Are you struggling to close deals despite having great products or services? What if understanding your customer better could dramatically improve your sales success?
In Gap Selling, Keenan emphasizes how to know your customer’s true needs and motivations. His methodology focuses on three crucial goals: becoming an expert in your customer’s business, uncovering their genuine objectives, and identifying the root causes of their challenges.
Discover how to build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.
Discovering Your Customer’s Gap
According to Keenan, learning how to know your customer—the process of asking questions to learn about your prospective customer’s gap—is the most important part of the sales process. He encourages you to think of discovery not as a single stage that you complete once and are done with, but as an ongoing process that can continue throughout the sale, so long as you’re talking to your customer and getting to know more about them.
(Shortform note: Sales experts suggest that conducting deep research on your client may not be suited to every type of sale. Because the time and effort spent on research comes at the opportunity cost of potentially pursuing other leads and other sales activities, experts recommend approaches like Keenan’s for situations where the customer has an especially complex problem that requires a tailored solution, or if the salesperson has a wide range of products and services that serve a variety of functions.)
He provides three goals for understanding your customer’s gap during an effective discovery: become an expert in your customer’s business; reveal your customer’s true goals; and reveal underlying causes of your customer’s issue.
1) Become An Expert In Your Customer’s Business
Keenan argues that an effective salesperson must become an expert in their customer’s business. He advocates continuously asking “why” questions and following up to dig deeper into their business model, practices, and current situation. This will help you learn as much as you can about your customer’s gap.
(Shortform note: As a counterpoint, some experts caution against asking “why” questions, as these can sometimes come across as accusatory or presuming a correct solution. For example, if you say, “Why are you doing X instead of just doing Y?” this may sound like you think you know more about your client’s business than they do—and this perceived insult could shut down conversation. Instead, they recommend asking “what” and “how” questions, like “How do you achieve X?” or “What do you do about Y?”)
2) Reveal Your Customer’s True Goals
Keenan emphasizes the importance of understanding a customer’s underlying motivations when making a sale. Your customer may present a clear short-term goal, but that’s only part of the picture. To truly assess the gap and the value your solution can provide, ask questions about the company’s long-term goals as well, such as about why a particular short-term goal is important, and how it fits into the company’s broader strategy.
For example, a manufacturing company expresses interest in buying new inventory management software. On the surface, their goal seems straightforward: to streamline their stock control process. However, by digging deeper and asking strategic questions, you reveal that this goal is part of a larger initiative to reduce operational costs by 20% over the next three years, in preparation for expanding into new markets. A more comprehensive software package would serve their inventory management needs as well as their overall efficiency goal.
(Shortform note: According to sales experts, asking lots of probing questions about your client’s goals could backfire and come across as pushy or nosy if you haven’t first built trust with your client. To build trust, they recommend preparing productive questions ahead of discussions, being transparent about what your company can and can’t accomplish, and communicating your desire to collaborate and cooperate throughout. Sales experts also recommend building trust and rapport through active listening: Pay attention to the person speaking and maintain eye contact; summarize their statements in your own words; and express empathy for the problems they’re dealing with.)
3) Reveal the Underlying Causes of Your Customer’s Issue
Keenan suggests that it may not be enough to take your customer’s word at face value when they explain their issue. He encourages you to ask questions that may reveal the underlying causes. By addressing these causes, you can offer a more comprehensive and impactful solution. This not only benefits your customer, but increases the value of your offering and the potential size of the sale.
For example, a manufacturing company approaches a sales representative complaining of frequent production delays and seeking a more advanced scheduling system. By asking detailed questions, the sales representative discovers that the delays are due to a combination of factors: outdated machinery, inconsistent supplier deliveries, and high employee turnover. Instead of simply selling them a new scheduling system, the salesperson can now propose a broader holistic solution with products to address all of these issues.
| How to Identify Root Causes Business experts clarify how you might identify underlying causes, using root cause analysis (RCA). Here we’ll look at two different methods. First, some experts recommend that you start with the problem and work backward using a technique called “the five whys.” This method involves first clearly defining the problem, then asking “Why did this happen?” to identify the most obvious and direct cause. Then you ask “why?” again to identify the second direct cause behind the first, and repeat for five iterations until you uncover the deeper root cause of the problem. The biggest advantage of this method is its simplicity. You can often get to a root cause quickly without having to invest significant time and resources. However, the simplicity can also lead you to overlook contributing factors. Others recommend a method called the fishbone diagram (aka Ishikawa, or the cause-and-effect diagram). In this method you start with an event, but then identify potential contributing factors by thoroughly considering six possible areas: equipment, materials, techniques, natural forces, metrics, and labor power. This technique has the advantage of leaving no stone unturned, but it can take more time and resources to fully account for each of the six factors. |
