Prospect the Sandler Way: A 30-Day Program for Mastering Stress-Free Lead Development by John Rosso

Author:John Rosso
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sandler Training
Published: 2014-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

Take another look at the Sandler Submarine. What “compartment” is positioned right after Budget?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sandler Prospecting Principle #13:

The Decision Step

In the previous chapter, your job was to find the next “compartment” in the Sandler Submarine, the one that comes right after the Budget Step. If you’re reading these words, I’m hoping that’s because you found it: Decision.

Here’s a painful but necessary truth: the vast majority of salespeople can find the word “decision” in the submarine graphic, but they don’t find out anything meaningful about the prospect’s decision-making process in the real world.

Here’s what usually happens: after a cursory initial discussion that usually skips the Pain and Budget Steps altogether, they rush into the so-called “proposal stage” without bothering to find out what will happen as a result of their delivering that proposal.

They have no idea whether what they’re putting into the proposal is what the prospect actually needs to see, hear, and experience in order to make a good decision. They have no idea who will actually be deciding what happens next. Usually, they deliver their “proposal” to someone who has no authority whatsoever to implement it! Then they wonder why nothing happens.

That, as I say, is how most salespeople work. They rush to the proposal. We definitely don’t want to be one of those salespeople! We have to understand what needs to happen in this critical Decision Step. Otherwise, we will very likely be following the prospect’s sales process and not our own sales process.

Completing the Decision Step is a matter of getting a complete and accurate understanding of the process that will lead us to either a yes or a no answer.

Important: We are interested not just in a prospect’s decision to write out a check and do business with us. We also want to understand the whole chain of little decisions that connect to that big decision.

That’s why, early on in the development cycle, we must discover the who, what, when, where, how, and why of the prospect’s complete buying process. Again, most of the time, you won’t have to focus on any of this during your prospecting call. But you do need to focus on it after you complete the Budget Step.

To whom are we talking? What are the steps of their process? What are the associated time lines? Where in the organizational chart will the final decision be made? Who would be involved in this process? Are we talking to the right people? If not, how do we expand our network of influence? How have they made decisions like this in the past? What criteria are they using to make this decision now? Why those criteria? What specifically is going to happen next? How do we know?

If we don’t know the answers to those questions, we’re really in no position to make a recommendation. We are investing significant time, effort, energy, and expertise in this process. We have a right—and a duty—to get clear answers to these questions. We do so in the Decision Step.

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