Lesson 6: Meaningful discovery
To further build a relationship and to discover how to guide your sales pitch, you’ll need to do some meaningful discovery through asking genuine questions. You want to discover the customer’s NWA so you can connect them to your FAB. What in the world does this mean? Let’s find out.
Connecting customers’ NWAs to your FABs
NWA refers to your customer’s needs, wants, and abilities. And, FAB refers to your features, advantages, and benefits. If you understand what a customer needs to have, what they want to have, and what they’re able to have (based on their time, budget, or other constraints), then you can show how the features you are selling and its advantages will benefit the customer. In line with understanding the customer’s abilities, this is a great time to determine if the customer is the main decision-maker for the sale, or if someone else needs to be present to finalize the decision.
PRO-TIP
To promote meaningful discovery, be intentionally curious. Ask open-ended questions to find information from your customer (e.g., why, how, or what questions). Ask close-ended questions to lead your customers down a specific path (e.g., yes or no questions).
Honest curiosity and intentional questioning helps you discover the things you need to know to effectively present your solution to a customer.
Checking for feedback
When presenting your solution after you’ve uncovered the customer’s wants and needs, it’s always a good practice to check for feedback. Checking for feedback is as simple as asking a question before you move on to presenting the close.
Think back to our example about a customer’s desire to garden because they valued their family’s traditions. Imagine you are selling a garden starter pack. You’ve built rapport and discovered the customer’s wants, needs, and abilities. As you prepare to move to the close, give a quick overview of the solution and check for feedback. Look at the example below to see how this conversation might go.
“Thank you for sharing your thoughts and memories about gardening. I know the perfect starter package to get this tradition started with your family.
The Produce 101 Starter Pack is going to give you all the material to build out an amazing garden: a pop up greenhouse, pre-fertilized soil, and all the seeds sorted into seasonal growth groups.
Before we move forward with talking about all the good stuff included in the starter pack, what questions do you have about what we’ve talked about?”
That last open-ended question gives the customer a chance to voice any objections or reluctance they may have before you get too far away from your conversation.
Sometimes if we wait to handle objections until the close it’s easy for a potential customer to use a “fake objection” like price because it is the most recent topic discussed. This way, if they have an objection it will most likely be product or service-related and you can overcome that in-the-moment. If they have no objections, GREAT, you can move on to a very assumptive close.
In the next lesson, we’ll cover best practices for handling the close and addressing any objections. Click to move forward when you’re ready!