I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about strategy lately because I’ve been working on a couple of things for a few new clients.
The big idea that we are trying to tackle is how to expand in their markets.
That’s often the big question I’ve dealt with…so it isn’t anything new. But I digress.
What has changed and what came to mind today is that I was looking at a deck from a sales team earlier in the week and I realized that it was symptomatic of what so many of us are dealing with and challenged by.
We have a solution. We think it will be great. We know people should be beating down our doors for it.
Yet, they don’t.
Instead, nothing changes.
Or, they buy from your competition.
That’s where the magic question we all need to spend more time on comes in:
“Why should they change?”
Every decision you make is about change.
When you are selling a new idea or a solution, you have to being by understanding why someone should change from what they are already doing.
Take for example, if you are selling some sort of training to a company…let’s say sales training.
A not very compelling reason might be because your sales team needs the best and most current ideas to make sales.
A more compelling reason might be that selling on the phone has changed and if you aren’t constantly learning about new ideas and new ways to sell on the phone, you are missing out on a tremendous amount of potential revenue that your competitors will capture because their salespeople have sharper phone skills, new ideas, and new approaches to closing.
For too many people the start of any consideration is why is it important for the prospect to do something for you.
That’s faulty.
Because in almost every situation, starting out talking about you and what is important to you is going to mean…no sale.
As we move forward next week, we need to move beyond the things that we think are important when we want to influence a colleague or prospect.
Here are some questions to guide you:
Think about what is going to have the most impact on their performance?
What would change mean to them?
What is the cost of not doing anything?
The key to any questions you ask yourself is that you really need to think about why is change necessary. Why should change be a priority? And, why are you the person or organization to help create the change that will make a huge improvement in their business.