Architecting the buyer’s journey (Kyle Asay, VP of Sales @ Qualtrics)

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1. 3:19

   so much easier for rep to move on to the next planned question than to admit that they're confused. So I recommend all those times that you want to say that makes sense. Instead, say, thanks for helping me start to understand. Can we go a little bit deeper into and then call out the areas where you need a little bit more clarity? Beautiful. What's number two, Kyle? “Number two is differentiate by teaching in discovery. Your competitors are asking almost” all the exact same questions that you are. And so to your buyer, everybody sounds exactly the same. A great way to stand out is to teach your buyers something they already know. The goal should be that your buyer gets value from you even if they never purchased your product. If you're able to differentiate by how you sell, not just by what you sell, you'll have

   In Competitive differentiation

2. 3:43

   all the exact same questions that you are. And so to your buyer, everybody sounds exactly the same. A great way to stand out is to teach your buyers something they already know. The goal should be that your buyer gets value from you even if they never purchased your product. If you're able to differentiate by how you sell, not just by what you sell, you'll have “a competitive advantage. So my advice is spend just as much time researching what you can teach” your buyer as you spend preparing the questions you want to ask them. An example of this, if I was doing discovery for Qualtrics, selling the customer experience solution to a customer experience manager at a bank, I would say, hey, help me understand how you're currently measuring the digital experience. The reason why I ask that is a lot of the banks in your space,

   In Competitive differentiation

3. 17:40

   And so, when I'm going to the demo, I'm going to call out from the beginning, hey, I know you're looking at our competition, there's a lot of things that we do the same as them because it's just required functionality to execute a program like this. I want to start this conversation with the aspects of our solution that matter the most “for you personally, why they're different, and how they would benefit your company.” Then, I spend the bulk of the conversation on those features with the storyline of this is why this is different, why we built it, this is why it matters for you personally, and here's how it impacts your company. And then I'll spend the last 20% at the end kind of glossing over the required functionality

   In Feature-to-benefit translation

4. 20:59

   that those features can get them to this outcome. Our organization doesn't offer that because we took a different approach. Here's why we took that approach. Here's why customers like you prefer that approach. And here's why I'm confident that you would benefit from our approach. There's a “reason why we invested our differentiation here. And here's why it's going to be a win for you.” Like, that's fine. I don't need to offer feature parity to everybody. I just need to be better at tying our differentiators to what my customer wants personally and for the company than our opposing seller can do. And so let's say we've gotten to the end of the demo. And at this point,

   In Competitive differentiation

5. 21:05

   took a different approach. Here's why we took that approach. Here's why customers like you prefer that approach. And here's why I'm confident that you would benefit from our approach. There's a reason why we invested our differentiation here. And here's why it's going to be a win for you. “Like, that's fine. I don't need to offer feature parity to everybody. I just need to be better at” tying our differentiators to what my customer wants personally and for the company than our opposing seller can do. And so let's say we've gotten to the end of the demo. And at this point, what we've done is we've said, hey, we've told some stories. We validated a variety of the

   In Competitive differentiation

6. 21:51

   What often happens towards the end stage of the deal, whether it's at the demo of a transactional deal or proposal review for a complex deal, is that the buyer will say something like, hey, let me discuss internally and get back to you. And then the seller is like, okay, I know what to do here. When will you have those conversations? When should we meet again? “Which is a huge mistake, because even if we schedule that meeting, it never actually ends” up happening. Because when the buyer says that, what they're actually saying is, I'm not really sure what happens next in the deal. And then the seller ends up spending the next several weeks just following up, just checking in. And when a seller is saying just checking in, they're also saying, hey, I have no idea what's supposed to happen next. I'm hoping that the

   In Meeting commitment signals

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