How to Elevate Your Sales Strategy: Shift from Solution Selling to Strategic Empathy

Unlock the secret to skyrocketing your sales by shifting your focus from showcasing solutions to demonstrating strategic empathy.

You may believe you are supposed to talk to your prospective client about your company. You may have been taught and trained that you are responsible for positioning your company as best in class. There was a time when this worked well enough.

You may also believe you need to tell your prospects about your large, well-known clients. You have been taught and trained that sharing your list of big clients will cause your contact to trust your company. This, too, used to work well enough.

If you happen to be one of those sales reps who is in love with their solution, you believe none of your competitors offer anything that can match yours. When you eventually discover that your solution is on par with what your competitions have, your faith in your solution will be shaken.

These subjects create too little value to dominate your first meeting with a buyer or a decision maker. The reason your contact begs off on the second meeting is because you have wasted their time. If this is how you sell today, you can improve your sales results by changing what you do.

Understanding Prospective Client Needs

Your prospective client is trying to make a rare decision that will solve a problem and improve their results. Your prospect needs to get this decision right on the first try. They worry about making a mistake that will cause them to fail. They’re also concerned that the wrong decision may make a bad problem worse.

Your contacts are seeking an expert and authority to guide them through the decision they need to make. Nothing you say about your company, your clients, or your solution is going to cause your contacts to believe that you know more about their problem and the decision they are struggling to make. You have to prove your expertise in the sales conversation, if you want to be preferred over your competition.

Adopting Strategic Empathy in Sales

There is a concept you can use to improve your sales conversations. Let’s call it strategic empathy. Instead of pitching your solution, imagine what your contacts don’t know. This can be difficult if you believe that your contacts know everything they need to make that rare, strategic decision to make a significant change. Once you have spent some time identifying the things your contacts don’t know, you can move on to another strategy that can help you be a better salesperson.

Now, take the role of decision-maker and think through what information and insights they would need to enable the contact and their stakeholders to move forward with confidence. Consider what you, as the decision maker, might need to know to ensure the change will lead to success.

The more you are able to organize your experience, the easier it is to make a list of what you would need to learn. You can do this work by thinking about the information your client is missing to be certain they are making the right decision. I’ve noticed the following trends:

• My prospects tend to not know that there are new and highly effective methodologies and sales strategies available to them and their sales teams.
• My prospects are often stuck in the Era of the Solution, which is over and has been replaced by the Era of Decision-Making.
• My prospects often believe that they will succeed by using pipeline coverage of 4X, even though they failed to hit their targets using this strategy in the past.
• My prospects often don’t understand that the only way to reach their goals is to improve their team’s sales effectiveness. You measure effectiveness by calculating each salesperson’s win rates.
• My clients believe that B2B sales training hasn’t evolved over the last decade. They worry about the time it takes to train a sales force.

Providing Essential Knowledge to Clients

If you are able to make a list like the one above, you can start to identify what your contacts need to know. My sample here is big ideas, but you will do well to get granular, addressing things like how to weight certain factors your contacts often get wrong.

While I don’t know what you sell, I do know that your contacts will engage with you should you sit next to them and help them to acquire the information and insights that will help them make a good decision.

When our environments change, buyers and decision-makers look for help making a change. They are not looking for an average salesperson. Instead, they are looking for a consultative salesperson, one that provides counsel, advice, recommendations, and the education they need to improve their business and their results.

Modernizing Your Sales Approach

If you are a sales leader or a sales manager, you would do well to remove any remnants of the legacy approach and replace it with a modern methodology and the sales strategies that create value for your clients. Many have already made these changes and improved their sales results and acquired more clients due to the better experience that they create when compared to their competitors.

If you are a salesperson, you should work on the idea above, and make a list of what your client will need to make that rare decision that you can guide them through. This is how to improve your ability to win deals.

If you need help making this shift, reach out to us here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/beth85.