Lesson 7 - Learn Your Prospect's Role

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Understanding your prospect’s role is critical to tailoring your message and building trust. In this lesson, we’ll teach you how to research a prospect’s responsibilities, goals, and challenges. Your assignment will involve picking a prospect at one of your target accounts and creating a quick profile summarizing their role and what you suspect they care about most. 

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to learn your prospect's profession. By that, I mean you're actually going to learn how to do their job at least a little bit. So when it comes to the role of a salesperson, you're going to hear the word consultative thrown around, a lot people are going to say you need to be consultative, you need to be a partner, you need to be a consultant. And a lot of people say that, but they don't actually know what that means. So let's dive into that for a second. When I'm thinking of someone as a consultative partner, what that means is they can help me to do my job more effectively. Forget the tools. Forget what you're trying to sell. Pretend that you what you're trying to sell does not exist at all. I want you to think about if they were to just call me up and say, I need you to help me do my job. Would you have any idea what to do or what to say or how to help them in any way with their workflows. If the answer is you wouldn't know how to do that, then they're not going to think of you as a consultative partner. Period you won't have the expertise. They will think of you as a salesperson. And for some types of sales, that's okay, but for more strategic, longer sales cycle, more partner driven sales, it's not and you really need to be able to step into the shoes of your customer to be consultative, and you need to be able to take that to a level where you can actually Help them understand how to do their job more effectively. So how do we do that? I'm not asking you to go get a degree in your prospects profession. I'm not asking you to go get an entry level job in that profession, but I am asking you to look up some basic kind of entry level training or courses or certifications that are related to that field. So for example, let's say that you are selling to product development teams, right? You're selling to engineers or product teams. You might get agile certified, right? You might get scrum certified so that you can better relate to those organizations. Let's say that you are selling to marketing teams or social media teams, maybe you look for a basic or junior level certification in that field. If you're selling to manufacturing teams, maybe you look for something like lean, right? So when you think about the prospects that you're selling, to ask yourself, Do I know anything about what they do? If not, I encourage you to look for a training course. You can find these online. You can find you can find workshops, you can find YouTube videos, but you need to take a training course, get an entry level certification, or at the very least read a book on the profession that you're selling to so that you can start to understand those day to day responsibilities, as if you were the prospect, I want this to be very solution agnostic. I don't want you to be thinking about your solution. Now, once you've completed the course or completed the book, then you can turn around and ask yourself, Okay, how has the knowledge I gained affected or improved my my understanding of how to sell to this role. So you might be asking yourself, like, okay, now I have a better understanding of the challenges, the priorities. How does this role align with the benefits of the product or service that I'm selling? Or maybe I learned something new that will help me improve the product or service that I'm selling, so that I can go to the product the product team, and say, Hey, based on the training that I've been doing in this role, this is what I've learned. So that is the goal. By the end of that training, you'll have a better understanding of what your prospects doing, what they're looking for, what their challenges are, your interactions will be more impactful. You'll feel way more comfortable talking about them. You'll understand the lingo, and this is just going to build on the previous work you've done, subscribing to their newsletters, lurking in their forums, doing informational interviews with them, right? You'll notice that these last few lessons have had a common theme around really diving in and understanding your prospect. I cannot stress it enough, because that is what's going to allow you to be a true consultative partner. All right. Short lesson now it's your turn. I want you to choose an entry level course related to your prospects role or. A book related to your prospects role, or a workshop related to what they do, or a certification related to what they do, and take it and finish it and study and be a student and actually put in some time. I'm not asking you to take a full eight week course here. I'm just asking for like, a one to two day thing, but you should really start to understand the terms and phrases that are used in these communities. Your study guide will walk you through this, and that's it for today's lesson. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time bye.