Friday Note - Sales Tip - Silver Bullets

I was having a discussion with a friend about selling this week, and we were talking about "the good old days". You know, back when there was no internet and you had to cold call and go out and find your own leads. We laughed when he brought up the ABCs of sales (Always be Closing) and how he hated that acronym. I said to him, "It should actually be, "Always be Qualifying", until it's time to close."

There is also a camp of thought that qualifying in sales is dead, that leads given to sales should already be qualified. I would call that pre-qualifying and feel that it goes deeper than that. If a buyer is forced to find a new vendor because of price, quality or delivery, and they are looking for the exact same or comparable part, the old model of BANT (budget, authority, need, time) works pretty well.

However, if the prospect is building a new product, looking for a redesign or trying to fix another problem, BANT goes out the window. Some of my largest sales start with the Engineering Department, and they have NO authority to purchase. In fact, I often work with an engineering team and my first contact is a contractor or subordinate engineer who handles initial discovery and sampling. The prospect pre-qualifies ME to make sure I can meet their needs before I get to speak to anyone with authority of any kind.

At this stage, you need to determine if they need a Cadillac or a Yugo to solve their issues and meet their needs, and THEN budget will come into play. At my largest and or most organized customers, there is often an engineering budget for the project, and the team is targeting a particular price point for this component. Sometimes it is realistic and at other times, it is not. Many times, the engineering phase is the information gathering stage for the prospect to determine if it is feasible to bring this new item to market. I have had many projects die on the vine when the company realizes that the cost of what they are designing far exceeds the market value of the finished product.

Sales cycles are variable in the manufacturing world. Some sales are bail-out orders and turn around in a week or two. Most of these are apples to apples parts, but can be a short-term engineering fix with a longer sales cycle behind it to get to the final solution. One of my largest new sales took two years to come to fruition. Projects sometimes fall out of favor and then rise again with new management or demand.

On large complex projects, you will find yourself on the "three-dimensional chess board", balancing the demands of Engineering, Purchasing, and Production. You may even work with the prospect's marketing team. Each of these groups has a different agenda, and you will need to do a lot of discovery to understand and meet those agendas to get to a purchase order.

I find that in the make to order world; understanding needs, creating confidence in your ability to deliver, and managing expectations become the key components to winning business. In these situations, information is power, and the more silver bullets you have in your holster, the better chance you have of closing the sale.