Sales is one of those professions that’s been around forever — or at least as long as people have sold things. Which might as well be forever.
No salesperson would be surprised to find out there’s an enormous number of sales methodologies out there. You’re probably familiar with many of them. You likely have a few go-tos you rely on day-to-day. Let’s talk about the ten most effective B2B sales frameworks, and understand when and where to use them.
Solution Selling
Solution Selling is about helping a buyer understand their pain, the impact it has on their organization, and the opportunity for improvement. By asking the right questions, you can guide your buyer down the path of visualizing your product or service as the solution.
This process involves lots of questions and isn’t as useful when the selling process is usually relatively straightforward.
Challenger Sale
With the Challenger Sales methodology, you’re educating your buyer about something they don’t yet know about. It could be a problem they don’t know about, like the cost of not operating without a CRM, or about something they don’t think is important enough.
It does take a lot of knowledge and experience, though, so it’s better left to more experienced salespeople.
SNAP Selling
In the face of intense busyness for many buyers across industries, SNAP selling is all about making your service insanely easy to buy. You make dealing with you and understanding your service incredibly simple. You ensure what you’re selling really stands out and is obviously a great choice. You align your product with the buyer such that it’s an easy decision that speaks for itself on how it caters to their needs — and finally, you keep your approach focused on those needs.
Spin Selling
This method involves a question-based approach that starts with asking situational questions about your buyer. Then, you encourage the buyer to start talking about their problems, needs, and pains. The seller can then ask implicational questions that help get to the consequences of the problems and build real urgency.
Last, again, you’ll get the buyer talking. This time about the benefits of the solution and how much better things could be. The need-payoff questions help the buyer sell themselves the service.
Sandler Sales Methodology
The Sandler methodology is about convincing the prospect they have a problem. And the only solution to that problem is yours.
Through building rapport and using up-front contracts to always have the next step secured, you maintain control over the process. This helps give you opportunities to explain how your solution truly does answer their most pressing and important organizational needs.
Conception Selling
This is about the buyer purchasing the concept of a solution rather than a product or a service. It’s about getting information about their situation, giving information about your solution, and obtaining their commitment.
It’s about finding and filling needs more than it’s about having some set product and forcing it to fit.
MEDDIC Sales Methodology
MEDDIC stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion. It means understanding the economic impact, how it’s measured, and who’s got the profit and loss responsibility. Then it’s about understanding the buyer’s decision journey and who will be the internal champion you need to win the deal.
This works best when you’re dealing with a large organization with multiple buyers and a complex internal structure. When there’s only one or two internal decision makers? It’s not worth it.
NEAT Sales
Standing for Needs, Economic Impact, Access to Authority, and Timeline, NEAT is a streamlined approach often very applicable to fields like SaaS.
You understand which needs your solution deals with and the straight-up economic impact it will have. Then, you ask yourself what sort of deadline will force the decision, and who will be making it.
Target Account Selling
With Target Account Selling, you’re focusing on specific, high-value accounts that tightly match your customer profile.
Your approach should involve keeping on top of what’s happening with the account first and foremost, but you’ll also need to pay attention to the market and what your own competitors are doing.
Inbound Sales Methodology
Finally, there’s Inbound Sales. This is an extremely powerful technique that takes advantage of the reality now that many buyers will have conducted a large amount of their own research before ever speaking to a salesperson.
With this framework, you’re able to position your solution as the natural choice. Ideally, your customer will even already be familiar with your company!
However, to make effective use of Inbound Sales, you’ll also need to have a great Inbound Marketing department to align with.
But if you do? This coordinated approach can be the most important member of a B2B salesperson’s sales toolbox.
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Need to go deeper? There’s so much more to discuss about each and every one of these methods. They’re all effective in the right time and place — and they’re all effective executed appropriately.
But knowing how and when to apply each specific approach? That’s going to require more than one blog post!
That's why I'll be speaking on this very topic at the next Edmonton HubSpot User Group meeting in February. Sign up here and don't miss the remarkable answers!
Want more amazing answers? We’ve helped more than 60 B2B companies across Canada and the US succeed through smart marketing technology and great content. Here’s a recent case study that explains some of our methods. If you like what you see, why not connect with us and get started with better sales results?