How to use a sales framework to troubleshoot your deals
Implementing SPICED
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: