​​​​Christopher Sopko

In order to uncover what will make one of the “evaluators” either accept or deny your solution a sales person needs to uncover each item that creates some sort of "pain" for each of the evaluators.  The more items creating "pain" means that they will have a bigger impact upon the evaluator both professionally and personally.  Demonstrating a clear solution that will help them eliminate their pain will increase the likelihood of winning the sale.

 

The best process for uncovering these items of pain is to follow a questioning process utilizing the SIIRP technique:

 

SIIRP  – Situation, Issues (current), Issues (future), Ramifications, Payback

 

Situation – These questions give you the basics of what is currently happening at the organization.  These questions uncover the who, what, when, where, and how about their operations. 

 

• How many items are you currently producing?

• How many people does it currently take to complete the task?

• How many will you need to produce in the future?

• Do you have a backlog?  How big is it?

 

Issues (current) – These questions get the customer talking about things within their organization or processes that they would like to fix.

 

• What is it about your current process that you would like to have fixed or changed?

• Do you have any on-going maintenance issues that you would like to discuss with me?

• How easy is it for your people to operate your current equipment?  Does it take too long to train new employees?

 

Issues (future) – These questions get the customer talking about things that may affect their organization or processes sometime in the near future.

 

• Are there things happening in your market that might affect you in the future if you do not address them now?

• Do you expect that sales of this product will increase in the next five years?  Can your facility handle the increased workload without bringing on additional staff?

• What impact will the governmental regulations that were just announced have on your business in the next 3-5 years.

 

Ramifications – These get to the real source of the issues.  In other words what impact or implications do your current and future situations have upon your organization?

 

• What specific impact would not modifying your process have upon your organization?  What cost will this add to your operations?

• How much would you be able to save if your maintenance costs could be cut in half?

• What benefit would there be to your organization if you could increase your production?

• What is the financial impact to the organization to train new employees?

 

Payback – This is where you match the features of your solution to fixing the situations causing their pain and show them a strong return on investment.

 

• Our solution will now allow you to increase your capacity by xx%.  From what you told me earlier this will mean an additional $xxx in revenue and $xxx in profit to your organization.

• Additionally, because we offer a 2 year warranty your maintenance costs will be non-existent during that timeframe saving your organization $xxx.   Additionally, based upon our historical trends you can expect that you will be able to reduce your overall maintenance costs by xx% from years 3-20. 

• As you can see, our systems are much easier to use and with our on-line training programs you will reduce the amount of valuable time needed on the manufacturing line to bring people up to speed.  Given that you have told me that you hire xx people per year you should see an annual savings of $xx in this area. 

• By implementing our solution and the savings we have identified, your ROI will be 1.8 years.