Step 1
Understand your growth & profitability aspirations and your value propositions
The first principle of outcome-based selling is to focus on the value to the prospect of dealing with the issue they have identified.
If the prospect cannot articulate the costs and consequences or implications of the problem and the value of solving it, their chances of getting their organisation to agree to invest in any solution is remote – as are your chances of winning.
It’s dangerous to assume that your prospect is fully aware of all of these costs and consequences. In fact, a key role of the salesperson in these early stages must be to help the prospect recognise the full horror of sticking with the status quo. Almost always, this will involve drawing their attention to aspects of the problem they may not have recognised or – even better – introducing high-impact issues that they may not have previously been aware of.
But if, despite all your efforts, the value of solving the problem remains unclear or weak, it’s usually best to qualify out the “opportunity” and defer it for future nurturing – even if you appear to have a good solution fit.
Step 2
What differentiates your firm from your competition
Be specific about the value you offer. Marketers sometimes make a great deal of fuss about articulating your company’s “unique value proposition”. But no matter how agonisingly carefully they are crafted, these can only ever be generic statements designed to appeal to your target market as a whole. Outcome-based selling requires that you get very specific about the value you offer each prospect – in effect you need a personally tailored unique value position.
Rather than a broad description of all that you can offer, you’ll get much more traction by selectively identifying and highlighting the small subset of your total capabilities that are most relevant to successfully addressing the issue you have identified. And you need to clearly explain how you deliver unique and relevant value to every member of the decision-making team.
Step 3
Assessment of your current sales organization’s ability to call and connect with the true decision makers.
Create and capture mutually meaningful outcomes in every interaction.
If your contacts are serious decision-makers with substantial workloads, they will not appreciate being involved in conversations and meetings that leave them wondering why they just wasted their valuable time. So the third core principle of outcome-based selling is to seek to establish mutually meaningful value in every customer interaction.
Step 4
Develop a targeted opportunity plan that will facilitate and build confidence with your client focused on THEIR goals.
Facilitate their buying process, not your sales process.
Conventional sales processes are all-too-often designed around the needs of the seller, not the buyer. So, it’s hardly surprising that things the salesperson sees as important are often regarded by the prospect as irrelevant or (even worse) profoundly irritating, while at the same time their interests and concerns are being poorly served by the salesperson.
That’s why your sales approach – and the key stages in your sales pipeline and CRM system – must be designed around the key stages and milestones in your prospect’s buying decision journey. Your sales activities, sales enablement tools and content must be designed to advance a well-qualified opportunity through their buying decision process
Step 5
Delivery of measurable action plan where payment is based on successful outcomes. If that cannot be done don’t continue to invest in the opportunity.
If you can’t contribute distinctive value, qualify out.
This final principle is simple: if your solution doesn’t offer a distinctively different and higher-value approach to solving and eliminating any of the other options they are considering, you need to either do something about it or qualify out.
