Many early-stage startup teams struggle with low win rates. You grind away to book meetings with prospects and have what seem like positive initial conversations only to see the momentum slowly dissipate with a series of polite no’s or worse, a bunch of non-responsive leads.
Implementing a sales framework in your sales process is the starting point to solving this problem, because it helps you figure out what is holding you back from closing more deals and helps you take the appropriate steps to improve.
There are lots of proven sales frameworks and methodologies available to choose from, among them SPIN, MEDDIC, BANT, Sandler and Challenger. I’m a big fan of the SPICED sales framework because its simple and intuitive for people coming to sales from a technical background (like I did) and because its customer-centric, which aligns with my product-driven approach to revenue. This post uses SPICED to illustrate how to use a sales framework in your sales process.
Contents
An overview of the SPICED sales framework
How to create a SPICED summary of a deal
How to use a SPICED summary to troubleshoot a deal
How to use SPICED in a pipeline meeting
An overview of the SPICED sales framework
SPICED is a sales framework developed by Winning by Design. It stands for:
Situation: facts about your prospect.
Pain: The challenges your prospect needs to solve.
Impact: The impact your prospect is trying to achieve.
Critical Event: Your prospect’s deadline for achieving impact.
Decision: The people, process and criteria involved in making a purchase.
I’ve implemented SPICED at several startups and love it because its very customer-centric. You can share a SPICED summary with a customer and collaborate on it to make sure you both have all the information needed to close the deal and ensure a smooth onboarding. Not only will your customer find this helpful, they will view you as a vendor who has listened and understood their needs, which is an essential foundation for competing on service.
How to create a SPICED summary of a deal
A SPICED summary captures the information for a specific deal. To start your summary create 5 boxes, one each for Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event and Decision. You can use a template like this:
Here’s what to put in each box.
In the Situation box, write down:
The firmographics of your prospect’s business that are relevant to the criteria in your ideal customer profile. For example, if your ICP is “B2B sales teams with <5 salespeople selling to technical buyers”, write down the size of your prospect’s sales team and the profile of their target customer, not just the size of their company.
The tools and systems that your customer is using in the worfklow into which your solution fits. These are the tools that you either need to integrate with or replace.
In the Pain box, write down:
The challenges expressed by your buyer. Use one line for each challenge so that you can capture the full detail.
Use their words, not yours. Don’t paraphrase what you hear to match your internal jargon, nor add hyperbole to make their challenges sound more urgent.
In the Impact box, write down:
The impact your prospect is trying to achieve from solving the challenges outlined in Pain.
Use separate lines for emotional impact (i.e. time savings, increased morale) and rational impact (i.e. quantifiable impact that ties directly to your prospect’s business KPIs).
As with Pain use your prospect’s words, not your own. It's very easy to make the mistake of just writing down your value prop (i.e. what you want to hear) instead of how your prospect describes it.
In the Critical Event box, write down:
The name of the initiative that your prospect’s business has planned to address the challenges described in the Pain box. For example, if your prospect has a new product launch that your martech solution supports, the name of your critical event is the name of the new product launch.
The date of a relevant milestone in the initiative that lines up with needing to deploy your solution. For example, if your prospect’s new product launches on June 15th but has a teaser campaign starting on May 15th, your critical event date is more likely to be May 15th.
Note that critical event is not your target close date for contract signature.
In the Decision box, write down:
The name and job title of each stakeholder who is involved in making the buying decision.