Provocative Selling | Provoke Your Prospects

Provocative Selling was born from the idea that challenges are opportunities. So, if you’re ready for the challenge, keep reading to learn what Provocative Selling is, why it’s relevant now and how to start applying it to your sales process.

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What is Provocative Selling? |  Provocation-Based Selling Definition

Provocative Selling, also called Provocation-Based Selling, revolves around the concept that prospects are unaware they have a pressing and urgent problem. To sales professionals, these challenges are, in fact, opportunities.

Potential customers might be unaware of the dangers their company may face if they don’t fix this problem. Still, if the salesperson can help the prospect become aware of the challenge and provide a solution, that’s Provocation-Based Selling.

Also read:

• What Is Insight Selling? Using Data To Coach Buyers & Close More Deals
• How Sales Reps Can Identify & Resolve 4 Common Customer Pain Points
• Decoding the Challenger Sale

3 Essential Provocative Selling Steps 

Below are the three essential provocative selling steps any salesperson needs to follow if they want to start honing their Provocation-Based selling approach. 

1. Identify a critical issue

Customers are so overexposed to the age-old sales question, “What keeps you up at night?” that its effectiveness has diminished to nearly nothing. Instead, ask questions that provoke the customer to want to find a solution to their problems.

The first step of provocative selling is identifying an issue, challenge or gap so ominous that, even in an unstable, fluctuating downturn, the company will find the money to resolve it. 

2. Formulate your provocation | Jarring the Prospect

In the next step of provocation-based selling, after you start off by creating a sense of urgency, you know, “You have a big, critical problem”. At this point, you want to remain respectful whilst letting them know that you’ve worked with leading industry companies and helped them address this painful challenge. In particular, their competitors. 

3. Lodge your provocation | Vital Decision-Makers

The last stage is approaching a decision-maker, ideally, an executive with the power to approve your proposed solution.

Provocative Selling Questions

The sad news is you can’t just come up with provocative questions on the fly. Trust us. It’s impossible because you must understand your prospect’s needs, wants and challenges beforehand. Therefore, you need to start by planning them out and to help you get started, you can use these questions to provoke ideas about what your prospect really needs:

• How does my customer meet its needs without using my product or service? 

• What are the primary problems, difficulties, and concerns prospects will likely experience in each scenario? 

• What are the business implications of these problems? How do they impact productivity, time-to-market, legal issues, profitability, costs, operational efficiency, decision-making and more?

• What does the customer get if it replaces its current methods, systems or processes with my offering?

How Does Provocation-Based Selling Differ From Other Sales Approaches?

If you’re wondering what are the similarities and differences between Provocative Selling and other common sales methodologies, below is a comparison of different sales approaches:

Transactional Selling

Transactional selling is a total hands-off sales strategy focusing solely on making a quick sale without prioritizing learning the customer’s pain and how their product can solve it. This is pretty much the complete opposite of provocation-based selling.

The Challenger Salesperson

Challenger Sales and Provocative Selling have more similarities than differences. The Challenger Sales Rep excels at adopting unique perspectives when it comes to creating solutions for existing problems. They’re a pioneer in pushing the status quo whilst possessing the ability to get potential customers excited about these new possibilities. Simultaneously, the Challenger Sales Rep can promote their products as the ideal innovative solutions to these problems. Challenger Sales and Provocative Selling are similar in that they set out to educate the customer.

Insight Selling vs Provocative Selling

Insight Selling and Provocative Selling are ‘two sides of the same coin.’ They’re slightly different takes on the same technique, which involves asking questions to uncover problems the prospect needs to address to help their business. The solution is, of course, your product or service.

Solution Selling

Solution Selling is a sales approach that replaced old ‘Product Selling’ practices. It’s a sales process focusing on selling the solution to the prospect’s problem. Whilst both approaches set out to solve the prospect’s problem, Provocation-Based Selling ultimately focuses on pointing out the problem first.

Consultative selling

Consultative selling is a type of sales approach that prioritizes an investigative process. Thereby, instead of simply telling prospects what they need, you ask prospects thought-provoking questions that help them identify their pain points. The similarity between Consultative Selling and Provocative Selling is that both use questions to uncover problems.

Summary of Comparison 

It’s fair to say that Provocation-Based Selling seems like a modern revision of solution selling. However, the real difference is that while in solution selling, your prospect is aware of the problem and has the budget to solve it – but the prospect’s not entirely sure they should ask you to solve it. In provocative selling, you uncover a problem, provoke a response, and position yourself as the ideal solution provider. 

Also read: Sales Methodologies: A Comparison of 15 Essential Approaches

SOCO Sales Training’s Take on Provocation-Based Selling

Whilst highlighting key issues that prospects have overlooked and sharing how you can help them to solve them is a great way to generate interest in your product or service, sales reps, at the same time, need to make sure they don’t come across as insincere and self-serving. It’s a skill that can be a very effective approach when combined properly.

If you need help getting your sales team the skills they need to provoke their customers, book an appointment with one of our program advisors, who will be happy to discuss Provocation-Based sales training in more detail with you.