product.
Commitment. After the customer invests in your product, make sure that all his needs are met.
Introductory. Do not forget about the simple basic questions to learn about the main issues and provide possible solutions.
Solution Selling concentrates on creating a personalized experience instead of the standard product or solution. The focus has usually shifted from the product itself to the way the solution is provided, combined with various benefits and professional advice.
Customers are usually informed about your product features as well as of your competotors' and are looking for the solution that fits their business best. Show how you are able to provide a highly personalized product.
Consultative Selling is based on the extensive knowledge and insight you can provide to your customer as an experienced advisor. You build a trustworthy connection with your customers based on the professional advice you provide to the purchase of the product based on your expertise.
By engaging in the conversation and showing how well you understand businesses' issues, you will be able to provide the required solutions.
These solutions might not always be connected to your product, thus showing your wide understanding of various softwares on the market. But you absolutely should lead the conversation to your product where necessary.
Value selling methodology focuses on the unique features of your product and connecting them to the customer's specific needs. The goal is to ask the correct questions to get a better understanding of customer's issues and how your product can create the best solution.
Here are some main points to keep in mind:
Emphasis on the unique features of the product;
Correct tailoring of the issues and solutions;
Make sure your product can solve the specific problems of the lead customers;
Learn about prospect's pain points.
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Try NowThe sales organization is not possible without implementing a proper sales methodology. Every sales methodology differs based on its focus, targeted customer lead, the qualification of the sales team, and specifics of the product.
We provided you with a list of the 15 best sales methodologies to choose from; the final decision is yours. Maybe you found the one for your goal in the list, or maybe you will combine features from different sales methodologies and create a new sales methodology that is perfect for your company.