All thing Sellers Need to Know in 2021
The new customer behaviors that have led and then accelerated the digital transformation of organizations are causing an upheaval in marketing strategies and sales techniques. In just a few years, we have gone from a “self-centred” vision on the product/service/brand to a customer-centric vision and solutions. So inevitably, if your customers are digital in the buying journey, that means that your salespeople have to develop their methods and their tools in order to offer an impeccable customer experience and to sell always more efficiently.
The BEBEDC sales technique
Not all opportunities are good for your business. You have to know how to accept it and anticipate the “go and no go” The BEBEDC sales technique aims to quickly qualify a prospect; in other words, to know whether or not it is worth starting or continuing the sales process. And therefore to ask yourself the following questions:
Need: Does the prospect really need my solution? Am I in the best position in the market to help him solve this problem?
Issue: What will happen if you do business with this potential client? And what if you weren’t doing business? One of the purposes of this is to assess the impact of buying or not acquiring your solution.
Budget: it is about quickly determining whether the prospect has (or not) the budget that would allow him to solve his problem
Deadline: is it the right time? Why would he act now? Locking the deadline allows you to control the sales cycle but also the impact on your production/resource planning and, therefore, your profitability.
Decision-makers: who will validate? Who are the people who can support, favourably influence or, on the contrary, “break the sale”?
The BANT method
BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. This technique, popularized in the 1960s by IBM, has lived well but is still used today, especially in software companies. The BANT method is like the BEBEDC technique, a kind of canvas for knowing whether or not to continue a sales process with a prospect.
Budget: Does the prospect have the means for his ambitions? What is the cost of inaction?
Authority: Who are the decision-makers? Who can derail the sale in the company or, on the contrary, accelerate it?
Need: Does the prospect really need our solution?
Timing: the challenge is to control the sales cycle and the decision-making at each stage of the process. Is the customer’s problem / need a priority?
It is considered that it takes at least 2/3 points out of 4 of the BANT to go further. Imagine, for example, that you have validated two elements, but the project is in 12 months or that everything is sticky, but the prospect does not have the necessary money to solve his problem. Is it worth going further for now and wasting your cartridges on a time-consuming presale that you know with little likelihood of going to the end?
Active listening
Active listening is an excellent technique that allows you to better qualify the needs of your prospect by discovering the problems (pain points in VO or pain points) and customer needs.
