Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. … – Ferris Bueller
Ferris certainly knew what he was talking about, and his comments can just as easily be applied to the rate at which the average human consumes information today.
Every single moment our bodies, brains and nervous systems process roughly 11 MILLION bits of data—every single moment. It’s incredible that we can actually retain and utilize any of it at that pace. Surprisingly, we do, however, consciously retain somewhere between 12 to 50 bits of information every moment.
I had one of those moments last week—you know, one of those moments where a data point jumped out at me and got my cerebral juices flowing—information I could leverage to alter my behavior and potentially improve my performance at work. Refreshing it was!
I was scrolling through LinkedIn, when my cursor landed on a video by “Keenan” the sales industry guru, CEO at A Sales Guy and author of this fantastic, recently published book Gap Selling.
While I tend not to consume self-improvement-type content during peak selling hours, his message hit me loud and clear. Honestly, Keenan’s passion for the game is infectious.
“Are you an expert at finding your buyers’ problems?” Keenan asks.
I stopped and asked myself this over and over again, as it relates to my role at Cincom Systems. To be honest, I was not sure I was audible-ready.
Like most sellers, of course, I am well-versed in our “value messaging.” But, I agreed with “Keenan” and, no, I did not feel that I had been behaving as an expert at finding buyer’s problems.
Know Customers’ Needs and Buyers’ Pain Points
Fortunately, the team at Cincom has been excellent at analyzing our customers’ needs over decades of growth. We have a plethora of resources on hand that enable our field organization to quickly ascertain the industries that find CPQSync, our new, cloud-based configure, price, quote module, which is embedded within Microsoft Dynamics 365, to be of the most value. So, I knew I was not far from the information I needed.
Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software helps sellers digitally transform to automate and optimize their quoting and ordering processes for complex, configurable products or services. In light of the recent pandemic and other social consternation industry titans, like Gavriella Schuster of Microsoft suggest, the importance of moving your business to the cloud has only become exponentially amplified of late.
Do these 10 problems sound familiar?
- Your Customer experience (CX) is not meeting customer expectations
- Complex and aging technical infrastructure is slowing the sales process
- Siloed teams making it hard to collaborate on and execute quotes
- It takes you days and weeks to get a quote out the door instead of minutes or hours
- Great sales talent, but not getting anticipated results
- Inefficiencies created by limitations of low-cost internal solutions (i.e. spreadsheets)
- Attrition and contraction have left your business with a loss of tribal knowledge
- Management does not have a clear view into seller’s performance in real time
- You have no way of delivering a seamless experience to quote new business inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM
- Sellers have difficulty creating accurate quotes to reduce risk of losing the deal or delivering the wrong product
The next time you are out evangelizing your corporate brand or trying to attract net new sales, partners and customers, take a page out of Ferris’ story and make sure you stop to look around at the data once in a while … or you might miss something.
Be an Expert at Understanding Buyer’s Pain Points
For individuals who sell, it is imperative that you take heed of Keenan’s theory, as well, and make sure you are behaving as an expert at finding your buyers’ problems. Being audible and ready to go out and discover new opportunities will most certainly serve your personal and professional growth.