2.2. Bucketing: The Key to Identifying the Prospect ‘Situation’ and Tailor your Pitch

Bucketing: The Key to Identifying the Prospect ‘Situation’ & Tailor Your Pitch

Unmoved Prospects?

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?

Why This Happens

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:

• It did not mesh with the prevalent client strategy (viz., they do not outsource, whereas you are pitching for them to outsource what they do in-house)
• It related to something that is not currently a focus-area for the prospect (even though it might be a KPI)
• Working with you would mean that they need to change the status quo, and they are unwilling to put in the time and effort to do so
• They’ve had some bad experience working with your firm, and as good as your pitch was, they aren’t willing to risk failure agai, etc.

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.

So, what’s the way out of this conundrum?

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.

Bucketing: Illustrations

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.

Steps to be taken at the End of the Bucketing Exercise

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.

Bucketing: An Exercise

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.