Sharing insights as part of the sales process is getting a lot of press these days. It makes sense that prospects are looking for relevant insights that will impact their business in world of abundant information.
But there are two mistakes I see salespeople making when sharing insights. Insights have to actually be relevant to the prospect and be truly insightful in order to speed up the sale. The mistakes I see most frequestly are:
- Sharing a deck of random facts and thinking they are insights.
- Sharing an insight and not turning it into an interesting conversation.
Insights Have to be Truly Impactful
A salesperson that shares series of slides with random facts is only showing that he or she wasn't successful at analyzing the information and determining what was real insight. Your job as the salesperson is to study the information and find one or two key insights to lead with. Find one or two key things and get those clear in your mind and lead the conversation with real insights.
Insights Have to Lead to a Conversation
The second mistake is sharing an insight, but not knowing how to turn it into an interesting conversation. It isn't that hard to get this right. Simply share the insight, comment on how you see it impacts the prospect, and then ask the prospect to react. Keep the conversation going from there.
If you get stuck, try reading about the insight first, then go to the prospect's website and social media to find some clues as to how to make the insight more specific to the prospect, which in turn could open up the interesting dialogue you're looking for.
For example, last week I helped a salesperson take a trend in the hearing aid industry and apply it to start an interesting conversation. After reading about the trend, we took a look at the prospect's testimonials on their website which illustrated their own customers were part of this trend. It was easy to go from there.
