How are your sellers advancing their sales opportunities?

How are your sellers creating urgency?

Because in the world of sales, urgency trumps importance every time (for me, it was a true “aha” moment when, ages ago, with the help of a Global Head of Sales, we cracked this one). If your sellers can’t generate a sense of urgency, their proposals will stall. We probably all have painful (and expensive) examples of this? Without attention, they can happen all the time.

The consultative selling model is increasingly not about opening up previously unknown “problem states”. As your sellers will tell you, most prospects already have a good idea about what their problem states are. No, the value of the model is to take the discussion deeper, into the area of business critical consequences… of not getting the known problem state solved.

This what the “implication” questioning stage does, and the power of this stage is to create urgency.

In our workshops we develop business specific implication question-sets with sellers. A very basic example might be:

What does each [problem state] cost you?

If it happens again what will the financial impact be?

What kind of figure have you budgeted to cover that?

If you haven’t budgeted for this, where will the money come from?

What will the effect of that be?

Sellers usually move through this stage straight into pitching features and benefits into the (recognised) problem state.

How are your sellers using implication questions to create urgency? And if they aren’t, how are they keeping their sales cases moving forward?