The opportunity to hear from Grove City College’s Football coach Andrew Didonato was beneficial in developing my understanding of sales, especially non-sales selling. Coach DiDonato walked us through a sales funnel that helps to visualize an effective sales process. The whole lecture was packed with simple, yet mind-blowing tactics to sell effectively. The funnel had the following pieces 1a. Pre-Call Analysis 1b. Need analysis 2. Need Awareness 3. Need Solution 4. Need Satisfaction. Although each aspect of this funnel had some amazing things to learn about, what was most intriguing to me was Need Analysis and Need Satisfaction.
For the need satisfaction piece of the funnel, Coach DiDonato showed us that general open-ended questions were required for this piece. This is the most crucial part of the sales funnel, here the salesman uses these general open-ended questions to learn about the customers’ needs and pains. Once the salesman knows these things, they can more effectively match one of their products to the need of the customer. Coach DiDonato had some of us in the classroom attempt to ask these types of questions, they were much more difficult than we thought and showed us that our biases can easily interfere.
Need Satisfaction was the last piece of the sales funnel, here the salesman simply asks for the business. This was so simple, yet, Coach DiDonato said that many sales opportunities fail because they do not ask. As we are moving people, we can’t get so focused on everything building up to the sale that we don’t ask the customer to move.
One final piece that made the whole lecture so significant was how he briefly touched on the effectiveness of this funnel and sharing the Gospel. Asking questions that help reveal pains and needs are very effective in sharing the one person that is the one true solution.
Although it seems to counter what comes to our minds when we think of sales, questions are the best tool for getting at the core of a customer’s issues and pains they can help salesmen to understand how their product will help, to ask is to sell.
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