Gap selling is a powerful sales approach that focuses on identifying and bridging the gap between where your customer currently stands and where they aspire to be. In this blog post, we'll explore how understanding and addressing this gap can significantly boost your sales effectiveness.
Instead of pushing products or services, gap selling focuses on understanding the customer’s pain points and asking thoughtful questions for more insightful strategies.
Through problem-solving rather than product selling, you can also reduce sales cycles. Overall, this will increase customer satisfaction, which could then increase your sales in the long run. So, if you're looking for a fresh new way of making sales that’ll get you closer to your clients, we’ve gone over all you need to know about “gap selling.”
How Does Gap Selling Work?: An Overview
Keenan, CEO and writer of the best-selling book Gap Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes, defines gap selling as: breaking down discovery into current state plus future state, and that equals the gap, the difference between the two.
He says “Then you have a total understanding of what's going on. Where they are today? Where they want to go tomorrow? What the space in the middle is?”.
So, let’s identify what each of these stages means to understand where the buyer is within the sales process:
Current State
At the beginning of this process, your priority is to find out what problem the customer is currently facing. There are five factors you can take a look at to identify what question you can ask:
- Environment: This could be a customer’s physical location or what the target market is like.
- Problem: The issues or challenges a customer is facing
- Impact: What effect these problems are having on them
- Root cause: What are the reasons for these specific issues
- Emotion: How is the prospective or current client feeling about the situation
By considering these, a sales rep can get a full overview of where the client is stuck.
Future State
Since you’ve already figured out where the customers are, it’s time to understand how to guide them to where they want to be.
At this point, you have all you need to come up with a list of possible options to give your prospect. Think about how they envision your product or service evolving in the future. How will resolving the issue affect them?
As a salesperson, you can position yourself ( the product or service you’re selling) as a solution. Even though they already have a goal in mind, you can bridge the gap by helping them achieve their specific objective.
The Gap
The distance between your prospect's current situation and their desired state is referred to as the "gap.” Even Keenan mentions that the GAP is the space where you can turn problems into opportunities. This is where you may figure out what their needs are and offer your services as the solution, also known as "bridging the gap."
So, it’s important to understand what the buyer wants, their difficulties, and what deciding factors influence them. This is the point where you can start building your sales prospect list. It’s much easier to communicate the potential value of a problem-solving product or service once you have a comprehensive and clear picture of where clients are and where they could be.
Here’s an example of what the journey might look like for both sales reps and customers alike:
Starting Your “Gap Selling”: 5 Steps You Can Take
Now that you’re aware of what the process looks like, it’s time to understand the components of the sales strategy to implement it.
Build Your Problem Chart
As the name suggests, a problem identification chart is a reference you can go back to at any stage to see what the customer’s pain points are. Essentially, it lists the following factors:
- The initial challenges or problems your clients are facing
- What negative effects do certain problems have on your client's life
- What issues your product can resolve
During this discovery phase, sales reps can use this chart to prioritize and classify the issues they find. This can help guarantee that every member of the sales team is fully aware of the problems the customer is experiencing along with potential solutions.
Uncover their Problems
You should try to find out your prospects' problems in detail and how they will affect the future of their company. This can be done by posing thought-provoking questions such as: “What do you find to be challenging in this process?”, “So, x is the problem you’re facing, if I’ve heard right?” etc.
Your question should be making the prospect think about the bigger picture of how these problems affect them or their company. At this point, start digging deeply into your client’s surroundings as well. Don’t start selling just yet; instead, your focus should be on completely comprehending the challenges that your aspiring buyer has.
Remember: keep this going as a continuing conversation with your customer, as challenges may keep on changing over time. This can be through customer reviews, recurring surveys, or even conducting market research.
Assess the Problem’s Impact
As mentioned before, one of the most important aspects of gap selling is realizing the impact of any issue clients face. So, you’ll have to poke and prod your clients to gain insight. This will help you better communicate the value your product can provide to the buyer. You can take a look at the examples below for some inspiration:
Identify their Future State
When you have a firm grasp of the present situation and its implications, it’s time to move forward. So, ask your clients which objectives, hopes, and results they want to achieve, what their future vision is like, and more. Once their problems have been resolved, majority of customers are now keen to discuss their ideal scenario.
Along with the questions, don't forget to ask about what drove them to their goal and how they feel about it.
Understand the Decision-Making Process
If you want to drive your customers to make a purchase, it’s important to know what criteria they’re considering when doing so, who’s making the purchase, and what the internal purchasing process looks like. Once you have this information, it’ll be way easier to set up a proposal to guide them through your sales process.
“Close” the Gap
As discussed, the main objective of gap selling is to bring your customers from their current state to their future (desired) state.
So whether you’re using Facebook ads or providing a demo, you have to find ways to show that your product is the answer to their problem. You can use insights and data from other stages of the process to further solidify your position as well.
Pro Tip: Try not to overwhelm the customers with too many features. Not all will be relevant to them, so stick to those that work for them and slowly uncover them as time goes on.
At the end of the day, it’s how genuine you are in solving the issues at hand. However, there can be problems that arise when trying to implement a “gap selling” sales strategy.
Challenges Of Getting Started with Gap-Selling Techniques
It can be quite easy to overlook your customers when trying out a gap-selling technique. This could be due to a few reasons, such as:
- Assuming the customer's current state or the future state they wish to achieve.
- Getting too technical with product specifications and not how it can solve the customer’s issues
- Exaggerating your product or service features to boost sales, trust us: it’ll eventually backfire
- Not being empathetic or actively listening when it’s the customer’s turn
- Undermining the need to look at data and analytics regarding customer behavior
- Not setting up KPIs (key performance indicators) to track and optimize results
Apart from these, there could also be other ways you or your team could struggle with gap selling. However, remember that the gap selling process varies from company to company and customer to customer. So, find what works for you and your target market to come up with the best possible outcome.
Why Choose Gap Selling As Your New Sales Approach
In today’s competitive industry market, gap selling provides sales teams with several benefits, especially for those looking to address complicated client issues.
From when you start generating leads to completing the selling process, customer needs should be at the forefront of what you do. As gap-selling is more of a problem-centric sales approach, it drills down on what the buyer truly wants and needs. Salespeople can also focus their resources on more promising possibilities by quickly identifying deals that are unlikely to close.
As you know the buyer's past, present, and future, you can forecast your sales by understanding whether the client is more likely to convert as well. So, it drives everyone (customers and sales reps) alike to approach the sales process differently. Moreover, the process allows reps to give the buyer a highly personalized experience, which forges deeper connections with clients.
By using gap selling, you set yourself apart from others simply by understanding their business gaps and coming up with solutions by posing thoughtful questions. This builds on your credibility as well. So, gap-selling isn’t just beneficial for the customers, it also improves your bottom line!
