I was taught about ‘compelling events’ by a master sales practitioner called Tony Coppinger who had been IBM trained, although he was so good I suspect he taught their trainers a thing or two. I was reminded of the importance of compelling events again this week and of why they are so important.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a ‘compelling event’ is what makes a potential client buy. It is the driving force behind their decision-making process and can be a hard need such as “my tyres are illegal, I must get new ones” or soft such as “I need to be seen to be taking action”. Without one there won’t be a sale and if we have not identified one during the sales process we are not in control of the sales cycle and worse don’t know what to pitch.

In order to identify the compelling event we have to do some research which can be undertaken online via [for example] news stories to identify M&A, growth plans, redundancies etc., and also face to face using open questions (what, where, why, how, when etc.).

In the past week I have seen two sales approaches. One, utilised high volume calling to ‘pitch’ services at companies until they found someone looking to buy. The other used research to identify a compelling event and then pitch the relevant service against that need. There were a number of interesting learnings. Firstly, the call volume with the first approach was very high and the results very poor. I think the sales person achieved a 1 in 50 hit rate and that was just identifying potential. The second utilised far fewer calls, not least because of the time invested in research and the hit rate was [I think] 1 in 3.

Another learning was the general feeling of nervousness from the sales person and others around them in more senior positions. As the sales person switched to the research led approach the lack of calling activity was almost viewed as laziness. There was a big feeling that if ‘you’re not on the phone you are not selling’. There was similar nervousness from the sales person but when they got results they became convinced it was the better approach.

The process transformed them from a sales person without much knowledge about the company they were calling to someone who could have a proper conversation and identify genuine need.