Ultimate Guide to Information Gathering in Sales

You’ve heard of qualification frameworks. There are about a million of them. Since IBM developed BANT in the 1960s, requiring salespeople to qualify each lead by Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timeline, methodical approaches to lead qualification have proliferated.

There are the classic entrants, like BANT or SPIN, which was developed by Neil Rackham in the 1980s. There are frameworks with good names, like CHAMP, developed by Zorian Rotenberg. Frameworks with a theory of qualification but without a snazzy acronym, like Challenger Sales. And frameworks with terrible names, like FAINT (negative), MEDDIC (too long), GPCTBA/C&I (what are they even thinking), and ANUM (yes, you can pronounce it, but I’m an ex-professor of Latin, and let’s just say that doesn’t mean “year”). Many of these sales-lead qualification frameworks are studied and practiced as far afield as Finland and Korea.

All of these frameworks are designed to help salespeople qualify leads as they move through the funnel. The goal is to identify which prospects have a good chance of closing and becoming good customers, while weeding out prospects who are a poor fit for the product—thus avoiding a waste of time.

However, lead qualification is only one reason among many to gather information about a suspect, lead, prospect—even a client—in sales. In fact, a great sales professional is like a detective, constantly addicted to information gathering. Sales is a great profession for lifelong learners. It’s not tenable to simply say “yes, the lead is qualified, I will pass it along to the next stage in the funnel” or “no, the lead is not a good fit, sayonara.”

This is why at Maestro we like to talk not about a qualification framework, but about an information-gathering framework. Ours is called DRIVE because of the intrinsic relationship of information gathering to maintaining velocity throughout the sales cycle. This blog has already addressed the mechanics of asking effective questions in sales. Now we will lay out the topic areas that are most essential for those effective questions. Later posts this month will explore question trees (a best practice for strategizing the information gathering conversation) and meeting objections in sales.

WHAT IS DRIVE?

DRIVE is an acronym for the five areas of information that have the greatest effect on accelerating the sales cycle. Some of these will be familiar from other frameworks, but it is in the application that DRIVE proves unique.

I, at the heart of DRIVE, stands for Impact. The sales professional will focus on the transformative power of the sale for the prospect. Is there a need? Are they ready and willing to attempt to solve it? What will happen if they do not? Status quo is one of your greatest competitors.

After Impact, sales professionals are wise to bring in V, for Velocity. (Think of the IV bringing essential nutrients to your sale.) Velocity gets into the timeline for transformation. When does the solution need to be in place? Why is that date important? What will happen if the deadline is missed?

Putting it all together, DRIVE stands for

D Decision

R Resources

I Impact

V Velocity

E Expectations

Decision gets into the people involved in the sale. According to Gartner, the average complex B2B sale in 2019 involved 6 to 10 decision-makers. It is important to understand the complex B2B sales decision-making ecosystem as much as possible so as not to waste time.

Resources is not just about budget. In fact, in many complex technology sales to large enterprise organizations, money is the least of the obstacles. Rather, concerns about bandwidth—IT lift, training, and uptake—hamstring the sale.

Expectations is the most unique part of the DRIVE information-gathering conversation. The sales professional engages the prospect’s imagination and emotions, looking at the potential for success on the prospect’s organizational and personal goals that can come about as a result of the solution. At the same time, they work to fully envision any possible risks or roadblocks that may impede success. The only one of the above-cited competing qualification frameworks that touches on this sort of visioning exercise is GPCTBA/C&I, which is far too unwieldy to be a practical guide for the sales professional.

HOW TO APPLY DRIVE

DRIVE does not describe a series of questions which must be memorized and spat out in a particular order to each prospect like a checklist. If that was how sales worked, we would all have been replaced by a Google Form by now.

Instead, the DRIVE information-gathering conversation is an opportunity for the skilled sales professional to build rapport, synergy, and a unified set of objectives with the prospect. Shooting off a list of questions, unfazed by the answers received, does not build that alignment and shared mindset between the sales professional and the prospect.

Rather, the conversation needs to develop in real time. That does not mean you need to improvise completely from scratch! Rather, question trees allow the sales professional to use their personal sales experience to predict the most likely outcomes of their questions and prepare for the conversational directions those outcomes would lead to. (More on question trees next week.) Preparation is still essential.

DRIVE THROUGHOUT THE SALES CYCLE

The sales funnel seems to lead naturally to a single goal, like Luke Skywalker falling off the catwalk and out the bottom of Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back, or Wile E. Coyote zooming off a cliff in pursuit of the Roadrunner. But the traditional graphic depiction of the sales funnel is deceptive. Gravity doesn’t help; effort is essential at every stage in order to maintain momentum.

A more apt image would acknowledge the necessity of continually feeding the velocity of the sale. It’s not like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the mountain, at least not if you have done your job of finding prospects who will legitimately benefit from your product. It’s more like keeping your foot lightly on the gas pedal.

Part of that injection of energy into the sales process involves continuing to seek out information. It will often become clear that something from DRIVE was incompletely known or understood. For example, a decisionmaker may leave the organization or a change in funding or the competitive landscape may change the organizational goals. It’s smart to ask “has anything changed that I should hear about?” at the beginning of any meeting with your contact.

The other part involves continuing to apply the information already gained, for purposes other than lead qualification. One of the greatest examples of this involves using Velocity information to keep a deal on track. If the sales professional fully understands not only the target date for implementation, but also the reasons why that date is important, then they can refer to those reasons to activate a sense of urgency in the prospect or client.

For example, “you told us you wanted to have the new course management system in place on August 1st so it would be ready for the beginning of the semester. It’s now July and we are waiting on a signed contract. How can we get this over the line so we can help you meet your timeline?”

PUT IT IN DRIVE

The secret to maintaining momentum in sales is to constantly gather information, and DRIVE is an effective framework to guide that persistent learning attitude. So take your sales out of neutral.

Looking for a license to DRIVE? Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co to learn about our trainings.