Avatar Evolution: Close More Deals with These THREE Steps

We’ve all heard of an avatar. No, not the blue aliens made famous by James Cameron’s movie. You know, the sales avatar. The “magic” marketing tool that helps you get inside your customers’ heads and relate to them so you can sell more products and make bookoos of cash. 

It’s a tried and tested tool. And it works! Understanding the customer as a marketing professional allows you to create better campaigns, write more convincing copy, and of course, secure more sales. 

And the beauty of this tool is it’s totally translatable for technology sales reps. We can use the idea of a customer avatar when understanding our clients. Getting into their heads and imagining ourselves in their shoes. Of course, we’re not marketers, so we need to translate the tool a bit and make it work for us. 

Successfully implementing client avatars into your sales process will close more deals, solve more problems, lead to less stress and more success. 

This quarter on the blog, we’ll be exploring what I’m calling: Avatar Evolution. 

We’ll look at…

• How sales reps can use this marketing tool

• How and WHERE to research your client avatars

• Creating your own avatars

• Learning where to spend your time wisely by creating low priority avatars

• Questions to ask your avatar in the first meeting

• Collecting all the necessary avatars to close big deals quickly

Today, we begin with the 3-step process I use when getting to know a new client. When implemented correctly (and it takes practice), avatars are an extremely powerful tool.  

Step 1: Research

Experienced sales professionals focus on helping the client get a job done. Your job is to make your client’s job easier. But, in order to do this, you’ve got to understand what their job is. While rookies spend meetings asking unnecessary questions, experienced sales people ask deeper questions because they’ve done the research. 

Don’t start at square 1 when you walk into your first meeting with a new client. Instead, spend time before the initial meeting researching on your own and gaining qualitative data in order to have an intelligent conversation.

Do background research BEFORE a meeting so you’re not wasting time with irrelevant questions that you could have googled the answers to beforehand. 

Research allows you to be prepared for the meeting and use the client’s time wisely. When you arrive unprepared, you waste client time by focusing the meeting on what YOU need to know instead of what THEY need done. 

Step 2: Understanding Jobs to be Done

Once you have that qualitative data, you go into the meeting already understanding the basic needs of the client. From here, you can ask deeper questions and more implicating questions. 

In short, your goal is to understand the jobs to be done. 

What does a client need done? In what amount of time? Within what budget constraints? The first meeting can now be used to understand the specific problems your client faces and gather quantitative data. 

Selling in the tech world gets tricky because we’re often selling to 6-7 people. Walking this tightrope can be extremely difficult and complicated. We have to understand ALL their jobs and be able to speak to each decision maker individually because they have different needs. 

Doing initial research allows you to ask questions so you can understand their jobs (and needs!) more quickly. This is what moves deals forward. 

Step 3: Keep the Conversation Going

The final step in this process is to keep the conversation going. Always be learning more about your client, their needs, the other people involved in the decision-making process, and how you can work to solve the issues they face. 

This means you’ll tailor all communication to them according to their specific needs. Email headlines should grab their attention. Invite them to webinars that address their unique problems. Get on their calendar for follow-up meetings where you bring value to their workday. 

Gradually expand the conversation so you’ve got the right people in the room to approve next steps forward. 

No Room For Errors

But Keril, does this really work? Can’t I just wing it and use salesy jargon in all my meetings? 

Sure, you can. If you want to watch deals fizzle out regularly, burn out in 8 years, change careers, and start all over again at 45. Just use sales jargon and wing it. 

Or you could learn from each deal. Evaluate your processes. Approach things methodically. And work to solve client problems, instead of selling your product. 

Recently, I closed a deal with my team in my new position at a new company. My boss addressed the team in an email saying: Keril - your dogged determination and detailed approach left no room for errors. THIS IS THE GOAL! Create a methodology and repeatable process that leaves NO. ROOM. FOR. ERRORS.  

With experience, you begin to know what’s useful to discover in pre-meeting research, which questions yield the best answers during that initial meeting, and how to best follow up in order to keep a conversation going. 

Using a client avatar to help the sales process significantly speeds up the learning curve. Documenting along the way, referring to detailed notes throughout the process, and organizing those notes at the end of each deal means that you NEVER start from square one again. 

Next time, we’re looking at specific research methods that are quick, easy, and yield results! But if you’ve got a new client meeting before our next post, go ahead and download our Living Avatar template and put it to use. 

Looking for additional guidance to help bring this advice to life? We’ve got more resources available all the time. Join the email list and get access to This Sales Life’s FREE Living Avatars Spreadsheet. 

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Keywords

Sales | Sales Professional | Sales Skills | Sales Hacks | Avatar | Close Deals | Research | Organization | Sales Habits

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