Helping Clients Succeed™: Qualifying Opportunities-Inquiry
Qualification is a process of mutual exploration and mutual understanding.
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Challenge
High cost. Low returns. Poor fit. Low value. Low trust. Lost sales. Lost long-term business and relationships.
Solution
Our business sales training workshop, Helping Clients Succeed: Qualifying Opportunities teaches sales people how to break down the dysfunctions in the selling/buying process and get real with trustworthy communication and disciplined business thinking. This unique methodology provides the strategies, tools, critical thinking, and communication skills to transform sales people into trusted business advisors who, through skilled inquiry, produce mutual understanding about the client's values and needs.
About the Workshop
The Helping Clients Succeed Qualifying Opportunities sales training workshop is designed to help sales people and their managers:
- Create value based on the buyer's criteria rather than the seller's criteria.
- Get to the heart of business issues in a systematic and yet flexible style.
- Understand of the underlying principles associated with opening dialog and building "trusted advisor" relationships.
- Qualify an opportunity in terms of time, money, and people.
- Establish a realistic expectation on the part of the client of what is required financially to solve the problem or achieve the desired results.
- Learn whom they must see, how to get access to them, and how to develop a compelling rationale that is in the client's best interest.
- Gain clarity of one's own strengths and weaknesses in communication skills and direct experience with new listening, questioning, and conversation skills.
- Understand how to handle difficult conversational and relationship issues while maintaining control and preserving the relationship.
Core competencies for Qualifying Opportunities:
Opportunity (O)
Mutually develop a sound business case
- Understand what the client is trying to accomplish before talking about solutions.
- Bring out all of a client's relevant issues, and identify the highest leverage issues that impact their business.
- Discuss client issues in depth, in order of their importance.
- Help clients find or think through the information that proves the problem exists.
- Get a clear measurement of how results will be achieved, and estimate the financial impact of not solving a problem.
- Build a strong business case for recommendations.
- Think beyond the immediate impact of the proposed intervention by exploring who or what else in the company would be affected and how proposed solutions are tied to overall key initiatives and strategies.
- Explore what has prevented a successful solution in the past or what might prevent one in the future.
- Learn how intent affects the trust between client and consultant and align their own intent to build trust and rapport with clients.
Resources (R)
Ensure congruence between the client's and the sales person's belief about necessary resources to achieve the opportunity.
- Discuss pricing and budget sensitively early in the selling process.
- Diplomatically challenge client's beliefs regarding resources (time, people, money, etc.) that don't appear realistic.
Decision Process
Gain mutual clarity on the what decision need to be made, when, by whom, and according to what criteria.
- Think through every step that a client's organization must take to make a well-informed decision.
- Establish a realistic timetable for each decision step, including the final decision.
- Prepare clients to speak with each person who may influence the decision before preparing a solution.
- Manage "gatekeeper" objections and gain access to key stakeholders to get their perspectives.
- Know who else the client is considering and how to position your solution.