3 July 2024 |
By - Sudha Mariappan
In the fiercely competitive marketplace of today, nailing down great deals and finally reaching the pinnacle of sales success is not just dependent on a great product or service.
It rather involves a strategic way of selling.
Sales is the heart of every business organisation. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, it doesn’t matter. You are selling something.
As a leading Digital Marketing company, here at Ontogen Digital, we help businesses grow by putting into play the latest sales techniques.
In this blog, let’s see the top ten sales methodologies to transform your sales strategy and drive your company toward growth.
Target Account Selling is simply a selling method concerned with focusing on high-value customers with long-term potential.
At Ontogen Digital, we maintain and utilise advanced data analytics to identify such customers and focus our efforts on those most likely to add huge revenue growth in the future.
We first segment our potential targeted clients to identify key accounts that exactly fit our expected customer profile.
Then, we engage with the real decision-makers in those accounts, make strong relations through personalised interactions. After doing that, we pitch our value propositions, each curated to our target audience’s interests.
We can then position ourselves as a strategic partner to them by deep understanding of our clients unique needs and challenges, rather than just dismissing them as another vendor.
2. SPIN Selling (Ask the Right Questions!):
SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham concerns the discovery of customer needs with a set of structured questions: Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff.
This technique is used because there is a need to know about your customers beforehand to sell them a product. It goes by understanding these 4 main key roles:
Situation: Situation questions are used to understand how your clients’ business works, what their background is. What challenges do they possess? There are four steps of SPIN selling.
Problem: This helps identify specific issues or challenges your customers might be facing.
Implication: If your customer faces any issues, would there be any consequences?
Need-payoff: Need-Payoff questions focus on what benefits your customer will acquire and how it will improve their situation.
At Ontogen Digital, we train our sales teams to master these questions, guiding conversations toward the solutions we offer.
Our process initiates with the understanding of the situation the prospect is in, identification of the problems that need to be solved, and pressure on the implications of those problems.
All of the offered solutions are underlined clearly on how they will help fix them, and follow up with a leading way to improved outcomes. The method is not only uncovering the need but also creating a feeling of reason in using the product.
3. SNAP Selling (Get your sales Fast and Simple):
SNAP Selling, introduced by Jill Konrath, emphasises keeping the sales process simple. It refers to: Simple, Invaluable, Aligned, and Priority and what the benefits to them are, and Propose solutions.
Simple: The message must be clear for customers to understand.
iNvaluable: The solutions that you offer should be invaluable to the buyer’s challenges, not the needs which will show the unique value the buyer will receive.
Aligned: The sales approach that you put in should be aligned with the needs your customer has.
Priority: The business should always prioritise the buyer’s needs and focus on delivering value.
With increasingly busy clients who are getting hard to catch day by day, it is necessary to get on their schedule and sell them their desired product.
At Ontogen Digital, we ensure simplifying our sales interactions so they align with these principles.
In the SNAP selling technique, we engage the prospect with strong points, align our offering to what is relevant in their world as it is now, address customers’ prickly pain points, and present solutions clearly.
All these simplify things, speed up decisions, and make it more likely that customers can understand and act on our sales pitch.
4. The Challenger Sale (Challenge the Status Quo):
An approach is needed that challenges customers in their assumptions and introduces innovative solutions.
We take over this approach by improving our sales teams to improve and evolve the status quo and to bring out this sense of urgency in customers for positive change.
We empower our clients to adopt new strategies for optimum benefit by giving them a unique view of things and showing them precisely how our solutions may challenge conventional wisdom.
They might believe in one thing about a particular product before.
But through the challenger sale, we can tweak their point of view by not disrupting their initial belief.
This helps us, as a company, establish ourselves as thought leaders and trusted partners within our area of specialisation.
5. Value Selling Framework (Give Importance to the Customer Benefits):
Instead of selling them the product itself, pointing out the customers’ pain points and helping them out with that is true value selling.
Value selling is amazingly dependent on how effectively this benefits the buyer's business.
On several fronts, Ontogen Digital works out and communicates numeric-based ROI to our clients.
We use real in-depth case studies, testimonials, and ROI calculations as a vehicle to stake a claim for the value that our solutions have offered similar clients.
This evidence-based approach puts the prospect at ease with the return on investment they are making through our products.
6. Solution Selling (At the very core, it is problem-solving):
Solution selling is concerned with the identification of customer pain points and the positioning of a product as a solution.
Our coaching at Ontogen Digital is all about how to make a diagnosis and customise a pitch spurting out with their problems in terms of specific challenges.
First, we fully understand the customer's business context and pain points, then present our solutions in the light of addressing these issues, showing how our offerings solve their key problems and better their operations.
7. Conceptual Selling (Selling the Big Picture of your product):
Conceptual selling developed by Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman, proposes that a customer attaches to a product when they buy the concept of the solution rather than the solution of the product itself.
Meaning, their goal of the product would align with the concept of the product.
At Ontogen Digital, we help clients see the big picture by aligning our solutions with strategic objectives. We plan for your sales.
We hold deep conversations regarding their long-term goals and the challenges for them to state how our solutions can be part of their success.
This way, clients can understand the big picture on what their decisions are going to involve and how a relationship with our company will move them forward in business.
8. The Sandler Selling System (Prioritise Relationships):
The Sandler Selling System is the brainchild of David Sandler. His Sandler Selling System selling methodology was focused on establishing rapport and building trust with prospects.
So at Ontogen Digital, we believe in relationship building and reasoning of the customers’ wants through proper communication.
We take our time to understand prospects' needs, concerns, and motivations. Thereby building a base on which fruitful trust is built. In this way, we can overcome objections very easily and make prospects make a decision that is beneficial for both of us.
9. MEDDIC (Qualification Criteria for High-Quality Leads):
MEDDIC is a framework for vetting and qualifying sales leads against six criteria: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain Points, and Champion.
Metrics
This is used to identify what the customer has for goals, and to make those goals measurable. Whether they want to quadruple output, halve time-to-market, or cut production costs by 20%, you need these metrics to be able to show the economic benefits and prove a strong return on investment.
Economic Buyer
Identify the Economic Buyer, who is a decision-maker with spending authority. In this tactic, you need to work on talking to this individual to learn about his expectations and the process he uses to make his decisions. In cases where direct contact is not possible, you may get insights from the current contact.
Decision Criteria
Should know what the company uses for a decision-making process, whether ease of use, integration, budget, or ROI. If they have no formal criteria laid out, advise them to do so to help customise your pitch accordingly.
Decision Process
Understand who, when, and how the decision process works. This will tell you how best to navigate the close and the associated timelines to make your close go quickly.
Identify Pain
Customers' pain points could be related to costing them too much money or slowing them down in production. You need to be specific on that. For example, if they are losing $300,000 a month due to slow production, then demonstrate clearly and directly how it is that your solution can solve this problem for them.
Champion
Find somebody in the company who is just a champion of your solution. If they’re a respected person around there, and he's getting creamed by the pain point,. He can really help a lot in closing the sale because he can advocate for you internally.
We use this framework in our digital marketing to focus on only those leads where the potential for conversion is highest.
Systematically, we run each lead against these criteria to be sure our selling time and effort are aligned with the best opportunities. This approach will help our efficiency in improving the closure rates.
10. Customer Centric Selling (Put Your Customers First):
Customer Centric Selling provides for understanding customer needs and addressing them across the entire sales process. We at Ontogen Digital adapt our approach to create a positive experience for our clients, ensuring their needs are satisfied at every stage.
We actually listen to our clients, curate our solutions to the particular requirements of clients, and show ongoing support to ensure their satisfaction. This approach helps us in creating long-term relationships and increasing customer loyalty.
Each of these 10 sales strategies possess its own strengths that you can adapt to your business and audience. You can check our sales blogs for more sales informations.
You can experiment and further modify if need be to find that mix which is just right for your company.
Seeking more information on how to improve your marketing? Connect with us at info@ontogendigital.com.
These sales strategies will help improve your sales performance, tightly set your customer base, and help drive growth inside a company.
At Ontogen Digital, we are always ready to help you do so at every step of the selling process.
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