How to prompt buying signals out of your prospects
Use insights to strike gold
Every salesperson gets excited when a buyer gives you explicit buying signals — the actions or behaviors that suggest a serious interest in buying your product or service.
But true buying signals are few and far between in today’s world of high competition, zoom meetings, transactional sales cycles, digital sales rooms and async comms where its hard to tell if your once apparently excited prospect is now ghosting you because their boss shot down your proposal or they’re just too busy to get back to you.
Most sellers try to engage their prospects by asking open-ended questions about their problems, asking follow up questions to probe for the severity and urgency of the problem and using that to create momentum for a deal. There’s nothing wrong with taking this approach. It’s just slow, unpredictable and more likely to hit dirt than strike gold.
By contrast you can get there a lot faster and with a much higher success rate by showing your prospect that you already know what their top problem is and you already know that fixing it is a high priority. When you do this you hit a nerve, especially with executive buyers. Hitting a nerve gets you several steps closer to striking gold.
The key to doing this is to use insights that prompt your buyer to start asking you buying questions like, “Why…?”, “How…?”, “When…?”, “How much…?”. These are the types of explicit buying signals that create momentum and this post is all about how to generate them quickly and predictably.
We cover:
How to select the type of insights that your prospects will respond to
How to produce and present your insights, including examples
How to use your insights in a sales call, questions to ask
Common mistakes to avoid
How to select insights that your prospects will respond to
Having done this on over a thousand sales calls in my career, I’ve found there are two types of insights that make every executive put down their phone and start asking buying questions: