“Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.”
― Oliver North
I’ve been thinking a lot about sales call preparation and how to be most effective when presenting to a prospect. I, like most salespeople, like to go fast and get the deal done. But what I’ve learned over my career is that the most important part of any sales conversation starts with a listening session and evaluating your prospect’s stage from an awareness perspective. How can we quickly identify how smart our prospect is on the problem they face and the solutions that exist in the market?
This, what I call the adaptive sales call, is the shifting of your sales gears to a specific talk track and the shortest path to close. There is nothing worse than seeing a sales call start to go down in flames because the rep didn’t listen and gauge the awareness of the prospect and starts a generic talk track that wastes time and kills credibility. Adapting your talk track and presentation based on the initial part of the call is something that truly great reps can do in their sleep.
Lately, I’ve been doing a ton of reading on marketing theory and ran across some extremely interesting concepts that came out of the ad industry in the 50s and 60s. Being a complete and total Mad Men fan, I dove right in.
Eugene Schwartz walked onto the streets of New York City is a new college grad in 1949, and began his ad career as a messenger for a large ad agency. He worked his way up the ladder to be the head of copywriting, and later ran his own firm.
I found one of his concepts an extremely appropriate adaptation of how you should view the prospect and their awareness level as you guide them on their journey. Schwartz’s Stages of Customer Awareness is a five-stage model that is used to understand the stages a customer goes through from the time they are first aware of a product or service to the time they become a loyal customer.
Here is a sales-ified version and is a great way of quickly establishing where your prospect is in the awareness realm, and their understanding of the problem, market solutions and you.
Total Awareness – Like friggin’ Skynet on August 29, 1997,( Terminator ref) the customer shows up on the call with complete awareness of the problem, solutions and your specific offering and is ready to buy. They know their problem, they know your solution, they have decided to buy and scream “let’s make a deal.” We wish the sales life was so easy, right? You be surprised how many times I’ve seen reps try and f..k this up lol. Listen and know you’re buying signals and shift to negotiation.
Product Awareness – the prospect has done their homework, been to your website, watched a webinar, read white papers and brochures, etc. etc. They know the problem they are aware of the market and know solutions, and they are meeting with you to learn more and differentiate your product in their minds and make an informed buy decision. It is imperative at this stage to ask deep questions and find out who your competition is, and how the prospect views you at that particular moment. From there you can craft your talk track and begin the fight.
Solution Awareness – prospects at this stage know they have a problem and know that solutions exist in the market but have no knowledge or awareness of what you offer. This is a solid position to be in for good sales reps. If your first to the gate, you can start to set the bar and land mines for your competition as they explore their options.
Problem Awareness – at this stage, the prospect knows they have a problem, but is oblivious that solutions exist. this is one of my favorite stages, because I love to see the light bulb go on in prospects. It's also a great place to establish a firm foothold, if you can properly educate the prospect. It is also a dangerous stage for salespeople as you may invest time and energy in educating, only to see a fickle prospect drift off.
Completely Unaware - at this stage there is really no awareness at all of the problem or the solutions in the prospect. This is typically where you’ll find yourself educating the market and can be the most painful from the sales cycle perspective. Most outbound sales efforts at newer startups can find themselves in this position, and it takes a special talk track to quickly educated on the problem and the provided solution.
If you have a great marketing team, they will have assets (videos, slides, collateral, etc) available for all these different stages of awareness. I would challenge you to start classifying prospects into these buckets and coming up with standard talk tracks and presentation paths for each. You will find it will become second nature, and for managers, a valuable way to train new reps.