Distinguishing Major and Minor Client Needs in Sales

If you don’t make this shift in your sales process, you’re going to close fewer deals, they’re going to take longer to close and you’re never really going to be sure what will close and what won’t…

You need to start implementing the “two-sale process”.

The two-sale process is where you prospect both the decision maker and the end user of your product.

You used to be able to get away with prospecting just one of them but as buyers are becoming less and less keen to put their careers on the line by implementing new products and services you now need to get multiple influencers within your accounts on board to get deals over the line.

This makes sense right?

You might even be doing this right now. The issue I’m seeing though is that sellers aren’t separating the wants and needs of their decision makers and end users. They are pitching them the same outcomes and that’s where their prospecting is falling apart.

When implementing the two-sale process I define your decision maker as the Major Ideal Customer Persona and your end user as the Minor Ideal Customer Persona.

Your Major and Minor ICPs operate on completely different time frames and so they are looking for dramatically different approaches for you to solve their problems with your product.

Major vs. Minor ICP

Your Major ICP already has their corporate goals and KPIs defined for the year before you ever engage with them. They’re thinking short to medium term. These goals have been defined and agreed with a board of directors or investors. Your messaging during the prospecting and closing stages of the sales process must cover these specific corporate targets. I’ll share how to do that in a minute.

Your Minor ICP on the other hand have a problem right now, this second, in the current moment. If you can’t help them understand how they’re going to benefit immediately during your prospecting and closing then they’re going to move onto the next priority in their list of 1,000 issues they’re facing

Value Propositions

When building out your value propositions for your specific ICP it’s important to understand the difference between what your Major ICP and Minor ICP desire.

Remember, to book a meeting and then close the deal all you need is to put the right message, in front of the right person at the right time.

Let’s focus on the specific message or value proposition here.

Your Major ICP is focused on the company, their market and the legislation.

Your Minor ICP is focused on the specific problems they’re facing day-to-day in their role.

To book a meeting with a Major ICP and then position your product to close a deal you have to consider their MISS goals:

• Money: Exceed agreed review forecasts.
• Improve: Increase company efficiency.
• Save: Cut costs.
• Safe: Stay well within legislation.

If the value of your product isn’t communicated within those terms, the Major ICP will never book a meeting or close a deal.

Your Minor ICP wants to look and feel good right now. That is it. Make them more effective so they look good internally or make their job easier so they feel better about coming to work each day.

The final thing to note before you implement the two sales process is that the two sets of value propositions, meetings, demos and closing processes are not run completely in parallel. They do overlap.

The Two Sale Split

We might start with two sets of meetings but over the course of the buying process they must start overlapping across multiple ICPs.

With our Major ICP start out future focused, discussing their MISS goals, opportunities and backing it up with numbers. Whilst with our Minor ICPs we’re focused on the present, looking at their pains, helping them change the status quo and dealing with emotions.

But towards the middle to the end of the buying process we must pull all of this together and get a more general consensus that the return on investment from implementing our product is worth it.

We need to get both the Major ICP and the Minor ICP to agree that the slight pain of implementing a new solution is going to be worth the pain reduction of the solution being implemented.

Once that agreement has been made, the deal is yours.

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