Selling Best Practices, Part 4: Order of the Sales Process

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Grow the Need First to Succeed

If you watched the previous part in this series (Grow the Need, Shrink the Cost), you know how important it is to grow the need. It's also important to grow the need at the right time in the sales process. In this part, Joe Friedman explains why sellers must grow the need first—at the beginning—rather than towards the end of the sales process. 

Transcript

Let’s talk about the order in which you need to sell. Think about the part of the sales process where you’re shrinking the perception of the cost of the solution. When someone objects to the price, you’re doing objection handling. When someone wants to talk about the service levels, the terms that they will get, any add-ons—you’re negotiating at that point. If they have a problem with their perception of the quality—whether it’s real or imagined—that, in their mind, is a cost of doing business with you. All of those things happen and get addressed at the tail-end of the sales process. 

Think about it—whether you are the buyer or the seller—when you get to the objection handling phase, when you’re trying to negotiate, what’s the next step? The next step in the minds of both parties is *Closing.*

So, what’s going to happen when the seller says “Are you willing to commit to the next step?”, and the buyer says, “No.”? Will the seller next say, “Oops! I didn’t grow the need big enough, I need to jump backwards and ask some more questions.”?  That’s not going to happen because it’s counter-intuituve. Both parties expect Closing is the next step. For that reason, you must *always* grow the need first—before any mention of your product is introduced.

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