7/8 steps to win at every single sales meeting
In this series, I take you through eight key steps to plan your B2B sales meetings in a way that sets you apart from the competition.
By building continuous momentum, providing value, and advancing sales at each step, you will ultimately get more (and faster) closed business.
Preparation is the secret to closing sales — and it needs to happen for every encounter with a prospect. Before each meeting, answer three key questions:
Why should this client meet with me?
2. Clarify your value proposition
What do I want my client to do?
5. Clarify continuation vs. advance
How can I provide value in this encounter?
7. Identify your unexpected value
Step 7: Identify your unexpected value
“The true goal for a salesperson is to help the customer win.” — Mike Weinberg
Since most B2B sales happen after multiple calls, your aim should be to leave a positive and memorable impression by providing unexpected value in every encounter — which comes from understanding what your potential client values the most.
You can deliver unexpected value to your prospect in different ways:
- Deliver insight
- Ask powerful questions
- Help them better understand their own needs
- Help them see the path to success
- Share new ideas
- Educate
- Share industry news and insights
Very often, the sales person offers the solution far too early — as a result, the prospect isn’t able to absorb the information.
I totally get why you might want to give your solution as soon as possible: you probably feel like time is running out, and that you may not get another opportunity to present all the awesome benefits of your product/ solution.
But if you want to close more sales, you’ve got to slow down and adjust to a pace more suitable for prospects.
Instead of repeatedly selling your solution in every meeting, focus on providing unexpected value. With this approach, you throttle your sales process to a speed that allows the prospective client to digest information and receive your solution properly. You increase the value of every single step, ultimately leading to a successful closing.
There are two keys to creating unexpected value:
1. Genuineness: deliver what the prospect considers to be true value
2. Consistency: deliver value in every meeting
In this way, you train your prospect to see you as more than just an agent who happens to offer a given solution. They start seeing you as a domain expert and a trusted advisor. You become a valuable asset who can help them achieve their desired objective.
When prospects see you in this light, they:
- Share more information with you
- Ask for your advice and trust your recommendations
- Refer you to others
- Forgive your errors
- Give you more business
Research shows that trusted advisors are 69 percent more likely to come away with the sale.
Questions are an excellent tool to add value. Before your meeting, develop a set of powerful, value-adding questions. Value-adding questions are those to which the answers aren’t obvious — the prospect has to think and reflect, which takes your dialogue into bold new territory.
By stimulating this type of higher-order thinking in the potential client, you add value and demonstrate your genuine desire to help. Aim for 2–3 high-value questions for every meeting.
_______________________________________________________________
Hi there, I am Maddy. I help B2B & SaaS founders get first 1000 customers and scale fast!
Sales is a science. Just like you engineer your product into existence, I can help you build a sales and marketing machine to help people see how your product change their lives for the better.
Do you want to scale your startup fast?
Start by getting The SaaS Scaling Game Plan and free training to build a predictable sales machine without wasting existing funds by clicking here.
