In a past life I worked in the world of IT sales and enjoyed it immensely, and made some good friends who where either customers or fellow colleagues.
Like most professional sales people I attended numerous sales training courses, seminars and events in order to “improve my game” and better understand how I could improve my chances of sales success, then I stumbled upon something very powerful that I still make use of nearly every day, and it’s a useful business tool even outside sales.
At the time I was working for DEC (Digital Equipments) largest European distributor and had been invited by a regional sales director to speak to his sales team. I did my pitch and I elected to stay for the rest of the day and it is perhaps one of the smartest business decisions I’ve ever made.
Each member of the sales team was asked to outline their major prospects over the coming months and give an overview of what they where working on.
One of the sales team was enthusing over a particular project prospect they had, and the sales director said, “this is all very good, but what is the impending event?” and at that moment I noticed that the prospect reporting sheets also had a box marked impending event.
The sales representative said that at this time he had not clearly identified the impending event because he was not close enough to the customer, so the sales director said “no impending event, more than likely – no sale this quarter.”
Over lunch all of this was explained to me, Impending events are really important things to understand, because this is what drives the customers buying cycle and indicates if the sale is likely to happen and when it is likely to happen.
In business most businesses put off making a decision until the last moment, because it is always wise to keep your options open, however if an impending event is identified, the seller can understand what the likely actions and timing of the customer might be.
For example a software licence might need to be renewed on a specific date, so if an alternative vendor wants to pitch he must do so in time for a transition to occur before the existing software must be renewed for X years. Another example maybe that your competitor is about to launch a new product that makes yours obsolete and you need to plan for a new product launch.
A printer may need to be aware of the dates of the major trade shows for his customers, because extra or new marketing collateral might be needed.
The closer you are to your customer the better you are likely to be given the information you need to identify the impending event and plan your marketing and sales activities accordingly.
Ironically the world of aviation has thousands of impending events every day as each aircraft rotates or lands.
Roy 7th April 2010
