Can Knowing Trigger Events Improve Your Sales Results?

Companies spend millions of dollars marketing and advertising, hoping they capture their clients’ hearts and minds early in the sales cycle. So many of your best clients are too busy to respond to a call or respond to an email. How can you use trigger events to help you become a better business development professional?

For my senior sales and business development leaders, I always recommend they spend more time understanding what is going on in their clients’ world. In the past, great sales professionals built great networks within their client organizations.

So how can we help you duplicate their network building efforts today? Using trigger events can help you get clients to return your call faster and easier than you can imagine.

Does having a great network in your clients ensure you win the business? You already know how much I believe in strong internal and external networks, but I think this gets you only 80% of the results you want. You must know when to call on a potential client or partner. Many successful sales today are driven off trigger events that make your clients open to new ideas and suggestions.

Once you begin using trigger selling you may never do sales the same way again.  I use several types of trigger events to help my clients grow faster. Today, we talk about the different kinds of triggers.  Next week I share several examples to help you get started.

The first type of trigger event is the external trigger event. This means something outside your client’s control is impacting the way your client does business, like a change in regulations, for example. It’s critical that you understand these events happen on a regular basis for your clients and they almost always get the attention of senior leadership.

Most key account professionals are very aware of the different ways external events impact their clients. Since many senior sales leaders are working with a smaller group of clients, it becomes easier to see what’s happening and then react to it. We will share several technologies to help your sales team know what’s going on with their clients and their markets in a later blog.

The second kind of trigger event is the internal trigger event.  There are many kinds of internal triggers that can help you win more business. These events are harder to know about, but can increase the speed of your sale significantly. Internal triggers are one of the reasons so many great sales teams keep on winning new business in their long term clients.

The challenge of the internal trigger events is your team must know how to move on information they receive when they are working on a client site. Successful internal trigger points may be more subtle and require people to decide what an event might mean to a client organization. Your people must begin to connect the dots for these trigger events. To leverage them your salesperson must also monitor the political impact of these internal events.

Internal triggers can also be used to impact other potential organizations. For example, a new CEO in your best client might mean that there is an opportunity to talk with their competitors about what they know about the new person. I’ve seen several key account mangers use an internal trigger to get contact with other organizations.

The final trigger event is one that is created by you and your sales team.  Your best sales professionals understand that by creating a trigger event in their clients, they can create new opportunities for their organizations to grow within their customers.

This trigger requires individuals to be able to tell a story that a client can see themselves in. The success of this strategy requires the sales professional to help connect the dots for their clients. If done properly, it can take relationships to a different level. If done incorrectly, it may take time to clean up the mess you created.

Where do all these trigger events take you? They provide you a great opportunity to develop a stronger, deeper relationship with clients. Trigger events provide you an opportunity to insert yourself into a client very quickly. Trigger events can also help you disrupt their incumbent supplier. How, you ask? I’ll show you next week.

Join us next week when we continue to apply the concept of trigger event based selling to your business development efforts. See you next week.