Page 159 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

cold emailing plan using the HubSpot software, but allowing them to
purchase on those grounds would simply lead to a failed campaign and a bad
customer experience. It was better for the customer if we educated them on
the dangers of their strategy and redirected them toward a more successful
approach.

3. Challenges: The challenges associated with implementing the buyer's plan.
Does the company have the right staff in place to execute the plan? Does the
company have the budget necessary to execute the plan? Are there gaps in
software functionality and vendor capabilities that will hurt the plan?
Understanding the prospective buyer's challenges enabled us to understand
how we could most effectively help. If we genuinely felt we could help
overcome the challenges, all parties would be comfortable moving forward.
If there were challenges remaining that we couldn't address directly, we
could at least help find alternative solutions in the spirit of the relationship.

4. Timeline: The date by which the prospective buyer needs to achieve the goal.
How did the buyer come up with that date? What are the consequences of not
achieving the goal by that date? How can HubSpot's solution help accelerate
goal achievement, and how can we communicate that effectively to the
buyer?

The more the HubSpot sales leadership team discussed the GPCT qualifying
matrix, the more we liked it. We tested the new matrix against a number of sales
opportunities and found that it provided a much better guide for the salespeople
to navigate the buyer journey.

Most companies would roll out a change like this at their annual sales meeting.
“Let me introduce our new sales qualifying matrix. GPCT!” At the sales
meeting, the sales team would be exposed to the definition of GPCT. They
would learn how it could be applied to their opportunity pipeline. They would
likely attend a few hours of classroom-style training to integrate it into their
current process. Six months later, 20 percent of the team would still be using
GPCT. The rest of the team would have settled back into their old ways.

We took a different approach. Instead of announcing GPCT to the entire team,
we set up an experiment.

The goal of the experiment was to understand whether transitioning from BANT
to GPCT would improve the discovery stage of our sales process and, in turn,
increase lead-to-customer conversion rates, salesperson productivity, and
customer success. In the first phase of the experiment, we planned to teach