The decision-making unit

Sometimes you’ll sell to an individual who has both the need and the budget, but often, and especially in bigger sales situations, you’ll deal with a group of people who, in turn, have a say in the outcome of the sale. When there’s more than one decision maker, this is commonly known as the decision-making unit, or DMU.

If you ask an experienced salesperson what his biggest problem area is, you’ll often hear that it’s “selling to a committee” or something similar. Making a sale to an individual is usually much easier, but with the right understanding and approach, selling to a decision-making unit isn’t a huge problem. You’ll also want to understand and be comfortable with the decision-making unit because you’ll encounter it frequently.

In its simplest form, a decision-making unit may be a cohabiting couple if you’re selling a domestic product. In a more complex business sale, it may comprise a technical person, a finance person, someone who represents the end users of the product, and so on. (You may also come across a purchasing department, but I cover that separately in Chapter 13.) A marketing textbook tells you about users, initiators, influencers, decision makers, gate keepers, and buyers, which can all sound a bit daunting. The key things to note are that people have different roles to play in making a decision about a purchase and that you need to understand their motivation and be able to address their specific concerns as part of your selling job.

As far as qualifying new business opportunities is concerned, you need to be able to identify who the key players are. As an absolute minimum, you need to understand who will make the final decision or how that decision will be made. Sometimes the easiest way to find something out is to ask a simple question. Ask your contact or the person who appears to be the most senior you’re dealing with to explain his decision-making process. If he’s reluctant to tell you, push back until you get an answer. Knowing the client’s decision-making process is important to your sales process, and asking your client to explain this to you demonstrates that you’re being professional in your approach.

In those very rare situations where someone won’t tell you about the decision-making process, you need to consider what this says about the relationship you’re going to have with that business and whether it’s worth pursuing. Explain this to your contact if necessary. You need the information to do your job, but you also want to conduct yourself professionally. If he’s not going to provide the information you need, then you have a mismatch in this business relationship that you may as well stop before it gets any further.

After identifying the key players and understanding the roles they play in the buying process, you’ll see that they each have different viewpoints and needs that you need to meet. You can handle these differences in a variety of ways depending on the size and complexity of your sale.

If you’re presenting to or always meeting the key players as a group, then be sure to acknowledge each of them and demonstrate that you understand they have differing objectives to cover. Offer to meet with them individually if that is appropriate, or offer to communicate via email to address any specific issues. When meeting as a group, you need to make sure that while your primary focus is on the most relevant person (generally the ultimate decision maker you’ve identified), you also take time to involve the others as the discussion covers their areas. Sometimes you’ll need to deliberately take the conversation in a direction that addresses key individuals, for two reasons: First, to demonstrate that you understand the importance of their areas, and second, to actively involve them. Keep in mind that they’ll have a say in the final decision and you want them on your side.

Often in a decision-making unit, some people will have no apparent role to play in the decision. These are usually decision influencers rather than decision makers and often play an important role without necessarily having a specific area of interest. You need to keep them engaged, too, and make sure that you pick up on anything that they introduce. Influencers are just that — people who can sway a decision by influence rather than authority — and you need to discuss with them what their interest in the solution is and to be able to demonstrate how your solution addresses those concerns.

The budget

Every purchase, domestic or business, has a budget, but it may not be expressed in absolute terms, such as $5,000. Instead, it may be addressed as “affordable,” for example. One of your important qualifying tasks is to determine what the budget is and to make sure that it fits in line with your proposed solution. How do you find out a budget? Well, you can ask, but don’t be too surprised if you’re not given a simple straightforward answer because often buyers are suspicious of being asked how much they’re prepared to spend.

Imagine the reaction if, when asked what the selling price was, you took a similar approach and wouldn’t say. Point this out to your buyers if they won’t tell you their budget, and also inform them that your role is to ensure a good fit between your product or service and their needs and that part of the process is to ensure both affordability and no mismatch between expectation and reality. (Refer to the power of silence concept that I cover in Chapter 2 if you still have a problem.)

If you can’t get an absolute value on the budget, ask for a guideline and let it be known that the process can’t go much further without that information. Stop the phone call or even the meeting if necessary because you really don’t want to get into game playing. But remember: Be professional in everything that you do.

Be as direct as necessary here, and tell your prospect that you can’t continue to recommend a solution without knowing the basic parameters. Turn the situation around and ask how he proceeds when he’s in the same position with potential clients of his own. Don’t accept being fobbed off here because this is a vital piece of information and without it, you can’t continue a sale. Any genuine buyer understands this, and if you continue to meet resistance, then walk away from the sale because it isn’t going to be qualified.

Here are some other ways to find out budget information if buyers are reluctant to tell you outright:

• Ask how they currently meet their needs and how much that costs (or you may discover this based on the information you gather).
• Ask about the level of investment they think is necessary to get the results they’re looking for.
• Talk about similar situations you’ve experienced, discuss the approximate cost of those, and gauge a reaction.

When you find the budget, you need to check for a good fit to your solution. If the figures are reasonably close, then you’re generally okay to accept that the deal is qualified in terms of budget. If there’s a significant mismatch in the budget and your solution cost, then it fails this qualification criterion and you need to reassess accordingly. Budgets aren’t always cast in stone, so find out through carefully considered questions whether there’s any flexibility in the budget and, if so, how flexible it is. If there’s no flexibility, then you should walk away from the deal, because if it’s not affordable, it’s not going to happen anyway and you don’t have time to waste.

In addition to finding out the project budget, you need to determine who has the budget sign-off. This member of the decision-making unit (see the preceding section) will be a vital person for you as the sale moves toward a yes. The budget sign-off holder has the ultimate buyer’s responsibility, so you need to make sure that you’ve covered all of his objections and that he is completely happy with your proposed solution.

Don’t wait until the last minute to cover this sign-off responsibility as that will inevitably lead to a delay.

The timescale

A key qualifying area is the project timescale. You need to make sure that the buyer’s timescale is consistent with the amount of effort you’re putting in at this stage. For example, if your prospect is just at the information gathering stage and isn’t going to make a decision for six months, then your job is to make sure he has access to the information he needs but not to commit lots of your time to it. At this point, you may simply direct him to your website and any literature you have to make sure he gets the info he needs.

Within a sales cycle, you have a window of opportunity for action. It’s difficult to define hard-and-fast rules here because of the differences in products and services. You’ll know what the typical sales cycle is like for your solution, how long information gathering lasts, whether a long gestation period exists, and how much planning is needed before prospects are ready to make a buying decision.

You need to determine where the key points in your sales cycle occur. At these points, you need to be available to your prospect to cover any points he may have and to assist in moving the process forward. Understand the following triggers and be prepared to act on them:

• What are your prospect’s timescale drivers?
• Why is he going to make a decision at the time he said he will?
• Do internal or external factors have a bearing on this decision?
• Is there anything that you could or should do to influence these factors?

In a long sales cycle, you don’t have to be in constant contact with your prospect, as long as he knows how to contact you with questions. As key points approach, and especially as you get close to the end of the sales cycle, you need to spend more time with your prospect, but depending on your product or service, this doesn’t always have to be face-to-face time because telephone time is often sufficient. Whatever the case, you need to show that you’re committing time and resources to your prospect and that you’re available to him.

Need and pain points

A need is best defined by the question “Does your prospect’s business have a problem that your solution can solve?” A pain point can be best described by the statement “there is a problem that needs to be addressed.”

Does your prospect have a real need for your product or service? If you don’t quickly discover this, you risk wasting lots of time only to find out that he isn’t going to buy from you because he doesn’t actually need what you’re proposing.

Amazingly enough, prospects don’t always tell the truth or don’t always explain their motives in looking at a product or service for different reasons. You need to be aware of all of these possibilities:

• Some prospects aren’t real buyers but rather mystery shoppers or even competitors who are trying to get a better understanding of your product, service, and sales processes. This does happen but not all that often thankfully.
• Some prospects make a habit of collecting information but have no intention of doing anything with it.
• Some prospects think they know what they want, but either they haven’t thought it out well enough or they change their minds during the sales cycle.

Anyone looking to buy a product or service is doing so for a reason, and as a salesperson, one of your first jobs is to discover these motives and the impact your prospect hopes to make by fulfilling them. Your job then becomes one of guiding your prospect through the process and demonstrating how your solution will address his needs and provide positive benefits.

A prospect usually has a set of needs rather than just a specific requirement, and you need to identify all of them as well as gain an understanding of their relative importance. This knowledge will put you in a good position to empathize with him as you build a sales relationship.

It may be that your prospect has to work weekends in order to catch up on work because his current mode of operating isn’t time efficient. By demonstrating how your solution meets his business need, you can also show him how his time will be freed up.

Understanding your prospect’s needs and their relative importance also enables you to quickly identify any show stoppers — that is, any benefit that your prospect wants to achieve that your proposed solution won’t deliver. If such a show stopper is a need with high relative importance to your prospect, then the chances of you getting to a yes are slim to none, so it’s vital to identify the needs and their importance very early in the sales cycle.

One of the best salespeople I’ve come across when selling to me didn’t get a sale. He spent some time on the phone with me getting an understanding of my need and how his solution would meet it. It became obvious to him fairly quickly, as a result of asking searching questions, that my absolute core requirement was something that his solution wasn’t able to deliver. It would do 80 percent of what I was looking for, but he recognized, correctly, that I wouldn’t buy something that didn’t fulfill my essential need. Instead of trying to change my mind or forcing a solution that was never going to be satisfactory, he told me that he understood how important my requirement was and thanked me for my time but said that he wasn’t able to meet my needs.

You may think that losing a sale like this is a bad thing, but that’s far from the case. This salesman recognized that his solution wouldn’t meet my qualification criteria and therefore he wouldn’t make the sale, so he saved a lot of time and effort by walking away. He also gained, in me, someone who is happy to refer others to him as a person who understood his solution and was open and straightforward to deal with.

Don’t consider it a failure if you uncover needs that your solution can’t deliver. Sometimes you may find an acceptable workaround solution, but this comes down to understanding the relative importance. Often, a workaround won’t be viable or acceptable. In this case, the sale is over because it has failed to pass a key qualification test. But this isn’t a failure; this just shows you why qualification is so important. Without it, you can spend a lot of time and effort going after new business opportunities that are just not appropriate and will therefore never result in a yes.

The attitude to risk

Your prospect’s attitude to risk is also a qualification criterion. If he’s ultraconservative in nature, then any sale is likely to be hard work and you need to factor this into your timescale (which I discuss earlier in this chapter). If he has more of a laissez faire character, you may have other problems to face if he blows hot and cold about a solution.

Risk is also a cultural consideration. In seeking to understand your prospect’s attitude to risk and to use it as a qualifying criterion, you need to find a way to determine how important risk is to him. Unfortunately, you can’t really ask your prospect, “How do you feel about risk?” You need to look for a set of clues that emerge during discussions and within his environment. The biggest clues will come from past performance, so ask how other decisions were reached and how he felt about the processes.

The biggest risk about risk (excuse the pun) is that your prospect will decide that doing anything represents a risk that he’s unwilling to take, and this is a surefire way to a no.

An attitude to risk in a sales situation has no rights or wrongs. It’s something that you need to be aware of, although you’ll have no influence on it. If your solution isn’t an exact fit or if you’re asking your prospect to be an early adopter of a solution, you may lose the sale. Risk’s qualification weighting will, to a large extent, depend on the type of product or service that you’re selling.

For more on risk and its role in a sales situation, check out Chapters 5 and 18.

Your competitive standing

Your competitive positioning as a qualification criterion may not be an obvious one, but nonetheless it’s important. First, you need to understand whether your solution is a good fit for your prospect’s needs. Does your solution lend itself to his needs out of the box? How does your solution measure against competitive offerings that your prospect may also be considering? Does your solution offer some clear benefits? If so, then how are you communicating this to your prospect?

In a “tick the box” exercise, how does your offering compare to those of your competitors in terms of matching your prospect’s needs? You can be sure that your prospect will compare your solution to your competitors’ at some point, so you need to be on the ball with your own comparisons. And you need to be ready to discuss them in a solution-oriented way, not attempting to put down any competitor’s solution but rather demonstrating a clear understanding of your prospect’s needs as met by your solution in a way that fits better than any competitors’ can.

Ensure that your sales support material is presented in the best possible light in order for this “tick the box” exercise to show you in the best possible way. Don’t make it difficult for your prospect to make a comparison of your solution to others that he may be considering.

If your solution is a less obvious fit but can still deliver real benefits, can you change the rules to play to your strengths? The short answer is yes. But this goes back to my point about understanding the real needs of your prospect and the relative importance of each of them (see the earlier section “Need and pain points” for more information). If you score poorly on some areas, you can play to your strengths on others, really pushing the benefits to your prospect while showing that you’re a good fit in the more obvious areas. Although this perhaps isn’t the best way to win the business, this shows your prospect that your solution scores highly in other areas that can provide a real advantage to him.

A useful approach in this situation is to borrow tactics from guerilla warfare, where you lose if you take on the competition head-to-head because it’s a better, more obvious fit. If you can take the focus toward the less obvious benefits, sniping away at the side of an issue where you have a clear advantage, then you can begin to change the weightings in your favor by persuading your prospect that these are the areas where he’ll gain most advantage over time. In other words, change the rules. Don’t play to your competitor’s strengths; understand its weaknesses in areas where you’re strong and focus on those areas.

Before taking this approach, you need be sure you understand your prospect’s attitude to risk as I discuss in the preceding section. If your prospect is very conservative in his approach, then you’re unlikely to win with guerilla tactics. And in terms of qualification criteria, you’ll lose in this example. You need to understand where this leaves you in prospect qualification. Are you better off walking away from a potential sale and focusing your attention on better qualified opportunities? Note that you’re not going to win every sale, and you need to use qualification as the real guide to where you have the best opportunities.

A level playing field

One of the most basic qualification criteria — so obvious that it’s sometimes overlooked — is to make sure that you have a realistic chance of winning the business right from the beginning of the sales cycle.

As I explain earlier in this chapter, you need to ask these questions as the sales cycle gets started and before you spend too much time and effort on it, ensuring that the project is real:

• Is this a real project? Is it going to happen? Is it budgeted? Is it core to the prospect’s needs?
• Does the prospect have the authority to make a buying decision?
• Has your prospect already decided what he’s going to buy and from whom before you even begin?
• Are you being given an equal opportunity along with any competitors, or have you been invited to discuss your solution merely to make up the numbers? Are you being used as a stalking horse for your prospect to put pressure on an existing or preferred vendor?

I strongly suggest that if you’re not being given a level playing field, then you’re better off walking away from a potential deal that wastes your time and effort when the decision is essentially already made.

So how do you find out about the playing field? Ask your prospect about other solutions he’s looking at. Ask about existing suppliers and how you’ll be treated in relation to them. Generally, it’s difficult for a prospect to hide the truth from you given a direct question, so don’t beat about the bush if you perceive that you’re not being treated equally.

In some industries, competitive tendering is the accepted norm. Two schools of thought on this kind of sales situation: Either you accept it and give it your best shot, or you decline to take part, preferring to focus your efforts on prospects who have a more selective buying process.

My rule of thumb is not to get involved in a sales process where more than two other vendors are involved. Why? For the following reasons, each of which is a red flag that suggests that your sales effort will be better utilized elsewhere:

• Too many vendors risk an artificially prolonged sales cycle.
• It suggests that your prospect is unclear on exactly what he’s trying to achieve.
• It suggests that your prospect doesn’t value your time.

Another issue to watch out for is when you’re competing against an incumbent supplier. In this case, it’s essential to understand the client-vendor relationship and why you’re being asked to compete against an existing supplier. Is it a real opportunity, or is the prospect using you to put pressure on the supplier?

Objective criteria

Objective criteria are fairly straightforward — something either is or isn’t met. For example, either you know that the budget is within your defined parameters or you know that it isn’t within your parameters. This is black and white. There is scope for shades of gray, however, in that you may not yet know what the budget is. In these cases, if the budget is within your parameters, then this criterion is met. If the budget isn’t within your parameters, then it’s not met. If you don’t yet know, then this criterion is pending. You pass the criteria only when you have a positive answer.

When I defined the objective criteria we use in my business for each contact stage in a sales cycle, I selected the following set of criteria, known as explicit ratings:

• Role: Does your prospect have the authority to make a buying decision? Is he the key decision maker or a key member of the decision-making unit?
• Budget: Do you understand the budget that has been allocated? Is it in line with expectations and reasonable for the scope of the project?
• Timescale: Is the decision-making timescale in line with both the complexity of the solution and your sales budget time frame?
• Project: Is the project real? Is it funded? Is in it line with the ability of your solution to address its needs?
• Demographics: Is the size of the company suitable for your solution?

When qualifying these criteria, we assign each item a weighting between A and D. These weightings aren’t equal; a weighting of A, for example, is more solid than one of D. For both our implicit and explicit ratings (find out about implicit ratings in the next section), our CRM system automatically calculates the weightings, which are based on the answers to the subjective and objective criteria. By having the weightings automatically calculated, we remove some of the “gut feel” qualification and finish up with a much more realistic set of data that we’re able to rely on. (I go into more detail on measuring and tracking qualification criteria in Chapters 9 and 21, where I look at different aspects of using CRM systems.)

We also add some overriding objective criteria, which must be met before we’ll even begin a sales conversation with a potential prospect:

• Business sector: Is your prospect operating in a business sector that’s a good fit for your solution?
• Geographical location: Can you cover support in your prospect’s area?
• Source of the lead: How reliable is the pre-sales information that you have? How was the prospect identified?
• Company turnover: Ensure that the prospect is neither too big nor too small to be able to operate with your solution. Is the company big enough to be able to offer you future scope for expansion?
• Number of employees: Does your solution lend itself to that scale of business?

We add to this a couple of other criteria that are specific to our business and so not relevant for inclusion here to avoid confusion.

If we ever run into a sales problem with a prospect that we didn’t expect to occur, our first point of reference becomes the qualification data, and we ask: Have we correctly qualified the opportunity?

Subjective criteria

Subjective criteria are based on what you know about factors that are open to human interpretation, such as the level of interest your prospect expresses. Prospects can be very interested, a little interested, or not very interested, and both the level of interest and the way you choose to measure and report it are open to interpretation.

Because subjective criteria are — just that — subjective, you need to take care in how you set these criteria and the reliance you place in the results. Subjective criteria should never be used in isolation to qualify the sales potential but can provide good guidance when used correctly and in conjunction with objective criteria (see the preceding section).

When I defined the subjective criteria that we use in my business, at each stage of tracking lead progress, I selected this set of criteria, which we call implicit ratings:

• No interest: This is a dead-end lead. Maybe revisit it in the future when personnel have moved.
• More information required: The prospect seems interested and has requested more details.
• Follow-up agreed: A set of follow-up activities has been agreed on and will be carried out.
• Very interested: This is the ideal situation; the prospect has a need and understands what you’re offering.

We assign a weighting from 1 to 4 depending on which category the prospect falls into. These ratings are subjective because they’re based on feelings, or perceptions, of how the prospect is disposed toward the proposed solution. Clearly, these criteria differ in importance to the qualification score, with very interested scoring a 4.

Knowing how often to qualify

Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that qualification of a prospect or a sales opportunity is a one-off action. Nothing could be further from the truth, and this assumption can come back and bite you if you’re not careful. Just because you identified the key decision maker at the beginning of the sales cycle doesn’t mean that he will remain the key decision maker. Businesses are organic, and change is a daily occurrence, so you need to keep on top of developments and be continually checking and requalifying as a sales cycle progresses.

I had firsthand experience of this recently when helping a client to open a new business relationship with a major technology company. We identified the key decision makers, and we qualified that there was indeed a real project and that both the budget and timescales were a good fit. Demographically, everything was ideal. The sales cycle was underway with some good initial discussion taking place. What could possibly go wrong? It started as something that was on our radar but gave us no immediate cause for concern — a new senior management appointment. This new manager didn’t have an immediate bearing on our project because he wasn’t involved, nor was his predecessor. What did change was that the new senior manager issued a company-wide dictate about new procedures to be followed when any project was outsourced, and this introduced a new key player into the decision-making unit as well as a new set of decision-making criteria. The balance of the decision-making unit subtlety changed, and had we not been alert to this, our client would have progressed its sale based on an out-of-date set of qualification criteria. Had it lost the sale, this would have been the pivotal moment. As it happens, our client went on to win the project, which in large part was due to being able to quickly identify and react to new qualification criteria.

You’ll often find that pivotal moments in the sales cycle occur when you least expect them. Sometimes it can be insight gained in a conversation of a new piece or research that you uncover. The key is to always remember to update your sales tracking system (I cover more on this in Chapters 4, 9, and 21) and the qualification data. When you review your prospect list and look at your forecasts in detail, they should reflect these newfound changes, and you should revisit any existing assumptions in that light.

In almost any sales situation, your qualification data provides the answers to these questions:

• Will it close?
• When will it close?
• Why didn’t it close?
• Why didn’t it close on time?

Learn to love the data. If used correctly, it can give you some superb insights to the real status of your new business initiatives.

Managing information about the qualification process

I talk a lot in this chapter about the need to qualify and manage the qualification process, but how do you manage to keep track of all this information and turn it into useful knowledge? In Chapter 4, I show you how technology can be one of your best friends in winning new business. You shouldn’t hide behind technology, though, and you shouldn’t use the lack of it as an excuse for inaction. Good old-fashioned pen and paper and a well-thought-out filing system can go a long way to helping you, too.

Selling and communication skills are paramount in uncovering the gems of qualification information. It’s amazing what you’ll learn and what people will tell you if you ask the right question at the right time. Ask questions and probe the answers. Keep your eyes and especially your ears open.

Develop your own qualification checklist; see Figure 19-1 for an example. Write down the key things you need to find out from a prospect and check them off as you discover the answers. Whenever you can, add this information into your company CRM or database system so it becomes shared knowledge and you can use it to track and measure the prospect qualification and pipeline.

You need to take ownership of qualifying your prospects and not expect anyone else to do it for you. It’s as important as managing your calendar, and you need to treat it with the same degree of importance. Ultimately, your skills in qualifying prospects will be the measure of your new business success.

Using qualification knowledge to make new business decisions

Very few new business salespeople have an abundance of time and are able to devote large chunks of such a valuable commodity where it won’t reap significant returns, but how do you know where to invest your valuable time?

Use the knowledge that you gain from qualifying opportunities and from tracking that qualification over time to give you the answer to the question, “What shall I do now?” In days gone by, salespeople largely relied on instinct or feelings when determining which prospects they need to invest time on. If you’re truly tracking and constantly qualifying, then the data you collect will point you to which opportunities need your time. I’m not suggesting that you do away with some of the basic selling skills or that you ignore instinct, but used in conjunction with real insight from qualification and tracking data, you can really be on top of your game all the time.

You’ll likely have times when you need additional resources to assist with a sale. When that happens, you’ll often have to make a case internally for being allocated scarce resources. Correctly using and recording new business qualification will quickly provide you (and whoever you need to convince to give you the resources) the necessary information to make quick and informed decisions.

Consider this scenario: If you were a sales manager and had two salespeople asking for the same resource at the same time, and one request was backed up with a well-qualified case showing that the bases had all been covered and that this resource could drive the sale to an early yes, and the other request was based on a gut feeling because the salesperson “just knew” it would make a difference, where would you invest the resource?

In the earlier section “Adding Objective and Subjective Criteria,” I talk about the implicit and explicit ratings that we use in my business. With these ratings, we’re able to quickly identify opportunities where, for example, the prospect is interested but we don’t know budget or timescales. This case would wave a big red flag to me, and I would want to know what exactly the prospect was interested in when clearly we know next to nothing about him.

Another example would be where our qualification criteria tells us that we have a first-rate prospect where we know the budget, timescale, and role of the decision maker, that the project is right for us, and that the demographics are spot on, but the prospect has no interest or maybe worse still the prospect is waiting for more information. Situations like these do occur in all sales environments, but having knowledge of them before it’s too late to do something about it can make all the difference between winning new business and losing it.

Qualification and tracking systems don’t need to be overly sophisticated, and almost any new business team can easily replicate well-thought-out ones. Don’t use fear of the unknown, fear of change, or fear of being “too complicated” as excuses to not be able to derive the same sort of benefits in new business. It can be done, and it can be done easily. I expand on this theme in Chapters 4, 9, and 21.

Experienced sales managers are able to identify these key pieces of information from sales reports and discussions with the salespeople involved, but their job can be made a lot easier and they can discover and act upon these issues much faster if the sales cycle information is treated as valuable knowledge. This qualification and information gathering can sometimes require salespeople to make a cultural change when they’ve traditionally guarded their information and been somewhat selective in the information they’ve shared with managers and colleagues. I have to put my hand up here and admit that I’ve been guilty of doing just this before I understood, accepted, and bought into the collaborative information-is-knowledge school of thought and long before I became a management consultant focused on helping companies to win new business.

I used to dread Monday morning sales meetings when the managing director would pore over spreadsheets and want to know all this “unnecessary” information and, even worse, when he put me on the spot with direct questions about “my” prospects. Who was he to want to know “my” information? How times have changed over the years as the poacher turns gamekeeper.

An individual new business salesperson may genuinely think that the sales situation he’s involved in is unique and that no one has ever encountered it previously, so he has to find his own way around the issues. He would, however, be wrong. Almost no sales situation is unique. Salespeople have a lot of clues readily available to them on how best to proceed in any given situation but only if they communicate the situation and seek help. Colleagues can share knowledge they’ve gained from wider-ranging research and intelligence, including how to save time and improve chances of success, for the overall success of the salesperson. However, if he still operates in a secretive “my sale, my data” environment, then knowledge is never going to find him on its own.

Gaining competitive advantage from qualification knowledge

Knowledge gained from qualifying your prospects should deliver you a real competitive advantage in the sales cycle. It’s often said that knowledge equates to power, and in winning new business, that is certainly the case. Knowing your prospect and understanding his motivation, backed up with real solid data, puts you in such a commanding position in a sales situation that you should be beating any competition much more often than you lose. In those hopefully rare occasions when you don’t win a sale, you’ll find the reason why in your qualification criteria. You should make it mandatory to review any lost sales opportunity in light of your qualification to see what happened and whether you should have seen the problems and been able to take corrective action. Apply those lessons, and you will have at least gained something from a lost sale.

Knowledge is a two-way street, and you’ll get more and better insight if you take the time to log and share your data. This is especially true in a situation where multiple new business salespeople are working for the same business. The nature of a salesperson has tended to be self-focused and somewhat secretive about his data. This needs a culture change to really begin to have a positive impact, but you can begin to educate people to expect to gain much more than they feel they may lose by sharing data, which in turn becomes knowledge when combined and analyzed.

If you get into the habit of routinely updating sales information systems with everything you discover during the progress of a sales cycle, this information builds up over time and patterns emerge, which can assist both you and others involved in similar situations. Strive to be the best you can be at logging information that you discover during the sales process. What may seem insignificant at the time could very well prove to be the key to unlocking your sale later on, or it could prove to be a priceless nugget of information in another sale.

Just gathering reams of information is of little use, though. You see the benefit only when you collate, examine, process, share, and act upon that information. At that point, the information becomes knowledge and a valuable asset in helping you to achieve competitive advantage in sales because you have access to an information network.

An information network is generally company confidential and stored and processed by a CRM system, which I discuss in Chapters 4 and 9, but you’re also able to tap into informal information networks, such as chamber of commerce or other business networking events that I cover in Chapter 17.

As a new business salesperson, one of your key attributes needs to be uncovering snippets of information and turning them into knowledge that will lead you to be in a stronger competitive position than any other salesperson you’re competing with for a specific sale. Knowledge really becomes power when you apply it to a competitive sales situation.