Where is my opportunity to differentiate?
How can I open doors the competition isn’t even thinking about?
The answers are in problem finding.
Prospects have a lot of information at their finger tips, and they will know a lot–if not all–about using ideas and tools to solve tactical problems. What they don”t have is your depth of knowledge and experience.
Put that to use for them.
“Today, both sale- and non-sales selling depends more on the creative, heuristic, problem-finding skills of artists than on the reductive, algorithmic, problem solving skills of technicians.”
-Daniel H. Pink
(To Sell is Human)
As an expert in the domain, put your background, knowledge, experience, and thought leadership to use by applying solutions and techniques from other disciplines. For example, Creative Teknologies used ideas and techniques from the automobile industry while designing LACMA Resnik Pavilion. We have seen companies leveraging collaboration with teams from different disciplines while coming up with entirely new solutions for the architectural projects.
One question we get all the time is: “We are busy solving problems at hand – current customer projects. Do I focus on that or do I “find problems?”
The answer to that is, with the right mindset and support system you can do both – focus on projects at hand and keep the antenna alert for finding buy Viagra 100mg online new problems to solve.
We have seen it with a number of our customers.
First and foremost, have a clear way to engage prospects in your sales process. Their focus will be on what they need to solve today. You want to have a way to discover information, so you can bring a unique approach and solution to the problem. We have seen sales teams increasing their effectiveness tremendously simply by shifting their focal point from tactical problem solving to more strategic prospect engagement. One way to look at it is this: Your customer is asking for a pain killer to stop the pain. Your mission is to analyze underlying reasons and background that will cure the pain more effectively. Any time I see a sales team without a systematic way to engage prospects, invariably I discover low-hanging fruit simply by spotting customer problems that are overlooked.
Use Data
The other key component to this is to use data.
Use web analytics to analyze a prospect’s behavior; see what they are searching for, how they are behaving over a period of time.
Once they become active leads in your sales funnel, use the Customer Relationships Management (CRM) to track and manage the sales process.
Create dashboards that give you insights easily – do weekly strategy meetings and talk over what you have seen from prospects and leads. An hour or two a week invested in this will save you a ton of time chasing wrong problems and prospects.
Technology has evolved to a point where we not only have incredible amount of data, but also the ability to interpret this data for business insights.
Use it.
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Questions or Comments?