These are questions You've got to understand what business outcome are you driving to, what's the sequence, how specifically are you planning to get there. You're listening to the audible Ready Podcast, the show that helps you and your teams sell more faster. We'll feature sales leaders sharing their best insights on how to create a sales engine that helps you fuel repeatable revenue growth. Presented by the team at Force Management, a leader in B to B sales effectiveness. Let's get
started. Hello, and welcome to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. I'm Rachel Klapmillern. We often talk about competitors on this podcast. They're important, right you want to understand your differentiation, your competitive differentiation. But a lot of times, particularly when budgets are tight, we are competing against funds being directed to other places. So we're competing against other initiatives, not necessarily like competitors
who have our same solution. It's always a risk. John Kaplan joins me to talk about this today. Rachel, this is a great topic and it's so relevant right now as people are trying to get above the noise. Yes, rising above the noise, and so John, this is really sort of competing against do nothing aligning to the pain, more specifically the pain of not
doing anything with this particular initiative that you're trying to sell. So, John, let's start with what I'm asking to understand if this is something I'm dealing with in the account that if I'm going to be dealing with competing initiatives, let me just answer it flatly. Yes, you are always going to be
competing with different initiatives. The extent to which you are differentiating against those initiatives will be your ability to align yourself to the problems that that customer is experiencing and highly differentiate yourself in that process. So the answer is yes, yes, yes, you're going to have this risk every time you do a deal, every time, for every opportunity. But let me break it down a little bit, and I want you to get a piece of paper out.
I'm going to give a couple seconds. Get a piece of paper out. If you're out for a walk or whatever. Just go back to this podcast and go back to this section because I want you to write these down. These are questions you've got to understand, and you could ask them just this way. What business outcome are you driving to what's the sequence, How specifically
are you planning to get there? Then you're associating the problem that they have with how you might be able to solve it, and how you solve it relates to that problem. It's all about the initial discovery. So there's some initial great discovery questions. How are you prioritizing initiatives right now? What's making its way to the top. What's the biggest business issue facing your customer right
now? What are they doing technically to solve this issue? You don't want to assume that they're not doing anything, So what are you currently doing? What do you like most about what you're doing right now? What's not working so well? How are you measuring success? Folks? This topic is all about discovery. As in most challenges in our sales process or in our daily
lives, it's all about discovery. Yeah. I also think too, John, It's part of that decision process qualification that I'm doing with medic right. If I'm weighing who is going to be making the decision? How do I use my decision process stage of my qualification to make sure I'm accounting for competing initiatives? I like it. Now you're starting to triangulate around the acronyms. This is like you hear me talk about how to get it in your blood.
What you just said is especially critical in a few areas. So first, if we just take a look at medic or medpick, you have a decision process and decision criteria, and this feeds directly directly into what we're talking about. Feeds directly into this. You also can hit it with metrics or economic buyer. So decision process, decision criteria. Just look at medpicks.
This falls directly into this prioritization. It also feeds directly in for how they're going to measure a solution and who the economic buyer is and how to get to the economic buyer. So, in fact, if you understand like the eye, let's look at that the eye identification of pain for both the technical pain and the business pain, and you understand all the negative consequences that are appearing because they have this technical pain in business pain. That's a home run
avenue to go down. So it's not complicated. You look at medic, you look at MEDPIC, you look at Discovery. Don't even think about,
oh, how do I understand their priorities? Just by the process of asking discovery questions to get these topics up on the table, you will understand prioritization, right, and you always say, John, you want to find pain that can't go another day without yes fix, And if you do that, it doesn't matter what other initiatives are out there, largely right, because yours is going to be the priority if it can't go anywhere longer without being fixed.
Rachel, that's exactly right. So once you understand the problems from both a technical and a business prospect, from a technical and a business point of view, and you understand how we can influence the technical decision criteria with our differentiation. Let me repeat that, once you understand the problems from both the technical and a business point of view, and then you understand how you can influence the technical decision criteria with your differentiation, and we can understand how they
will measure success. We're now ready to pivot and speak about how we do that. People often ask me how you do what that? And how we do that is the decision criteria. How we do it better differently, that's our differentiation and where we've done it before is our proof points, case studies and testimonials. Always go outside in before you go inside out. Remember it's not just what you sell, but how you sell that can be just as
important and differentiating you out in the marketplace. That's true. And remember, I guess if there isn't a direct tie between your two initiatives, things like that you might be competing against. You really got to find the urgency in your deal, and that aligns with finding the measurableer pain. So how do I remind my customer of the pain that they're going to alleviate with my solution or the pain they're going to have if they don't move forward with my solution.
I love that set up, Rachel, and I want people to listen to this very very careful. If you're walking, you're riding a bike, stop for a second, because it's not that you will have to remind them of their pain. You don't remind them of their pain. You need to remind them that you understood their pain. It's significance to both the technical pain and the business pain, and that it has real negative consequences. So here's the skill, Rachel. It's not to tell people that they have a problem
hoping to convince them of the urgency. The skill is to ask great discovery questions that can get them to stand in their own moment of pain, where they wind up convincing themselves that they have a problem, and then it becomes urgent because it was urgent for them. People rarely argue with their own conclusions. And Rachel, when we get done producing this thing, I want you to cut that snippet for me because I'm going to post that everywhere. That's
right, good done, Consider it done. And really, what you're talking about, John, are some of the same tactics that we use when we talk about competing. Again, do nothing because there really are potentially doing nothing as it relates to your initiative. Yeah, you know, when you think about it, the only time you really run into do nothing is when the customer does not think the problem is urgent enough and therefore they've not prioritized it.
Do you understand So, Rachel, when somebody says to me, oh, you know, they're dragging their feet there, that's our problem. If they're not prioritizing us, we haven't prioritized it for them. We haven't helped them. This is why you have to have deep. While you got to go deep on discovery, many people have taken training from me before, Rachel, and they remember me shouting in the room go deeper, go deeper,
go deeper. What I'm really talking about is connecting it to the negative consequences, almost to the point where the customer says, uncle, I give and Rachel. I actually had a customer tell me one time, this is exactly what they said. They said, Okay, smart guy, it's obvious that we have a huge problem. Why don't you spend a minute or two telling me what you think you can do about it. It's one of my proudest moments in selling. And look, I'm not trying to pester my customers,
but I am trying to get them to participate in their own rescue. I need you to cut that as a snippet too. Were full of them today. Yeah, we're on a roll. Yes, there are going to be situations that we run into, John where you really have to put your initiative on hold because of other priorities and they really need to do those initiatives before yours. But if you find that out, that's still great knowledge. And this conversation provides you a way to stay in touch. Yeah, and I'm
just going to kind of reiterate. You're absolutely right. But if I'm doing my discovery right and my product has value and meaning, I should be able to overcome that. I should be able to get someone to create their own urgency. But look, you asked a specific question. There are times that that's not possible. And if for some reason I've not done that, then absolutely I continue to keep in touch with the customer. Again, not to pester them, but to drip them, you know, drip to them good
pieces of information, articles, announcements, industry news, et cetera. One of my favorite sellers on the planet is somebody works for us named Paul de Moore. He sends these podcasts, Rachel. These podcasts we do because that's a walking audition for what we're going to teach people and why they would buy us. He sends these podcasts to customers and he's not asking for an order,
but he is front and center every week with them. Yep, exactly, And what a great way to be uncommon right to be an elite seller, John, You've given us some great tactics to use when we're faced with this situation. I know many of you are faced with differentiating and competing against alternative uses for that budget in your prospect companies, wrap it up for us as we close. Yep, it's all about discovery. Prepare great discovery questions
that can get your customers to stand in their own moment of pain. Let the urgency get created by them. The more you tell them they have a problem, the more they're going to resist. You. Make it all about them before you earn the right to make it all about you. Go crush it always, always. Thank you John, my pleasure. Thank you to all of you for continuing to listen to the audi Already Sales podcast. At
Force Management, we're focused on transforming sales organizations into elite teams. Our proven methodologies deliver programs that build company alignment and fuel repeatable revenue growth. Give your teams the ability to execute the growth strategy at the point of sale. Our strength is our experience. The proof is in our results. Let's get started. Visit us at forcemanagement dot com. You've been listening to the audible Ready
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