Keep the Focus on Your Buyer in Your Sales Process

The only way your reps are going to be consistently successful is if they're able to effectively align with their buyer's needs and desired outcomes throughout the sales process.  We've compiled our best resources for uncovering customer needs in discovery and aligning your sales process with your buyer's process below.

1. Asking Bold Discovery Questions

Effective discovery is the key to selling on value. Asking those bold questions can sometimes be intimidating for reps who are going up against high-powered executives. This blog post runs through some tips to help prepare for a sales conversation focused on uncovering high-level business challenges.

2. The Best Way to Ask Tough Discovery Questions:

In this blog post, we run through best practices for steering a conversation that helps buyers stand in the pain of their challenges. It's not easy to get a prospect to talk about why their company is lacking in a certain area. This post helps equip your sales reps with the resources to ask tough questions that steer prospects toward your solutions.

3. Setting up your Discovery Question Flow

You know you need to get to the challenges a prospect is having, but how do you set up the question flow to make sure your discovery calls get to where you need them to go. We asked Force Management's experts for a framework on how to structure a great discovery call. This guide was the result. Our tip sheet helps sales reps prepare a question flow that leads to enables them to dig deep into their buyers' business pains.

4.  Playing Back Your Sales Discovery Sessions

Once you have a great discovery call, you need a way to move the conversation forward. A key part to successful discovery is the salesperson’s ability to articulate what they learned in discovery back to the customer. We call it playing back “What We Heard”. In this podcast, John Kaplan runs through best practices for using this information to your advantage.

5. Multiple Decision Makers in Your Sales Process

The majority of B2B deals you're selling likely involve multiple decision-makers. A group of stakeholders means multiple opinions on value, capabilities and metrics. In this podcast, John Kaplan runs through best practices for commanding your message when there are several people involved in the opportunity. 

6.  Aligning Differentiation to Your Buyer

You may know what makes your solution different than others in the market, but aligning that differentiation to the customers is how elite salespeople move the needle. In this podcast, John Kaplan runs through best practices for aligning differentiation to a customer's decision criteria.

7. Six Questions to Test Your Prospect’s Decision Process

How strong are the deals in the pipeline? Understanding your buyer's decision making process and the key decision makers are two critical components to closing those opportunities. This knowledge will help your sales teams avoid long drawn out deals that result in no-decisions. In this blog post, we cdover six questions to help your team members gauge the strength of an opportunity.