Embrace Trigger Event Selling to Win More B2B Deals
I’ve been reading and hearing a lot recently about using sales triggers to find new customers. Until I really took the time to dig into Trigger Event Selling, I thought it was just a new sales fad that would lead to yet another sales training book. I was wrong.
What is Trigger Event Selling?
The best description of trigger event selling I’ve seen is from Craig Elias at Shift Selling. Craig states that trigger selling is “getting in front of the right person at EXACTLY THE RIGHT TIME”. The process usually involves automated tools that scour the internet for fresh news about changes at prospective client companies.
For example, a new merger or a change in law for a particular industry both represent events that may present you with opportunity. If you actively “listen” for those events using internet tools you can be the first to engage the potential customer in a serious sales conversation. All sales people know that being the first to engage a new prospect gives you a significant advantage to define the opportunity in your favor.
Triggers for Outbound Selling
Most trigger selling experts talk about using this fresh business intelligence to engage new prospects using outbound methods. Once an event triggers an opportunity, the savvy sales person begins a quick research process using Google, InsideView, NetProspex, etc. to start building an action plan. That is usually followed by traditional outbound sales processes using email or cold/warm-calling to penetrate the opportunity.
Inbound Trigger Event Selling
The issue I have with only focusing on Outbound Trigger Event Selling is that there may be lots of opportunities that do not show up in the listening areas and therefore do not “trigger” notification. For example, the fact that a company might be planning a new IT project won’t necessarily hit the streets, or the social media “wires”. For that reason a VP of Sales should not overlook the power in inbound triggers, like EchoQuote.
What I’ve realized is that what we do at EchoQuote is Inbound Trigger Event Selling because we are, in fact, “getting in front of the right person at exactly the right time”. Most of the requests we process on behalf of our clients are new projects that are still in the research phase and the decision criteria has not been set. We find that serious customers that are planning new projects need to understand how a particular solution fits into their budget before they will spend time with a formal product investigation.
Nearly 90% of the leads we convert for our clients are in the discovery/analysis phase of their projects. If you couple early discovery with a top notch sales team you are going to win a lot more deals and early discovery is what Trigger Event Selling is all about.
If you haven’t dug into Craig’s Blog, you should. He has great insight into the sales process and is leading the charge for trigger event selling.
