Training the SDR Through the Three Stages of Needs Discovery

When to progress the SDR through the stages of discovery

Asking questions to identify pain and then positioning your product to heel or help is the single most important aspect of prospecting. This article does not describe the skills or techniques to make better conversations. It addresses the mental ability when learning new skills and when to progress to the next stage.

Essentially there are three stages that the sales consultant goes through in order to learn how to identify the needs of the prospect:

1. Presentation Stage (induction): The new sales consultant with limited technical knowledge presents the solution simply in a script format. Induction.
2. Investigation Stage (three months plus): The sales consultant starts to ask open-ended questions, two-sided questions (walk me through…) and TED Questions (Tell, Explain, Describe). The sales consultant has a good technical knowledge and can hold a conversation with the prospect.
3. Differentiation Stage (nine months plus): The senior sales consultant is customer obsessed, he/she adapts quickly in conversation, responds effectively to the needs of our prospects, aligns their solutions to the prospects needs, differentiates from their competitors and can define their solutions to the prospect technically. The sales trainer recognises that performance is 80-90% psychological (positive mental attitude) and 10-20% tactical (maintaining your core techniques, skills and product knowledge).

Sales trainers must understand the learning capabilities of the sales consultant at different stages of their development. If we try and teach open ended and TED questions at Induction, we will overload the new sales consultant which could harm their development.

Sales trainers should use a methodical approach so that the sales consultants can practice and hone their skills before progressing onto the investigation and then the differentiation stage. To do this we must understand Skill Acquisition.

Skill Acquisition – The Journey to Expertise

Motor Learning Skill Acquisition (Fitts and Posner 1967). There are three stages of Motor Skill Acquisition:

Cognitive Stage.

The learner is trying to work out what to do. They are thinking about the task. Often you will see that they are slow, a bit awkward, and you can almost hear the brain ticking over. They often do quite inappropriate things. The cognitive stage is characterized as having large gains in performance and inconsistent performance. During this stage instruction, guidance, slow-role plays, call analysis, augmented feedback, and other coaching techniques are highly effective.

Associative Stage.

The learner knows what to do but needs practice to do it consistently and efficiently. At this stage the sales person knows what they are doing, but still need to think about it a little and may be a little uncoordinated. The associative stage is characterized as:

• much less verbal information,
• smaller gains in performance, conscious performance, adjustment making, awkward and disjointed conversations, and taking a long time to complete calls.
• During this stage a 70-20-10 model of learning is highly effective. This means that sales consultants obtain 70 percent of their knowledge from job-related experiences (prospecting), 20 percent from interactions with others (learning from peers), and 10 percent from formal educational events (sales training).

Autonomous Stage.

The skill is learnt and becomes automatic. Now we see this fluid conversation, seeming to require little effort and little thought. Performance seems unconscious, automatic and smooth. During this stage one-one call coaching is highly effective.

So, when do we move from the Presentation Stage to the Investigatory Stage? When do we move the sales consultant off the script and onto the meatier questions?

We can only do this after they have mastered the script in the Autonomous Stage! If we move them too quickly, we run the risk of Sales consultants with poor sales structure. Once we are happy that the sales consultants script performance is:

• Unconscious (they don’t need the script in front of them),
• Automatic (moves comfortably between the stages of the script) and
• Smooth (no gaps, sentence fillers and mistakes),

Then we can start stage two of their development – Teaching questioning skills and responding better to the answers.