Framework for Closing Sales
Effective Sales Messaging for B2B
Use this framework to create urgency with your client and overcome delays and objections before closing a deal
Find practical ideas below on how to incorporate pain points into sales presentations
The Sales Challenge
B2B sales cycles can be notoriously long (at times longer than expected). That makes it even more challenging, when towards the end progress seems to stall. There can be many forms: The client can become a ghost, object to the price, or raise technical or compliance concerns. Or, they just can’t decide to buy.
In short: the deal is not closing.
In such a situation, the temptation is to agree to give the client more time. Or, to respond to the objections she raised to justify her not making the decision. In almost all cases, the stated reason is rarely the real obstacle. It's a symptom. The symptom shows that your value proposition did not get through. Or, that the buyer doesn’t see changing the status quo as urgent. You need to go back here and change that.
The Framework: Vision Creation
This concept is from the 1994 B2B sales classic Solution Selling by Michael Bosworth. Despite its age, it is still my favourite book about sales. To my knowledge he came up with the distinction between features (the cup has a handle), advantages (that prevents your fingers from burning) and benefits (which you said you wanted to avoid) as well as other concepts that stood the test of time.
Principles:
The client needs to admit pain, which consist of a.) a real problem, b.) awareness of the problem, and c.) the active desire to solve it. If any of the three are are missing, the client is unlikely to take action.
The role of sales is to lead the buyer from latent to active pain and then to share the seller’s vision of the preferred solution.
The seller wants to ensure that, throughout this process, the client takes and keeps ownership for the problem. They also want the client to find the best solution. If the seller takes over, it might raise the buyer’s defences (most people like to buy, bot not being sold to) and undermine her commitment to take action.
My executive coaching clients will note that there are parallels to coaching, especially around ownership. Unlike a coach, the seller wants to control the selling process, but not the client.
How it works
The Vision Creation Process has three stages. In them, the seller asks three types of questions. They form the cute 3x3 matrix below:
Stages
Diagnose reason: getting the client to admit she has a problem and to share details, in effect working from latent (unconscious) pain to admitted pain.
Explore impact: escalate the issue by looking into the organisational impact. This creates the urgency that move the buyer to take action.
Visualise capabilities: have the client describe (visualise) how much better her life could be if her pain point was solved. As you help her do this, try to introduce features of your solution as possible requirements.
Question Types
Open questions: you know them, they can’t be answered with yes, no or number and start with what, why, who, where or how. In most cases (again: incl. coaching) these are the most useful questions.
Control questions: can be open or closed questions. They allow the seller to keep control of the scope and direction of the conversation.
Confirm questions: summarise the seller’s understanding of the buyer’s situation. It is also a great way to show the buyer that you are listening and making a real effort to see her perspective (= empathy).
The Vision Creation Matrix
Start our conversation with a client from top left to right and then row by row. The key is to consider the principles from above, especially letting the client own the problem.
When she talks openly about her challenges, don’t come to her rescue yet. Instead, keep probing ("What else?") for more and confirm what you understand.
A key part is exploring the impact on others, which could be other departments, her own team, or even senior management up to the board. The sense is that if the problem isn’t solved, something dramatic could happen. It should create the urgency that helps you close the deal.
Practical Application
The approach predates Zoom calls and, I think, even PowerPoint. It works best in an actual conversation be it in a meeting, phone call or video conference setting. I have also used it in workshops we held with a client. The client must commit time and trust. Most sellers won't have this luxury.
Yet, many pitches and demos use slides and many clients, especially when in groups of decision makers, expect to see a presentation. How to incorporate the approach in a deck? Here are some ways that I have deployed:
Begin the presentation / conversation with a slide about challenges (company or industry). In the early days of Google ad sales, we pitched C-Level executives. We always started with a slide titled “Our understanding of your challenges.” On it, we listed some marketing and digital topics we had researched before the meeting. We then asked the clients to confirm and/or elaborate which always resulted in useful insight. Some statements we could refer to later in the selling process. (one telecom client in Australia responded to our list with “I wish that was it!” after which he gave us a masterclass in telecoms leadership with all its difficulties. It was priceless)
A variation of the challenges slide would be a “Trends” slide. Many companies struggle with the pace of change and the complexity caused by it. Ensure to include topics that are relevant to your product. A generic template could look something like this:
The advantage of this format is that it can usually be reused for all clients in the same industry vertical.
For the vision part, a useful approach is the “Current State vs Future State” which is also used in coaching
This might need some customisation as you want to be specific in describing the problems. If you get this right, the client will be dissatisfied with the status quo (the biggest competitor for many B2B startups) and motivated to act. You can go through the 9 fields of the matrix above in the context of the page.
As usual, I hope you find this useful. Any feedback is welcome. If you like to get the matrix and the tow templates as Google Slides please email me at yuri@narciss.coach
Have a great day and never stop growing!
Yuri