Tactical Planning: The Three Phases of the Sales Call

by Miller Heiman

To manage each one of your sales calls so that your customers know that doing business with you is a mutually satisfying, win-win enterprise, you need to do tactical planning. By tactical planning, we mean something very specific. We mean consciously thinking through, in advance, how you are going to handle the three key phases of the sales call to link your product knowledge with your knowledge of your customer's needs to get a solid sales commitment.

In this diagram, the three pieces of the "pie" correspond to the three key phases of the sales call; the outer rim, labeled Superb Communication Process, stands for a dynamic tactical element that means:

• Maximum understanding between buyer and seller. Maximizing the quality and quantity of information flow between buyer and seller (two way flow).
• Maximizing win-win— minimizing the chance that someone loses.
• Maximizing the questioning, listening, and responding activity on the part of the seller; minimizing telling, describing, showing, demonstrating (at least in the opening stages of the interaction).
• Phase One of the sales call--Getting Information-- involves understanding what you need to know about your customer's current situation so you can effectively tell your story. In other words, it's finding out the client's reasons for being interested in doing business with you. Contrary to the given wisdom, this is where every good sales call begins.

Phase Two--Giving Information--involves describing and possibly demonstrating your product or service in relationship to the needs of the customer. In other words, it means giving him or her the information he or she needs to make a sound buying decision. It goes beyond the "features and benefits" of your product, and that effectively differentiates you from everybody else who is giving your prospects information.

Phase Three--Getting Commitment--means resolving any of the uncertainties that might prevent your potential client from buying, even though the fit between his needs and your solution is right. We don't mean "overcoming the customer's objections." We mean working with him so that the two of you share commitment to the selling process, at every step of the way.

One caution. When we speak of the three phases of the sales call, we don't mean you should think of them like the phases of the moon, coming in the same invariable sequence every time. There is no set order to these phases; we number them merely to make the distinction between them clear. Every sales call is a dynamic interaction between buyer and seller, and that means that you must be able to move freely from one phase to another at any time, not in response to some hypothetical, ideal sequence, but in response to what's actually happening in the call. Tactical planning enables you to do that. When you use this three-phase framework, you always know three things with precision at any given moment in the call: you understand exactly where you are, exactly where your customer is, and exactly what still needs to be done to move the sale toward a win-win conclusion.

From Conceptual Selling, by Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman with Tad Tuleja. © 1987 by Miller Heiman Inc. All rights reserved by permission of Warner Books, Inc.