Even the best restaurant in town will find it hard to sell food to patrons who have just eaten. Every restaurant patron must eat, but not every restaurant patron must eat now. The same is true for your business. Every buyer in your sales territory may consider your offering a must have, but that does not mean they must have it now.

The most successful sales and customer-facing teams, use Buy Cycle Triggers and Hooks to improve their ability to identify and connect with buyers when they’re “hungry” — when they’re ready to engage in an active buying cycle. This ensures a higher quality and quantity of sales opportunities and accelerates the refresh rate of their sales pipelines.

• Buy Cycle Triggers represent the circumstances and events that provoke buyers to change.
• Buy Cycle Hooks represent the economic, strategic or personal impacts that provoke buyers to change now.

Why are the right triggers and hooks so effective at filling sales pipelines? Because they reflect the mindset of the buyers growth multipliers want to reach. Decision-makers are always looking at their environment to anticipate circumstances and events that may trigger change. And, they are constantly weighing the hooks or impacts of success, failure and doing nothing when prioritizing the timing of their responses.

When we’re prospecting, our job is to let decision-makers know the triggers we serve and hooks we deliver so when the time is right for them to buy, they know they can rely upon us.

Aligning Sales and Marketing

Marketing campaigns that leverage Buy Cycle Triggers and Hooks can deliver an enormous lift to the prospecting efforts of individual sales team members.

Salespeople have the ability to leverage 12 or more prospecting channels, depending on their industry (i.e. email, phone, referrals, etc.). Thoughtful marketing leaders can make sure each member of a sales team has the ability to leverage as many channels as possible, so they can prospect at scale.

In other words, your marketing team can help each salesperson make sure their outbound prospecting campaigns are always-on, to ensure they reach and maintain 100% coverage of their territory and/or named account list every month or quarter.

This is why joint lead generation and prospecting campaigns that leverage compelling triggers and hooks produce conversion rates that are 3x to 4x higher than traditional approaches.

With the proper mindset, skillset and toolset, sales and marketing teams can work together to accomplish far more than either can on their own.

The Right Triggers and Hooks

If you are a student of our Collecting WINS™ program, you are familiar with our concept of the Universal Buying Cycle™ and our focus on selling the way people buy. Triggers and hooks simply help you sell the way your customer’s buy, by connecting with decision-makers at the emotional beginning of their buying cycles.

The right triggers and hooks, therefore, deliver emotional answers to a decision-maker’s most important buying questions, “why change?” and “why now?”.

To understand which triggers and hooks are most compelling to your decision-maker, you must immerse yourself in understanding 1) the mindset or beliefs of that decision-maker, 2) the environment within which they operate, and 3) what is required for them to be successful.

The closer your triggers and hooks are to reflecting the buyer’s actual experience, the more powerful your messages will be, and the more interest decision-makers will have in speaking with you.