Winning a Reference Customer
This post is not a Sales 101. Instead, it looks at how to approach the prospective customers resistance to buying from a new market entrant.
Winning your first three reference customers in a new market is hard work. You will face more resistance from your prospects than you do in your home market. As you hold meetings with your prospects you will gain more intelligence as to what their objections are and like all professional sellers you will have an internal discussion after each meeting to review how it went and what you have learnt.
As well as the objections that are directly raised by the customer you also need to look for where there is an unspoken issue that leads to a reluctance to proceed. To create the change from prospect to customer you will need to overcome both of these. A useful technique is to categorize the objections and resistance into Barriers, Hurdles and Gaps.
Barriers are those things you can’t change and if the prospect is not willing to remove that objection then there will not be a sale. An example of this could be a company policy to only use certain types of technology. You are not going to port your software to another technology for one customer unless the customer changes policy you cannot advance the sale.
Hurdles are things you can do something about. An example here may be the customer wants confirmation that your software can transfer data to an application that you have not interfaced with before. Here you can carry out a proof of concept to demonstrate compliance.
There are two key points to make at this point. It is always worth double checking that a barrier isn’t a hurdle that you could get round. Secondly, just because you can overcome a hurdle doesn’t mean you should. Altering your offer just for one customer may not be best for your business. However, if you are finding the same hurdle in a number of your meetings then you need to consider whether you have the right offer-to-market fit.
The third category of resistance are the gaps. Things you did not know were required prior to the meeting and that you need to provide to the prospect. An example of this could be a local government opportunity where the prospect tells you that they buy through a particular purchasing consortium and you are not yet in that catalogue. Gaps are things that you can fill in before moving the sales process along.
The categories are summarized in the graphic from Giant, below.
