Your Conceptual Sales Territory

by Graham Denton

Most salespeople and marketing departments, according to Michael T. Bosworth, spend the bulk of energy looking in the wrong places.

In his book Solution Selling, Bosworth defines three levels of need that buyers may experience: latent need, pain, and vision of a solution. Most sales organizations, he says, concentrate on buyers in the second and third levels--those customers who know they have a problem and already are actively looking for a solution. Yet those levels contain only about 5 percent of the average customer territory. The bulk of everybody's "conceptual sales territory" is filled by customers who still are in the latent need stage. That's 95 percent of your potential business, routinely unattended.

It gets worse. Not only do the second and third levels represent a narrow slice of your overall potential but customers at these levels have, in most cases, already been heavily influenced by one of your competitors, and they are leaning emotionally, if not pragmatically, toward someone else's solution. You can turn these half-decided customers around "if you know what you are doing and are selling consciously," but this requires attentiveness to levels of need that most salespeople lack.

For most salespeople, talking with actively looking prospects is so comfortable that they delude themselves into thinking that they've got the inside track, when the reality in the buyer's mind may be very different. In this situation, "you are prospecting for buyers who already have decided to buy," and -- even worse -- "you are simply helping your competition close business."

Bosworth's solution is not simply to "broaden your territory," but to broaden it conceptually toward those prospects who haven't yet identified that they have a problem. Your prospecting, he says, should answer these questions: "How can I develop buyers in the 95 percent latent need area?" "How can I get buyers to initiate a buy cycle?" Taking those questions seriously up front will enable you to develop a vision with "latent need" prospects -- a vision of a solution that is biased toward your products or services.