How to Use Market Knowledge to Sell Better
By Janice Lawrence
A market perspective helps you at every step of the sales cycle. Market knowledge can help you find emerging opportunities, build value and compete more effectively. Here is how...
Find opportunities faster.
A market perspective helps you prospect more effectively because it builds your understanding of how market drivers are interacting to create change. Change creates problems, which in turn creates opportunities for your new technology. Prospecting early in the technology adoption lifecycle can be very frustrating. Often you are looking for opportunities that do not exist. A market perspective helps you recognize pockets of increasing tension, which are usually where the first opportunities materialize.
Improve sales productivity.
A market perspective also improves your ability to quickly qualify an account. The faster you determine the customer has a viable need, budget and a sense of urgency, the more productive you will be. An insightful understanding of the market is invaluable early in the sales process. The primary goal of your first sales call is to establish your credibility and earn the right to develop the account. If you can intelligently discuss how market trends are impacting the prospect's business and suggest ways to take advantage of emerging opportunities, it is likely that you will be invited back to discuss your ideas with senior business executives. However, if you are not knowledgeable about the prospect's business, it is unlikely you will ever be invited out of the IT department. Finally, the better you understand the market momentum, the better you will be able to gauge the customer's urgency. An important part of forecasting is being able to predict when the customer will buy. A market perspective helps you understand the market drivers that can cause an account to move slowly or close quickly.
Recognize issues.
Much of the information you gather and analyze while developing a market perspective can be used as you plan and implement your discovery process. Market drivers are excellent sources of potential issues around which you can build provocative questioning strategies. If you understand where the market is in its technology adoption lifecycle, you know where to focus your account development strategy. Early in the market development, you will want to focus your discovery on the line executives who are interested in building competitive advantage. Later in market, you will want to make sure that you include a wide range of functional and technical influencers in your data collection, so you can manage their concerns about risk.
Focus your proposal.
A market perspective is critical to making a compelling proposal. It helps you balance conflicting customer needs into a coherent proposal that reflects the balance of risk and reward required to close the deal. When proposing a solution, use relevant market drivers to help the customer understand the inevitability of adoption. This will drive their urgency to buy the solution and implement it quickly.
Negotiate Smarter.
The stage of market adoption determines the customer's compelling reason to buy. It also drives the urgency of the closing process. If a prospect wants to use the technology to build competitive advantage, then he has to move quickly. You can use this urgency to your advantage to negotiate a profitable deal. Fast.
Janice Lawrence has advised leading edge technology companies for the past two decades on how to sell innovative technology. Follow her [http://blog.sellresults.com/]Sell Results Blog and supercharge your technology sales success. In March, Lawrence is discussing how to develop a market perspective to improve your technology sales.
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Learn more about how to gather and use the information you need to sell technology successfully by reading SELL RESULTS What Every Technology Salesperson Needs to Know |
