The number one reason sales opportunities go dark is lack of alignment between buyer and seller. Salespeople must appeal to the logical and emotional needs — in other words, you have to sell the way the buyer wants to buy. That sounds intuitive, but it’s frequently forgotten.
Sales Benchmark Index, a sales and marketing consultancy focused on B2B companies, offers these root causes for sales opportunities to go dark:
• You aren’t aligned with the buyer.
A rep may be solving a problem that isn’t a pain point or presenting price too early in the discussion. Buyers will always gravitate to those they trust. If you don’t make buyers feel secure, they won’t buy from you.
• The sales effort is single-threaded.
A rep may have met only one stakeholder who has purchasing power. The people you don’t meet have questions, concerns and their own agendas.
• Too focused on your company and product.
It’s natural for a rep to be focused on pushing her company’s agenda in a sales call, but it leads to lack of differentiation, commoditized offerings and stalled deals.
Sales Benchmark Index states the solution lies in creating buyer personas for each individual buyer and to develop a buyer process map (BPM). The BPM spells out the distinct components of the buyer process, the actions the buyer is taking in each phase and a “micro-decision detector” that identifies the questions the buyer is asking. Using these tools helps reps slow down and think like their buyers so they can move through the process together.
You can download the Sales Benchmark Index Buyer Focused Toolkit at SalesBenchmark.com.
