A lost sales opportunity hurts the bottom line, but it can also provide a valuable teaching lesson for your sales team. There is usually a quantifiable reason that the sale wasn’t made.
Identifying what went wrong gives your team an opportunity to understand how not to make the same mistake twice. Help your team recover from the lost sales opportunity quickly and effectively. Here are four questions you can ask your salespeople that will help them learn from their mistakes.
The best sales processes align with the prospect’s buying process and contain an effective way to qualify deals along the way. In other words, sellers need to be able to qualify a prospect by “reading the buying signs.”
Customer Verifiable Outcomes allow the customer to participate in the selling process. They indicate their “buying” state-of-mind. They may include things like:
Using Customer Verifiable Outcomes as criteria in your sales process earns your sellers the right to advance the opportunity to the next stage of the buying process. As a result, sellers are better able to verify areas where they would otherwise be guessing. If reps can determine these benchmarks, they are less likely to lose the opportunity.
If reps don’t focus on staying in sync with their customers and reading the buying signs, they greatly increase the probability of losing deals. What “buyer signals” did the rep use to show that it was time to move the opportunity to the next stage? How well did the rep use Customer Verifiable Outcomes throughout the sales process? What steps may have been skipped that led to the lost opportunity?
Read more about leveraging Customer Verifiable Outcomes.
If the required capabilities were defined and the differentiation was clear, it is possible that the problem could tie back to the buyer believing your organization could do what it promises. The salesperson may have articulated value and differentiation, but the buyer didn’t have the proof to back up the claims.
Providing a prospect with proof points and customer testimonials gives them tangible evidence that you can do what you say you can do. If your reps are in a competitive deal situation, it could make or break the opportunity. Think about it, if all things are equal and your competitor has proof he/she achieved the metrics your buyer is looking for and you don’t, who will the customer choose?
Read more about leveraging proof points in the sales process.