A guide to solution-selling

Tino Hwata

This is everything I wish I’d known, before I started, about doing the “sales” part of my role at a Pharma intelligence startup. It’s really hard to find great information about sales without a lot of junk, so I set out to write down as much as I could about it (whilst also respecting your time).

The biggest realisation I had to make to sell successfully was to realize that:

Your job is not to “sell”, your job is *lead qualification*. 

The “selling” process goes surprisingly smooth if you’ve qualified the lead correctly. Most pain is caused by sales professionals not doing this qualification process correctly (if at all), overselling or underselling their product, and then being surprised by the inevitable “no” or being ghosted by their (potential) client.

Once you’ve qualified somebody as a good fit for your product or service, selling to them and getting that “yes” is remarkably easy and seems to “just happen”.

Qualification is asking the correct set of questions to determine if the prospect is a good fit for your offering or not. Once your company has product-market fit, you will have a good sense of what these “qualification questions” are. In my case, these were questions such as: “how do you currently assess the impact pipeline therapies will have on recently approved drugs?”, “how do you identify where your drug sits in the treatment landscape and how that may change in the next 3-5 years”; these quickly enabled us to figure out how big the client/prospect was and whether they were the right fit for the solution we have on offer.

The #1 trick of doing a successful sales call is: be quiet.

You should aim to be talking for about 20% of the time, with your potential client talking about 80%. Sales is fundamentally about listening, not about talking.

Why is this true? Selling simply matching somebody with a certain problem finds a product that provides a solution at a compelling price-point, and goes away (usually) happy. To figure out if somebody has this problem and needs your “solution”, you need them to tell you about their business objectives and how they currently solve this problem.

Most prospects do not typically have a well-formed list of things they want out of a product — often they’re just curious or at best have a vague sense that something is wrong and have just heard of your solution— you need to get information from them so that you can help them figure out if your solution is the right fit (aka solves their pain point). Hence: they need to do most of the talking.

Sales Call Structure:

1. Introductions

2. Current business process

3. Main pain points & ideal solution

4. Positioning your “compelling” solution

5. Next steps & timeline

If you miss out any of these sections, it’s not a great sales call.

Pre-call research

Even 10 mins of prep makes a world of difference. Assuming you fully understand your solution and who it helps the most; LinkedIn is still the main method: search the person, find their title, Google them, Google their boss, try and construct a clear picture of the org chart. For example, if their title is “Global Head Medical Affairs” figure out if there is a “VP” level in the org (typically more senior) — you could try searching {company name} + “Medical” as an example and get everyone with the word “medical” in the title. 

You need a clear picture of how senior the ideal prospect is i.e. whether or not they have buying power and who they would need to convince (champions) to get the deal done.

Generally, the smaller the business, the more important it is to be talking to the CEO; the larger the business, the more you want to be talking to whoever specialises / is in charge of the sub-function you are targeting. 

The actual Call

1) Introductions

Very important.

First, always ask if it’s still a good time to speak — “we have X minutes scheduled to speak, is now still a good time to speak?”. Yes, the meeting was scheduled so it probably is, but there is a welcome element of asking permission again and getting someone’s consent here. It also shows respect for their time.

Second, once they’ve said yes, you want to:

• Briefly introduce yourself and your role at the company

  Set the expectations and be in control. Something like: “I’m going to run through: your current process for XYZ, issues you have with it, your ideal solution, and then run through next steps if that makes sense. Is there anything else that’d be important for you to run through?”

  Laying out the call like this signals that you’re competent and respectable and know what you’re doing. This “signalling effect” is important: companies are much more likely to buy from you if they believe the salesperson was competent - so help yourself from the start.
  

2) Current business process

If you do this part properly, then you know exactly what they do at the moment, whether they are a good fit for your solution, and whether they’re likely to convert into a client.

The key rule for this process is to ask open ended questions that get the prospect to describe in detail what they do right now.

So if you’re working for GoToMeeting, you want to ask something like “how do you currently do videoconferencing?” Or “how would somebody at your company currently take a video call?” You would then get them to expand on their responses using probing questions like “can you tell me a bit more about that?” and so on.

The success criterion for this phase is: by the end of it, you should be able to “play the movie” in your head of exactly how the relevant process you’re targeting looks.

If you’re selling GoToMeeting, you know exactly how they take remote video calls. If you’re selling DropBox, you know exactly how they share files with each other etc.

At this point, if the prospect clearly isn’t a good fit for your solution, be honest tell them, and not waste their time any further.

3) Main pain points & ideal solution

Once you’ve figured out their current process, you need to understand what’s broken.

The key questions include:

• What’s the biggest thing you want to fix about [tracking physician perceptions] at the moment? (-> Why that thing? etc.)

• So you’re obviously speaking with me, and we’re talking about [your drug to go market strategies] How come you chose to take this call today? 

• What’s important to you here? (If they’re really blunt, you can suggest. You can say something like “E.g. speed? Support for European countries? physician messaging? drug sales?”)
  
  This phase has been successful when you have clear conviction in the 1-3 things they care about most - this is your weapon.

4) Your solution

At this point, the prospect either clearly IS or clearly ISN’T the right fit for your solution. Moreover, they’ve given you a bunch of information if you’ve done their job right so far, so typically they’ll be expecting more information from you by this point, so you have “permission” to talk “delicate sales pitch” - although pitching is the wrong word.

The “pitch” part is easy: repeat the 1-3 things they truly care about back to them, and then explain how your solution meets those needs, with credible proof points.

• “So if I heard correctly, it sounds like you care about being able to directly ask medical thought leaders pressing questions in a timely manner as well as gain key issues right now — is that right?” → give them a chance to confirm

• Then go through each trait…

  • “You mentioned that you care about X. That’s actually a big focus of ours, [clear proof point].” For example — “you mentioned that you care about tracking patient segments in which physicians tend to change their prescribing habits as you don’t have time to track this regularly. We have physician directory of 3.5 million that we can run these projects on at monthly intervals and give you (in their own words) the key reasons physicians change their prescribing habits for certain patient segments so that you can tweak your messaging ensuring it resonates with not only thoughts leaders but the everyday physician .”

5) Next steps and timeline

Leave the call with definite next steps to the extent that you can. Get verbal consent for a follow up call in whatever timeframe makes sense — something like “would a follow-up chat next Friday work for you?”.

This is all very contextual at this point and depends on how they’re responding, some people are more non-committal at this stage and then you don’t want to be too pushy - either way, you’ll sense if you’ve done your job right. If you have and they’re a good fit then they’ll typically trust you, so they become your ally and give you the information on what they’re doing next, how long things take, etc.

6) Follow-up

Always follow up. No excuse.

Your follow-up should be short, and include a clear call to action for the agreed next steps. For example, if you decided a decision call made sense, you want something along the lines of “You mentioned a call next Friday afternoon would be good for a final decision and the next steps; I’ll send an invite for 3.30 and just let me know if you’d prefer a different time.”

Finally —follow up relentlessly. Prospects ghost even when the sales call went incredibly well, and it’s usually just because they’re busy, not because they hate you. Be shameless here — you want to get a clear “no” or a clear “yes” or a clear “I’m doing XYZ and it will take me X days, follow up next week”.

About me: I have been the highest performing (since) graduate at my company. I have helped to set up and train teams in London and New York and closed enterprise deals with many companies you’ve heard of (Novartis, Pfizer, Servier, GSK, Biogen, etc.) as well as biotechs. I am more of a generalist and do not consider myself a sales “expert”; treat this as “the core basics to get you decently good at sales”.

Wishing you and yours a healthy and prosperous week ahead,