Putting weight behind the need

Yes, this is a tenuous link to a cold call...

Reading a lot of sales blogs, a common piece of advice thrown around is think about what your prospective customer is getting from the call, rather than just what you're getting. It's very easy to go in with the objective of 'selling my product or service' but harder to put yourself in the shoes of the other person in the conversation. One thing it's safe to presume is that they won't start the call thinking 'you know what, I really fancy throwing some money at something today.'

Now of course, you can approach this one of two ways. A simple approach would be to call and ask the prospect what their pain is and what they're looking to improve on or what they need. But the problem with this approach is A) it's time consuming - and your prospect might not want to spend a whole load of time with you, and B) it can lead you down paths you weren't expecting. Yes, you can learn what they want but on the spot you've then got evaluate how your product or service best suits their need.

The second approach is to use a trigger event. This, to me at least, seems the far more productive approach. Before you start the conversation you know what the pain is because you've been alerted to it by the sales trigger. You've had time to prepare a reasonable proposal to fix it and, you're not taking up hours of your prospects time learning about them. What's more, you look on the ball and competent, which last time I checked goes down quite well during a sales pitch.

By using trigger events you can put yourself in the customer's shoes much easier meaning you can understand much more what they want from the call. It seems a no brainer to use them, especially when you no longer have to search for them...