Improving Your Understanding Of Your Sales Prospects With Insights

In today’s Sales Insight blog post I felt it would be a good idea to spend some time looking at the power of using “Insights” to get in front of more sales prospects and drive increased sales.

Using Insights To Cut Through The Noise

The first part of this is to consider just how noisy the environment is for our prospects and customers. They are being increasingly targeted by organisations and people just like us, so how can we successfully cut through that noise to increase our chance of getting in front of them?

One of the things that I’ve found really useful is to create ‘insights’ for our customers. These are those really important moments in selling, when your customer or your prospect sees something that they haven’t seen before.

The 3 Types Of Insight

There are three types of insight that we can employ:

1. 1. Credibility Insight – Credibility Insights are those things that the customer knows and would expect you to know.
   2. Advisor Insight – Advisor Insights are those things that the customer is aware that they don’t know, but would expect you to know.
   3. Challenger Insight – The most compelling type of insight are Challenger Insights, where the customer is completely unaware of something and the impact it will have on their business. If you can share insights that help the customer understand these things and how they can positively gain from them, you can really start to get their attention and interest.

   Creating Your Insight Lists

   I recommend that you start by doing some research on your prospect’s business. Create a list of all the insights you can identify and how your product or services could help their business with these.

   Now you have your list of insights, spend some time separating them according to whether they are Credibility, Advisor or Challenger insights.

   I use a four-step process to focus on the most powerful Challenger insights:

   1. Identify your sustainable unique strengths

   2. Identify which strength is currently under appreciated by the customer

   3. Identify the area of the customer’s business where this strength could help, but they do not know that this could help – Essentially, what is it that the customer fails to fully understand about their business, that leads them to under appreciate your unique sustainable capability?

   4. Determine how you would need to coach the customer to appreciate the strength and how it could help them

   When you go through those four steps, you’ll find that you’ve got some insights that become really interesting for your customer.

   Using The “GETIN” Process To Make More Appointments

   Now you have still got to make the contact. You’ve still got to get through the door.

   At Salestrong we have created something called the GETIN process – an acronym for Greeting, Explain, The Hot Spots, Insight and Now!

   Greeting – Introduce yourself.
   Explain – Very succinctly, help the prospect or customer understand the purpose of the call.
   The Hot Spots – Identify the challenges that they face and the things that they might not understand about their own business.
   Insights – Communicate your Challenger insights.
   Now – Create a sense of urgency as to the value of meeting with you right now.

   Salestrong Tip For Sales Managers – A simple exercise if you’re a sales manager, to improve your sales peoples’ skill getting in front of more prospects, is to get your sales team to write their own GETIN scripts and then role-play, with one person being the seller and the other person being the prospect. Provide them with some observational feedback and you’ll see that their ability to get in front of prospects increases.

   If you’d like to chat a little bit more about this or any sales topic, then please feel free to contact me on steve@salestrong.co.uk. Thank you.