Compelling Events Are Magical
- by Elay Cohen
- July 27, 2015
- Sales Skills
Compelling Events Are Magical
Compelling events are proven to qualify deals and close deals faster because they help executives with challenges take action. Compelling events are not price or discount driven.
When we uncover compelling events through thoughtful discovery with the right executives, magic happens.
It’s so important that Ken Krogue, founder at InsideSales.com, wrote an article in Forbes including compelling events.
He writes:
“Start with Who. Then move to Why. If the Why is strong enough, the What and How can be figured out. And then the urgency, or When, and How Much magically appear.” Read the full article.
Be Curious
Our buyers are coming to us with business issues they want to solve. They believe we can help them solve their problems and grow their businesses. They wouldn’t be talking to us if they didn’t. Once we uncover their problems, all too often, we fall short in mapping a solution to their challenges to a sequence of events or mutual plan. The purpose is not to create urgency around a date that maps to signing a commercial contract. The intent is to provide a realistic set of expectations to increase the likelihood of success, by a certain date.
Once we understand the pain, resist the urge to jump into a demonstration. Dive deeper. Ask probing and layering questions. Understand why it’s important and for whom. Quantify the impact of not solving their stated problems. Find out what happens if they don’t solve this problem, by a certain date. Put a number to it. If our prospect is hesitant to share the impact then ask more questions. It could be we’re talking to the wrong person, getting back to Ken’s article that coaches us to start with who.
If we’re not solving a problem that maps to one of a company’s top five initiatives, then our deals are less likely to happen.
Be curious about which executive owns the problem and associated top initiative. If an initiative doesn’t exist, then it’s our job to help sell it internally, making it one. That’s where the fun part of selling begins.
Use Compelling Event Messaging In Sales Campaigns
Once a compelling event is uncovered (or created) and validated with our champion and executive sponsor, it’s great to anchor all communications around it. Friendly reminders in all communications serve to reinforce the need to solve this problem by the date needed to meet the company’s go-to-market initiative. Remember, it’s not our date, it’s our customer’s date.
Here are some tips to integrate compelling event messaging in our sales communications:
- Emails: Use the compelling event in subject lines and in final parting words of an email. For example, put “initiative ABC” in the subject line. Sign off an email with the words: “We’re looking forward to working together to make initiative ABC happen.
- Pitches: Anchor every executive presentation in a compelling event. Call the presentation by the compelling event name. Put it on the title slide. Reinforce with messaging on each and every slide.
- Customer Sales Calls: Kick off sales calls with a clear purpose of intent around the compelling event. Validate and align stakeholders on goals, expected outcomes, timelines, and their date.
- Demonstrations: Kick off a demonstration sharing a story of what your customer’s world will be like after they solve the problem. Use compelling events language to reinforce value and action rather than features.
And don’t forget to add compelling event as a field on your Salesforce/CRM system to drive better forecasting and deal coaching.
How do you integrate compelling events in your value propositions, marketing campaigns, sales process and sales training?
About the Author
Elay Cohen is the author of SalesHood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams to Succeed and the co-founder of SalesHood, a SaaS sales enablement platform and community for sales professionals. Elay is the former Senior Vice President of Sales Productivity at Salesforce. Recognized as the company's "2011 Top Executive", and credited for creating and executing all of Salesforce's sales productivity programs that accelerated its growth from $300M to $3B+ in revenue. The sales training and sales support innovations delivered over these years by Elay and his team to thousands of sales reps resulted in unprecedented hypergrowth. He also created the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) category.
