(888) 815-0802How Many Good Sales Touches
What’s your buyer’s ROI on the time and attention they invest in you?
B2B buyers want to make purchase decisions faster. Up to 40% faster according to one study.
What’s holding them back?
Empty, valueless sales touches that don’t help the buyer make progress toward making a purchase decision.
Take a second here and estimate how many positive sales touches you have with your buyer in your typical sales process.
Include only the value-delivering sales touches that result in the buyer moving closer to making a decision. Don’t count all the valueless one-sided “touching base” and “checking in” messages that you send to a buyer.
What’s your number of positive sales touches per opportunity? The number will vary by the nature of the product and service being sold. However, in general, the answer is “not many.”
Let’s estimate that your typical sales cycle has five positive value-delivering sales touches with your buyer. If you waste just one of those touches by being unprepared to help the buyer make progress, then you’ll have thrown away 20% of the opportunities you have to deliver value to your prospect.
This opens the door to your competition to deliver value when you don’t.
Here’s a simple way for you, as a seller, to ensure that every sales touch has value for your buyer. Answer these two questions before every sales interaction. It doesn’t matter how big (a virtual or in-person call) or how small (an email), you must have these answers before you proceed:
- What value does the buyer need from us (or expect from us) today in order to move closer to making their decision?
- What steps will the buyer commit to take in exchange for the value they receive?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions for every sales interaction you have with a buyer, then you risk having an empty, valueless sales touch.
Remember, each time you interact with a buyer they make an investment of their limited time in you. Logically, they expect to receive something of value in return for that investment.
In other words, buyers expect an ROI on the time and attention they invest in you. If you train a prospect, through empty sales touches, to expect to receive little or no value from you, then you can expect to receive no more of their time.
When this happens, you will find yourself on the outside looking in with your nose pressed against the glass.
Which is not where you want to be.
