How to Build Buyer Decision Criteria

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What a f-ing week….

I had 3 days of on-site training in a row, starting in NY on Monday, Austin on Tuesday, and San Fran on Wednesday. 

It was tight but doable if there were no delays or cancellations, which, of course, there were.  

My flight from Boston to New York was cancelled, so I had to get a car service at midnight on Sunday to drive me 3.5 hours to New York. There, I got about 2 hours of sleep before training the next day.

Then, during the training in NY, I got an alert that my flight to Austin was cancelled, so I had to get another car service to Phili (2.5 hours) to barely catch a flight to Austin that got me in around 1am.

I slept for another couple of hours and trained all day in Austin. Thankfully, the flight to SF wasn’t cancelled or delayed, but it got me in around midnight again for another few hours of sleep before another full day of training.

Before COVID, this was a regular type of week for me, which is why I say that COVID really saved me personally from continuing to beat myself up like that every week. 

Now that I’m 48 years old, I realize my body isn’t exactly up for that kind of abuse anymore, so I’m planning for some “me time” this weekend in my hot tub, couch and bed.

In the meantime, I thought I would share a few things in this week’s newsletter that came up in the trainings.

TACTICAL TIPS: DECISION CRITERIA PRIORITIZED

SALES RESOURCES: MEETING EFFICIENCY SURVEY

SALES FROM THE STREETS: IRL… IYKYK

TACTICAL TIPS: DECISION CRITERIA, PRIORITIZED 

It’s crazy to me when I ask clients about the decision criteria they’re using to evaluate vendors, and they don’t have an answer, or if they do, it’s pretty vague and subjective.

For sales training evaluation, people usually say, “We’re looking for the best fit” or “someone who will work with us to tailor the content to our needs.”  

These are okay criteria to discuss, but how can you use them to make a true objective comparison between vendors?

Also, what about all the other components of sales training, like the trainer's personality fit, the reinforcement afterward, the specific KPIs you’re looking to impact, the industry relevance, and so much more? 

This vague decision criteria isn’t just an issue with me and my prospective clients looking for sales training; it’s with almost every client I work with and how their prospective customers do their evaluations.

As frustrating as this is, I think it’s an opportunity to help the client make a better decision and leverage a bit of a Challenger Sales approach.

Here’s what I do to try and help make the process more objective for the client and help them make a decision that typically puts me in a great position to win the deal.

I outline all the different criteria people should use when evaluating sales training providers.  It includes what I mentioned above plus more.

I also make sure to add things to the list that are not exactly favorable for me and my training like: 1) Looking for a complete methodology, 2) Pricing/Cost, 3) Supporting Technology for tracking, etc. 

My list is usually around 10 items.

Then, when I ask the client about their decision criteria, and they give me a vague answer, I pull up the list and share with them how other clients I work with tend to evaluate vendors with these criteria.  

I ask them to rank the items in terms of priorities based on what is most important to them versus what is least important to them.

As a side note, if they put “price/cost” as the #1 criterion, I address it right there and say something like, “If price is seriously your #1 criterion, then we can make this conversation pretty short. I’m not the CHEAPEST solution, nor do I ever want to be.”

After the meeting, I send them a Summary Email and include the prioritized criteria and ask them to confirm.  

I confirm the criteria with everyone else I meet throughout the sales process to ensure everyone is on the same page. If they are not, I try to get them together to ensure they are.

I then build my proposal focusing on their top 3 criteria and highlighting how they align.

If they happen to object to pricing at the later stages of the process and it wasn’t one of the top 3 criteria, then I can use the “Reprioritization” approach to objection handling and say something like “I can appreciate that price is an issue but is it more important than those criteria we talked about?”

I’m not saying it’s a perfect way to handle objections or that it always works, but at least it gives you something to rely on. 

Try it out and let me know what you think. 

SALES RESOURCES:  MEETING EFFICIENCY SURVEY 

The “Decision Criteria - Prioritized” is part of my “Qualification” process but not “Discovery.”

There’s a big difference between Qualification and Discovery.

Qualification is about us. We ask questions to determine whether the client is a fit for our services so we can sell them something.

Discovery is about them.  It’s about understanding the client’s needs, pain points, priorities and how we might be able to help them solve those problems or achieve those goals. 

I want to get the Qualification stuff out of the way as quickly as possible so I can focus on what’s most important - the customer. 

That’s why I tend to send out a Meeting Efficiency Survey before my meetings with clients to try and get that stuff out of the way even before our call. 

Check out this post I did a while back that outlines how it works and gives you an example of one of my surveys.

You can do this by signing up for a SurveyMonkey or Typeform account (not sponsors).  

Full disclosure: I only get about a 20% response rate when I send this to the client before the meeting, but those meetings tend to go A LOT better than most. 

SALES FROM THE STREETS: IRL 

As I said in the intro, last week was a brutal week of travel and reminded me of why I don’t like to travel as much as I did before COVID.

However, the on-site (In Real Life—IRL) training was more than energizing and kept me going through all the pain and frustration.

There’s just nothing that can replace meeting with people in person. 

Relationship development, collaboration, side conversations, body language are all areas that can’t be replaced by a virtual environment.

I even got to have dinner with my good friend Richard Harris in San Francisco, whom I hadn’t seen in a while.

I think it’s important to try and meet people in person when you can, including customers, but it has to be valuable for both parties.

Some of the reps in the training this week asked me about going onsite to meet a client during the sales process. 

I told them it’s always a good thing for us to meet the client in person because it significantly helps with rapport development and more. 

The question we need to ask ourselves is - what’s in it for the customer?

What value do they get from us meeting them in person? 

If we can’t answer that question then I don’t think we should go onsite just to deliver donuts or whatever.

Think through the value from both ends, and if you can make a genuine case that they will get value from you being there, then do everything you can to meet them in person.

Relationships take far more effort to develop than a few virtual meetings and emails back and forth.

I'm not sure if you’ve heard, but my friend Jen Allen Knuth and I will be judging Clay’s experts next week.

They’re submitting their best Clay workflows, and we will decide which ones solve the biggest business problem.

If you haven’t seen Clay yet, I highly recommend checking them out. There aren’t very many things they can’t do.

ADDITIONAL WAYS YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR SALES GAME 

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• The industry-leading Make it Happen Monday Podcast where you’ll get insights and inspiration from some of the most interesting and influential people in the world of Sales and business. (this is where you’ll hear the Guy Kawasaki episode on May XYZ)

The JB Sales YouTube channel with practical tips that you can apply immediately to drive results along with interviews and content that is guaranteed to get you to think differently.