A shorter blog post today.
I would imagine you've had deals that stalled out or are currently stalled in your pipeline. You're still trying figure out what’s going on. What is the problem?
Or you lost a deal and there's that mystery, where did it go sideways? What happened here?
The Sandler Submarine is central to our selling system. It’s power to transform your entire sales career is there, but it can also be used a diagnostic tool.
It's can be used in a way to break apart what might not be working with either a current opportunity that's stalled or something that went bad in the past. If something went bad, and you were blindsided, you can use the submarine to figure out what happened. The past is only good for lessons. If we don’t learn from those lessons, we will continue to make the same mistakes in the future.
What I'd recommend you do is apply the Submarine.
As an example:
If you have something stalled in the pipeline, you'd say, ‘Okay, what is the problem?’
As the Submarine would point out, most of the times when something is stalled, it’s either that the pain has changed, or that you never really had enough pain to motivate them to move forward.
Or in the decision step, the cast of characters has changed, or something within the decision step has changed.
All kinds of things can change, but most often I found that by using the Submarine, it comes down to one of those two compartments. Once you diagnose that, you can really drill down to where in that step you need to bring back up pain, or budget, etc. How do you need to remind them of the pain? How do you go back and re-quantify it?
It all starts with the Submarine as a thinking tool, because that's really what it is. It's a construct to be able to plan, but also to strategize. When something goes bad and you didn't close the business, especially when you thought you were going to…. well, the Submarine's a great way to help you figure out what happened. My experience has been that the answer is always somewhere in the Submarine if you look hard enough.
Look at an opportunity now you have stalled or something you lost recently and apply the Submarine as a diagnostic tool so you can either reignite something, or you can learn your lessons and not make the same mistakes again.
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Check out some of my recent blog posts:
Dealing With Terms & Conditions As A Chicago Sales Professional
How To Get To The Right Decision Makers
Millennial's & Gen Z - What This Incredible Generation Means To You As A Sales Manager
The Magic Of The Pattern Interrupt For Chicago Sales Professionals
This One Tactic Can Change The Very Way You And Your Salespeople Sell
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