Do you still hold on to your sales framework? Why MEDDPICC, SPIN or BANT lull you into a false sense of security.

What’s in this article?

This article discusses the limitations of traditional sales frameworks like MEDDPICC, SPIN, and BANT. It argues that these frameworks, while providing a structured approach to sales, often overlook the human element in the process. Sales success hinges not only on meeting internal criteria but also on understanding the customer's psychological state. The article emphasizes that salespeople should focus on building trust and rapport with customers, addressing their needs, motivations, and goals. It suggests incorporating psychological understanding into the sales process, coaching sales teams to ask the right questions and actively demonstrate empathy. This approach can lead to a more effective and successful sales strategy.

Main background

If you work in sales, you’re probably familiar with this: The sales funnel

Yours might look exactly like the one shown above or somewhat similar. Each step usually represents different tasks and challenges for a salesperson. Within the pipeline, you usually define criteria which ought to be met to move your customer to the next stage in the pipeline. The defined criteria are in turn based on different methods known as BANT or MEDDIC, etc. The main goal is to get a better understanding, respectively a better probability for the likelihood of winning or losing a client.

This in turn helps the company, including the sales representatives themselves in forecasting.

So in the end, a pipeline is a process view of the aggregate of your internal tasks and rules, which helps you with forecasting. 

Doing what everyone else is doing

The problem is that these assumptions seldom work out in practice. Why? Because you try to steer your customer along your internal process. However, your process and criteria are arbitrary and do not necessarily match the way your customer works or operates.   

Moreover, the methods employed are also not something your customer is interested in. Fairly, they help you to have a guideline, a playbook, necessary data points, which are needed to give better estimates of whether a deal can and will be successful. 

Most of the time, people try to stick to the process and task level hoping that by following structures with clear criteria it will lead to success.

In reality, a lot depends on nuances – Especially in enterprise sales, these nuances are “humans”. Thus, success largely depends on not only fulfilling checklists but also on psychological mechanisms.

However, this view is seldom reflected in the overall approach. In each step on the process and task level, there is human interaction. 

You are writing an email to someone. You are holding a presentation to someone, etc. Thus, you need to get into the shoes of your customer, too!

The customer level or why we still mostly sell to human beings.

On the customer level, the person on the other side – just as you – has goals, aspirations, motivations, needs, feelings, etc.

They usually meet you (a stranger) for the first time and their job might depend on whether you’ll be able to help them or not. Conversely, they’ll decide whether they want to help you or not.

This is crucial, as it will influence if you can move a deal in your CRM.

A first step is to acknowledge the customer level and thus integrating it into your process. Even better, you put the customer level first and then map the customer to your process and not vice versa. This way, it’ll be easier to understand what drives them and why.

The psychological level in sales or how we make decisions

One level deeper on the customer level is the psychological level. What is meant by that is that even though your potential customer has realised that your offering helps them to solve their problems because you mentioned the right case-studies and has completed the task on their side (i.e., set-up a call with colleagues) continuing with you depends on whether you also are being perceived as someone who is able to execute (e.g., demonstrating competence) and are trustworthy (e.g., not jeopardising their reputation).

Imagine this: You are a salesperson, and your goal is to close a client so that you meet your quarterly goals. How do you feel? What would you do if you knew that disclosing this information to a client might help you to close the deal. And what about if you knew that the customer you’re selling to is not the ideal fit for your company, but it helps you to not be the person who scores lowest on the internal quota achievement overview.

The same view here applies to your customers. They are afraid of their image inside the company, they need to feel safe and trust you to give you relevant information.

How? 

That’s where psychology enters the room. You need to create positive impressions and build confidence as well as trust (and many more things). It helps you to build the interpersonal connection that you need in order to help your customer (aka the other person) to go along with you and let them disclose information that helps you to do your qualification step, which is part of your overall sales process.

Which “means”?

There are several ways to do it. For example, if someone is afraid that introducing a new product/software into the company could affect their image in a negative way, you could mitigate it with different means so that psychologically that person does not feel that way anymore.

For example, the person could try your product (e.g., demo access) or you show them the output quality (e.g., a report, etc.). Another way could be through sophisticated communication and professional language that demonstrates your knowledge and rigour.

In sum, there is an active demonstration part and a psychological impression part. The good news is that you can have control over both. However, bear in mind that “emotion beats cognition” – This does not mean that arguments (i.e., cognition) are irrelevant, rather it means that your impression can enhance or mitigate them. 

Bottom-line: understanding customers

If you understand the psychological aspects of your customer and put yourself in their shoes on how they work internally as well as their needs, motivations, and goals, it’s much easier to achieve what your company has set as a process.

The goal here is not to replace the process view aka the pipeline with the psychological view but rather to incorporate it. 

It would be ought to forecast deals on the question “Did we already build trust with our champion?”.

However, the consequence of that state inside your champion will determine if you will be able to push the deal to the next stage.

The good thing is that it’s in your hands and you can learn and coach yourself or employees to consider and incorporate the psychological elements together with your company-specific requirements.

For example, by coaching the right question tactics to get the information you need to qualify a potential client and then learning, which product or which solution is the best one fitting to their needs.

This can create trust by demonstrating that you understand the client’s needs and helping them to succeed. If you then present the solution in a positive framed and emotional way, it even amplifies the experience and mitigates negative feelings in your counterpart.

How to coach sales reps?

One way to coach exactly this approach is with AI coaching. You can mimic your customer journey and perspective, combine it with your company specifics (product specs, etc.), and address psychological aspects to move the deal to the next stage.

Interested in experiencing AI coaching? Let us tell you more: