Stop Those (Sales) Fishing Expeditions!
We’ve all sat through them: a sales rep comes into the call, doesn’t know much about our business, and it becomes a Q&A session where they’re trying to find a pain to sell into or identify BANT criteria.
The fishing expedition.
Customers get very little value from these calls, yet they’re typically the first interaction with your sales team. In fact, it can take 2-5 meetings depending on the complexity of your solutions or severity of the challenges your buyers face.
And so, sales cycles take longer and buyers feel irritated at spending so much time trying to identify a need that fits their solution. Meanwhile, sales teams spend additional cycles lining up the right experts to answer questions.
What if you could accelerate your sales process and reduce time-to-signature across the board?
The solution: build the right systems and processes, leveraging tools like 9Lenses, to address both buyer education and seller alignment so that both get far more value from their initial conversations.
You’re able to compress weeks’ worth of meetings into a single conversation.
From Four Weeks To 10 Minutes
We work best in a handful of verticals, and the financial services sector is one of those. We recently had a large bank highlight exactly what a shift from fishing expedition to consultative approach did for their business.
Prior to engaging with us, it would take a banker a series of meetings to meet with their customer.
They had:
- Typical questions to ask
- Checklists
- Cheat sheets
- Additional resources on-hand
After the initial meeting, they’d take a week or two, analyze the information, and after that get in touch with relevant internal experts.
This often took 3-4 weeks to finally present the solutions to the client.
As sales teams are fond of saying: time kills all deals. And remember, you’re not working against other companies or solutions – you’re also working against complacency, where a buyer opts to make no decision whatsoever.
This bank built an advisory tool that bankers used with clients to help the client identify applicable needs in advance of the discussion.
Now, what took weeks only took 10 minutes. And the initial meeting became far more consultative in nature by looking at the results, analyzing the gaps, and providing expertise on how they could address those.
All within the first meeting.
Advising > Fishing
Buyers don’t want to have bait dangled in front of them, hoping they’ll bite on a particular challenge or solution you present.
That’s transactional, frustrating, and a waste of time that slows down your sales cycles and encourages your buyers to go elsewhere.
A better way? Leveraging a tool like 9Lenses for all sellers.
This both standardizes their approach + saves everyone time in discovering if you’re the right solution.
And that’s always a win-win worth pursuing.
Trusted Advisor? Or Glorified Scheduler?
Another typical challenge is when Account Executives become nothing more than glorified schedulers.
Here’s an example: we’re working with a Fortune 500 client with a sales process centered around connecting buyers to the right subject matter expert.
So, there’s someone who owns the relationship … and their job is to sell everything the firm has to offer to potential customers.
A client asked the account executive, “hey, does your firm do X?” and they said “of course! We’ve got an expert in that space. Let me go and get you connected with them.
Immediately, the process is on hold. There’s not a single thing the AE can do until the expert connects with the buyer … and depending on calendars, it could take a few weeks to get this moving again!
And yet, it runs into another issue:
Disconnected Experts
Here’s the problem: That expert comes in to meet with the client but still knows very little about the business.
The Account Executive was asking the initial questions, but their goal was to pull in the right expert. So now, the expert’s coming in, and they have to initiate their own fishing expedition full of questions to try and learn about the buyer’s business, challenges, etc.
When I was interviewing this expert, they told me they had a meeting coming up in 24 hours that’d been on the calendar for two weeks – and they didn’t know anything about the buyer.
Nothing! For two whole weeks!
This is an all-too-common combination of an unqualified sales discussion bringing in someone who can’t be prepared to move things forward.
And let’s not forget these experts are doing these calls throughout the week. How inefficient is it to have your expert on an unqualified call where they’re just casting about? It’s not the best use of the expert’s time, either!
But Wait, Is This Asking Too Much?
I get this question all the time: how can a seller expect the buyer, who’s already taken time on their calendar to meet, to spend additional time taking an assessment in advance of the initial meeting?
It’s all about how it’s presented.
If it’s presented as additional work (“hey, could you take this before our call?”) then yes, it’s going to annoy your buyer.
But nobody likes wasting their time, and especially not executives.
You want to make the most of that initial interaction. So when you send this, you tell them this assessment will drive the initial conversation by identifying the most relevant topics specific to their business – and that you, the rep, will be more prepared to address those.
For example, let’s say you’re selling some sort of cybersecurity solution. “Hey,” you send via email, “if you spend five minutes taking this 12-question assessment, it’ll give you a set of recommendations based on industry best practices and what we’re seeing with similar clients. When we meet, we can go over these results and let the conversation flow from there!”
Now you’re providing value – not asking for additional work.
And it avoids the pain of a fishing expedition where you’re peppering them with questions and trying to understand their business.
It’s all about helping you help them. So yes, you’re asking for them to spend 5-7 minutes, but it’s so that a 30-minute conversation is far more impactful for all parties involved. When presented this way, many buyers express appreciation on how different – and helpful – it is!
Advising > Fishing
Buyers don’t want to have bait dangled in front of them, hoping they’ll bite on a particular challenge or solution you present.
That’s transactional, frustrating, and a waste of time that slows down your sales cycles and encourages your buyers to go elsewhere.
Your better way? Leveraging a tool like 9Lenses for all sellers.
This both standardizes their approach + saves everyone time in discovering if you’re the right solution.
And that’s always a win-win worth pursuing.
