For April we are bringing back the Sales and Marketing Academy! This is our most popular Academy where sales and marketing professionals from across the country fill our training room to learn from the best leaders in the industry. This month we have special guest Alan Rohrer from Question Based Selling in the house! Alan Rohrer has been with Question Based Selling (QBS) for 12 years and is their top sales consultant. He has worked with the CharTec team and Alex for years developing and refining our sales processes and has a whole day of sales training during our 4 day CharTec Sales Lab. Well, we’re bringing him out to Academy to teach you all about sales! One of the many differences in the QBS way of training is SPA vs. PAS in selling solutions.

SPA is not a nice luxurious thing when it comes to selling, it a serious problem and is the way many sales persons are selling currently. Many people will walk into a prospect’s office, talk about their solution and why they are so great. Then once they find out what the problem is; their solution doesn’t always fit into what the client’s needs are. Then you start to back pedal and talk about how you can actually take care of this issue and that challenge. The problem is, you’ve already shown them your hand. Now here comes the alternatives and the objections. Well so-and-so can do that for less, the other IT guy also does X,Y, and Z. Well our other guy does that too. It’s too late now, you’ve devalued your solution and now it is all about a price war. At this point you might as well leave your business card and walk out because you just lost the sale. To avoid this, we practice the PAS way of selling.

In order to effectively sell a solution, you need to know what the issues are first! You can’t sell a minivan to someone who clearly wants a sports car. So why would you sell a phone system to someone who needs network security? We need to listen to our prospects and ask the right questions. It’s not about the solutions WE want to sell them, it’s the solutions they NEED. New need is a relative term. More often than not, they do not know they NEED a product or service because they are unaware they have the pain, or are unsure that their pain will be fixed by your solution. This is why a proper discovery is key to presenting a Managed Services solution. By understanding their issues and problems, you get to understand how your solution can fit their needs perfectly. By doing this, you automatically beat out any of the alternatives to your solution. It doesn’t matter what the other guys quoted everything out for, chances are:

  1. They didn’t talk to their staff
  2. They didn’t do a full discovery
  3. They are still on a SPA way of selling

If these are true, you’ll have them interested in what you have to offer, even before they know the price (which you don’t give until the final presentation). Sure ABC Technology may be cheaper, but they are not offering X,Y, and Z like you are. This gives you leverage over the competition. Finally, when you present your solution, it may not be your favorite one or the one that gives you the biggest bonus check, but it’s the one that fits their solution perfectly. You call out important pain points from the staff that you uncovered during the discovery. This way you’re not making up issues, you’re using hard facts from the staff.

By changing up the way you sell, you not only make it easier to gather the information to craft the perfect solution, you end up building rapport with the staff, and gaining hard fast evidence that their technology is suffering and that you have just the right solution to make it better. Learn more about SPA vs. PAS at this month’s Academy. Seating is limited so register here today!