Trigger Based Selling

Strenghtening your sales process with trigger based selling

For many businesses sales activity is driven by the marketing plan. This seems sensible, of course, as the sales team will be capitalising on the marketing activities that communicate the businesses’ products and services.

However, what this approach can miss is key information about the customers or prospects which makes them more or less likely to buy at certain times. For example, when a business is moving office it may need specialised telecoms and IT services to keep operating with the minimum of disruption.  If your business supplies these services you would want to know about this planned move.  You would need to think about how you collect this sort of information and how you build it into your sales process to ‘trigger’ your sales activity.

Other triggers within the target business would include:

-        Change of senior personnel

-       Acquisitions or mergers

-       Demise of  your target customers’ competitors

-       Legislation which affects your target customer, e.g health and safety

-       Relocation

-       Business expansion

According to Craig Elias in his book, SHIFT! Harness the Trigger Events that Turn Prospects into Customers’, selling based on triggers can make salespeople five times more likely to make a sale.

Grainne Ridge