Diagnose Before You Prescribe To Be Successful In Sales

From our award-winning E-Learning Platform SOCO Academy

Have you ever talked yourself out of a sale? If you have, there’s a good chance you weren’t listening to your customer. Too many people think it’s their role to do all of the talking to sell their product or service. In reality, what ends up happening is they talk themselves out of the sale because they don’t know what’s essential to the customer. Unfortunately, too many of us make the mistake of selling our products or services before fully understanding our prospects’ most pressing challenges. Don’t keep repeating the same mistake, instead keep reading to learn how to diagnose before you prescribe to be successful sales.

Also read: 10 Sales Needs Analysis Questions You Should Always Ask Prospects

The current problem | Diagnose before you prescribe

Too many salespeople try to sell products or services before fully understanding our prospects’ most pressing challenges. Selling a product or service to someone you’re not entirely sure actually needs it is comparable to your doctor handing you a prescription before taking the time to understand your symptoms fully. Can you imagine that happening? Of course not! Following the same logic, you wouldn’t promote your products and services to customers before you had a clear idea of what they need and their problems.

How to effectively diagnose before you prescribe

Now you understand why you need to diagnose before you prescribe, let’s delve into how to effectively to do this as part of your sales process:

1. Qualify Prospects

Identifying people as prospects (prospecting) is an essential aspect of personal selling. You qualify prospects by asking three questions.

  1. Do they need your product?
  2. Do they have the ability to pay for your product?
  3. Do they have the authority to purchase your product?

Always keep these three questions in mind and keep refining your prospect list to help you avoid wasting time calling on people who are unlikely to do business with you.

2. Ask Questions

Here’s a great question to start with: What’s the #1 challenge you’re facing? Simply ask this question, listen and take notes. People are more than happy to share with you what’s not working and what their problems are. Because very few people even ask this question, you’ll come across as a professional and as someone who genuinely cares about them.

I’ll ask YOU the same question. What’s YOUR #1 challenge in selling? If you could sit down with me for a coffee (or beer), what’s the #1 question you would ask me? Please leave a reply in the comments below, and share your #1 challenge in selling.

3. Start a fact-finding mission

The purpose of these meetings is to uncover your prospects’ greatest challenges and what they’re doing now, if anything, to overcome those challenges. You’re on a fact-finding mission, and the answers to these questions will help you see if you can match your solution to their challenges. This will also allow you to modify your offering if necessary. Avoid the temptation
to start selling.

Position your business as the ideal solution

Revolutionise your sales representatives from being order takers to being a respected partner of your customer’s business who knows exactly how to advance the sale.

In Selling Your Solution training, we focus on the foundational sales skills everyone in sales needs to master. Whether that’s asking the right questions to uncover problems, presenting your solution effectively, tactfully overcoming objections or presenting so efficiently that closing becomes easy.

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