Prospects withholding details of pain

Brian Frawley

We have a new logo team of mostly young sellers. They are mostly new to Force Management and are improving. We are noticing a trend of prospects withholding hard numbers. An AE had a call yesterday with a COO of a small company (under 200 employees). The first TED question around the pain was answered a bit vaguely as usual. The AE asked a good follow up to try to get a better understanding of the impact and was told in a cordial way "we will determine the ROI not you. Just show me the tech and the price." The AE did the best he could for the rest of the call but we are in a pretty weak position. This is the first where the prospect was that direct but we have definitely been seeing prospects being more cagey around negative consequences, PBOs, etc. Any thoughts on combatting this?

Tim Caito

Brian - Short of digging into the details of this call, there are some general best practices for a customer reluctant to share impact info or engage. The first thing to remember is that most prospects have experienced a LOT of bad selling. Until we show them we are different, they will most likely see us as "another one of them". We've found the best way to do that is to keep the conversation focused on them. Your rep tried relative to impact and not surprisingly the prospect pushed back (early).

The good news is that they asked for something (demo and price). When they do that they have just given us a small amount of leverage. In that moment most ineffective sellers give those 2 things to the customer. Elite sellers say "I welcome the chance to show you our solution, but to make it most impactful to you I have just a couple of questions about your use case... or your environment... or the things/functionality you want to see. Without that info from you I'm not sure what you want to see in the demo and certainly can't give you a realistic price."

If they give you just a few answers, then you can ask a few simple follow up questions... "Why is that one of your top interests?" "Tell me how you do it now?" (TED questions). If they don't engage, we have to sometimes give the short demo, but ask a ton of discovery questions during it. Same end, just using the demo as a discovery call. I will hold firm on not giving a price yet... holding on to that leverage point til I get more perspective from them.

Sometimes getting to impact questions is something that needs to be earned. Great, insight provoking discovery questions focused on their use case and interests is perhaps the pathway to get them more willing to engage. If they won't we have to ask if this is a prospect we should be investing in. In other words, we have some rights in this discussion too. Hope this provides a few ideas.

Dave Davies

It sounds like the AE did everything possible to drive hard numbers as a set up shot for an ROI business case.  So, well done on that.  Typically, prospects don't share specific pain points because they don't yet fully trust the people they're working with, or don't yet see them as a business partner (vs. technical vendor).   Not the AE's fault, just where the state of the relationship is.  Given this, the adage "wherever you are, there you go" comes to mind.  Which means, give them what they want (demonstrate your capabilities), then earn the right to back-track into the ROI inputs.  Before just running the demo, though, the AE needs to quickly understand (and hopefully influence) the required capabilities so the demo is tailored, versus boilerplate.

Richard Tate

Good points on this, I would just add that there needs to be proper expectations and boundaries on the call. An email of the agenda for the call is something I and most sellers should do. AE's shouldn't shy away from pricing (I always give a range and start very high), but it's important not to be a robotic seller. Give bucket questions, act like they've been there before and know the status quo.

As the previous point mentioned, most buyers experience a lot of "bad" selling, the seller needs to know that they understand their world. The seller had no credibility pitching ROI in that instance.

Joern Wozny

Great posts here, awesome!
Perhaps another thing that can have a positive influence on the course of the conversation right from the start is to open the meeting with a framing. In other words, formulate the goal of the meeting in the introduction and ask the customer whether he agrees with it.
If the customer does not want to answer one or two questions openly during the meeting, you can remind them in a friendly manner that this is important in order to achieve the initially agreed objective of the meeting.
As people generally want to be consistent with commitments once they have made, this can lead to them providing more insights after all.