As I have stated in a previous post, gap selling is not a new fancy sales method, but actually a comprehensive description of the different things good sales people often already do to close deals effectively. Therefore your sales approach might already be on the way to true gap selling - or maybe you are miles away from it.
Either way, here is a quick checklist to evaluate where your gaps (pun intended) are towards the desired future state of using an effective gap selling approach in your organisation.
Are you identifying a quantifiable gap you sell to?
Are your sales people experts in the industry they sell into and on the product they sell? Or do you constantly train them on those / pair them with experts?
Do you research a customer's business strategy, competitive environment, performance relevant to your product before you contact them?
Do you have a hypothesis for potential gaps before you contact each customer? Do you use this as entry, but then continue discovering?
Do you record customer's current performance relevant to your product as well as their targets in a quantitive way?
Are you individually quantifying the impact the gap closure has on each customer? Do you communicate it to your customer?
Do you have a stage where sales people should walk away from a prospect, not because of customer silence, but because the impact is too small?
Are you addressing your customer's cost of change?
Plenty of good deals fail because sales people do not consider what's called the cost of change. Change is always painful and that pain is elevated when there are additional, either factual or emotional, impact factors present.
Have you taken a critical look at your company's weaknesses through the eyes of your potential customers to identify any potential risks they could see?
Have you developed communication material to address these concerns? Are you considering them in your offer (e.g. testing periods)?
Are you actively checking during discovery for your customer's risk assessment and your customer's cost of change considerations?
Are you checking for any potential emotional or reputation attachment of decision stakeholders to the current solution?
Are you considering and supporting the transition process your customer has to go through to adopt your product (training, phase out, data transfer etc.)?
Are your sales processes ready?
Once you have made sure that your sales approach is set to identify clear quantifiable gaps and that you are addressing your customer's cost of change in your communication or your offer, you need to check whether your sales processes are ready to successfully close deals:
Do you have an adjustable list of all the small yes (micro-sales) you need from different stakeholders at your customer to close the sale?
Have you identified each of these stakeholders and what their individual gaps to close as well as their costs of change are?
Do you have clear actions on your side to bring your customer to each yes or do you leave it to the customer to get there?
Do you have a form of CRM (even a spreadsheet can do) to keep track of each customer in the cycle?
Is your sales force management process focused on actions?
In case you have ticked all boxes as "Yes", your sales force has the basics for gap selling in place. That means you either did this checklist to give yourself a pat on the back - and you deserve it! - or you have performance issues that or not based on the approach you take but the management of your sales force.
In any case, if you want to have an outside view on your readiness or if you feel you could use help to get ready for the challenge, feel free to contact me for a free initial consultation to see how I can help you create a truly quantifiable impact offering.
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