How often have you experienced making a strong, impassioned pitch to your prospect, one which you felt would sway the prospect and win you the sale, only to have your hopes dashed later?
Sure, there could be a multiplicity of reasons for the above transpiring, including your client simply having a bad day when you met. However, some of the key reasons behind this is that while the salesperson’s pitch might have been interesting:
Bottom-line, your pitch wasn’t in sync with their current focus or their subjective experience.
Most salespeople have a standard pitch that they deliver to all prospect.
The key to overcoming this situation is what we call ‘bucketing’
“Buckets” – as the name states – refers to the label you give to the various prospect segments or groups you are pitching to. Bucketing is arguably the most crucial part of your endeavour to create a message that resonates with your prospect.
With bucketing, what you need to do is pose a few questions to identify what the ‘situation’ is with the prospect. You then follow up with relevant probing questions to unearth the pain points relative to the situation identified.
For example, posing the bucketing questions might uncover that situation with the prospect that is they do things in-house and do not outsource work to a vendor or supplier. Your subsequent questions to unearth pain points now need to be relative to this situation, which will be based on an understanding of the benefits of outsourcing work to you. These follow-up questions will be very different to the ones that you would pose if the ‘situation’ identified is that the prospect is working with one of your rivals, and is not looking to shift yet.
Here is an illustration of a conversation between a salesperson selling meal vouchers and her prospect. Note how the individual has used the questions to identify a set of buckets.
Insight | “Mr ___________ having worked with a lot of organisations in the ___________ industry, especially, organisations your size, we’ve been able to study many initiatives that they take to improve employee morale” |
Questions |
|
Information that it will reveal about buyer journey situation | Situation 01: Interested; not sure which partner to choose
Situation 02: Interested; “Has chosen a rival firm” Situation 03: Disinterested; “HR unaware/ disinterested in gift vouchers” Situation 04: Disinterested; “Other key decision makers not convinced/ interested” Situation 05: Disinterested; “Past bad experiences” |
Once you have identified the bucket that the customer can be placed in, you would need to:
Probe further (say they had a bad experience, probe further to understand what this was, when it happened, what was the outcome).
OR
Deliver an ‘insight’ message or presentation. This is your pitch, which is constructed to ‘educate’ the customer. This presentation will be relative to the situation identified. For example, your pitch for Situation 1 will involve you talking about the merits of your firm vs. the pitch for Situation 3, which would involve selling meal vouchers as a concept.
Here is an illustration of a conversation between a salesperson selling meal vouchers and her prospect. Note how the individual has used the questions to identify a set of buckets.
Possible Situations | |
Questions you Will Ask to Unearth the Situation |