What signs tell you that your prospect is serious? Asking the right questions will lead you to answers about your buyer’s intent.
Why Buyers Buy from You
What criteria do your buyers use before purchasing from you? Sure, your product is good, and you are trustworthy. Those are not differentiators as most of us have good products and are trustworthy.
What are the differentiators? What questions did a prospect ask that were meaningful? Evaluating buyer intent and moving prospects through a sales funnel involves understanding their needs, behaviors, and readiness to purchase.
SPIN AND BANT
SPIN and BANT stand for:
- SPIN – Situation, Problem, Impact, and Need.
- BANT – Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline
Develop questions that focus on each of these items, and you will find who among prospects are likely buyers.
Ask questions strategically at each stage of your sales funnel. Start with your prospect’s situation. What about their circumstances makes them a prospect? What problem do they have that merits your solution? In contrast, leave timeline until later in the process.
Prospect Interaction
Buyer interest is also measured by your prospect’s questions and actions. What questions should an interested buyer ask? Serious buyers ask about how to implement what you sell and the impact on operations. Their initial questions are not about price.
Set milestones that prospects can reach. For example, asking for a demo and signing up for a webinar are examples.
OPSMGT
OPSMGT (OPS) sells operational consulting services to small and medium businesses. They were having trouble converting prospects to customers.
Emma Wolf owns OPS and manages 2 salespeople and 3 technicians. Emma realized that too much time was spent following up, prospects were slow to buy, and the team’s approach needed to change.
Using a sales specialist, OPS introduced SPIN and BANT and deployed a new CRM to track progress.
The team created a series of questions as follows:
- What do you do currently to address the problems you have?
- How does a solution fit into your business plan?
- What is the impact of not making a change?
- What other products are you considering?
- What budget have you set?
- What is your decision making process?
- What is your timeline?
The goal is to have the prospect tell you that they need your solution because you exposed their pain points and offered the salve to eliminate the pain
OPSMGT Succeeds
Over the next 2 years, OPS’s conversion rate went from 1 in 10 to 3 in 10 increasing sales by 3X. “WOW,” said Emma. The OPS team knew how to separate serious from casual prospects.
“Our CRM tracked everything,” said Emma. In the CRM:
- Salespeople ranked prospects based on their answers.
- Prospects moved through the sales funnel based on their answers and actions.
- Emails were triggered based on a prospect’s progress through the sales funnel.
- Different emails went to different prospects based on timelines.
The OPS team knows they could not have achieved their results without the use of its CRM to manage their leads. As Emma said,
