6 Benefits From Incorporating C2MPE in Your Selling Efforts

You could say that the Philadelphia Eagles showed up for Super Bowl LIX with tremendous urgency to win.  You could also say that the Kanas City Chiefs made it clear that they lacked that same urgency.

While the single most important thing for salespeople to achieve in a discovery call is urgency, you can’t tell a prospect that they have urgency, you can’t manufacture urgency, and you can’t fake urgency.

Urgency arises from a combination of the following five factors which together, I call C²MPE:

1. Compelling reasons to buy (ie.: we could upset and potentially lose big customers)
2. Compelling reason to buy from you (ie.: you’re the only one who can do this on a timely basis)
3. Monetizing the compelling reason (ie.: Might cost us $250,000/month)
4. Personal impact (ie.: I could lose my job)
5. Emotional impact (ie.: I would be devastated)

When these four factors are in place you have a scenario where your prospect must buy.  The three alternatives are:

1. Nice to have and when it’s only nice to have, your opportunity will stall midway through the pipeline.  You’ll keep trying but it won’t close.
2. Motivated buyer – something they want and need, but you still fall short of urgency, leading to a very long sales cycle.
3. Lack of Interest – no money will be spent with you for your product/service.  This opportunity is disqualified before you ever get to the qualifying stage.

While urgency is the final achievement of Discovery, the only way to get there is through skilled listening and questioning skills.  Most salespeople have atrocious listening and questioning skills and often lack the situational awareness to recognize which questions to ask in the moment.  I’m not by any stretch of the imagination suggesting that salespeople have a list of 50 questions.  “50 questions” is for amateurs, won’t help you, and should be avoided at all costs.  You should know where you need to end up and have a conversation, with give and take, that will get you there.

Lawyers never ask a question to which they don’t know the answer.  Salespeople should follow suit.  I recreated the following trick which I saw in my X feed and it’s a great example of asking questions to which you already know the answers.

When you and/or your salespeople improve in the area of listening and asking questions, you’ll realize the following six benefits:

1. Shorter sales cycle
2. Much higher win rate
3. Increase in average deal size
4. Increase in margin
5. Reduction in unqualified proposals and quotes
6. More accurate forecasts

All of this depends on your ability to take a consultative approach and develop your ability to actively listen and ask good, tough, timely questions. Only 15% of all salespeople possess the Consultative Seller competency as a strength.  Do you need help with better listening and questioning skills?  Request help from the masters!

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