In today’s competitive sales landscape, strategies must evolve alongside buyer behavior. Gap Selling—pioneered by Keenan—is gaining traction for its ability to uncover what truly motivates prospects: the gap between their current problems and desired future state. This article helps you assess whether Gap Selling aligns with your team’s approach, backed by real-world insights, case examples, and actionable steps to apply it effectively.
5 Key Takeaways:
- Process vs. Methodology Enlightenment: Discover the critical distinction between process and methodology in sales, revealing why Gap Selling transcends conventional sales tactics by addressing the ‘gap’ between the customer’s current and desired state.
- Gap Selling Demystified: Unpack the essence of Gap Selling, emphasizing its customer-centric focus that prioritizes understanding and addressing specific customer needs over selling a product or service.
- Strategic Framework Unveiled: Learn the intricacies of how Gap Selling works, including the identification of gaps, the crafting of tailored solutions, and the strategic dialogue that moves customers towards a purchase.
- Success Blueprint: Gain insights into the practical steps and mindset shifts required to excel in Gap Selling, highlighting the importance of research, active listening, and empathy in creating value for customers.
- Compatibility Assessment: Equip yourself with criteria to evaluate whether Gap Selling aligns with your organization’s sales culture, operational model, and long-term goals, ensuring a strategic fit that maximizes sales effectiveness.
Contents:
- What Is Gap Selling?
- How Gap Selling Works
- Gap Selling Example
- Achieving Success With Gap Selling
- Is Gap Selling Right for Your Organization?
- Gap Selling With Teamgate
- FAQs: Gap Selling
What Is Gap Selling?
Gap Selling zeroes in on understanding and clearly quantifying the gap between a customer’s current situation and their ideal outcome. Rather than emphasizing product features, it emphasizes identifying the core problems customers face, allowing for compelling, outcome-oriented pitches.
What Problems Does Gap Selling Address?
Many sales teams struggle because they pitch product features without truly understanding customer pain points. Gap Selling addresses this directly by focusing on customer problems first, leading to clearer value propositions, shorter sales cycles, and fewer unqualified leads.
Gap Selling Benefits
Gap selling works according to the way buyers think. Customers don’t buy on problems, they buy on the impact the problem is having on their goals and quality of life. Gap selling helps the buyer see how the root cause of the problem impacts their current state and what their ideal state could look like. In gap selling, the conversation rarely focuses on product features until the current state, the gap, and the future state are identified. That way, you sell based on the outcome—the value the customer receives from purchasing your product or service.
Here are the main benefits of gap selling:
- Sharper Qualification: Identifies valuable prospects quicker.
- Emotional Resonance: Builds stronger relationships through empathy.
- Value Justification: Clearly quantifies why your solution is worth the investment.
- Cross-Sell Potential: Reveals hidden opportunities within client challenges.
How Gap Selling Works
Gap selling focuses on three key areas: the current state, the future state, and the gap. Let’s explore further:
The Current State
Understand your prospect’s existing pain clearly. For instance, our SaaS sales team identified hidden inefficiencies causing three-month delays in revenue cycles. The customer’s current state consists of:
- Environment details: Basic customer details such as their physical location, product or service, target market, and business stakeholders.
- Type of problem: Addresses the type of problem the customer faces. Is it a technical problem? Is it a business problem?
- Impact: This factor considers how the problem affects the business. For example, if the problem costs money and how much.
- Root cause: The underlying issue that causes the problem.
- Emotion: This factor gets to the heart of what the buyer feels about the problem.
To uncover a problem’s root cause, you’ll need to ask a variety of questions.
Probing Questions
Probing questions are designed to encourage deep thought about a specific topic. For example:
- How would you describe the problem you’re facing?
- What is working and what isn’t in your company?
- What do you expect to achieve with new technology?
Provoking Questions
Challenge the customer’s current perspective on the problem. The goal is to get them thinking about the problem in a way they may not have previously. Examples include:
- Have you ever considered […]?
- What do you think about […]?
Validating Questions
Closed-ended questions to validate what you know about the customer or problem based on your discovery. For example:
- If I understand correctly…
- Just to confirm…
- Do you mean…
The Future State
Future state discussions revolve around the ideal outcome. This involves understanding what the prospect’s company would look like if they solve the problem, as well as understanding why it is important to them. The goal is to paint a vivid picture of your customer’s ideal situation.
- New physical: What new environment do they want to build?
- Problems: What is the current problem? What long-term problems do they foresee?
- Desired outcomes: What is their ultimate goal or expected outcome?
- Desired emotions: How will the solution make them feel?
- Potential solutions: Have they researched solutions?
The Gap
The gap represents the distance between the current and future state of the customer’s environment. Knowing the buyer’s goals, challenges, and decision criteria is important to influence the deal or create urgency for action. When exposing gaps, it’s also essential to quantify their impact. Showing the impact creates a more compelling narrative that plays to the prospect’s emotions. Lead conversion is almost effortless when you use this process.
Gap Selling Example
The first step for a sales rep is to gather as much information as possible. If the product is a cloud-based accounting system, one possible discovery question would be, “How would you describe the problem you’re facing?”.
The prospect might describe their problem as an inability to keep up with and identify all the various accounting fraud schemes. Digging deeper shows that the prospect’s company only catches about half of all fraudulent transactions. Further discovery reveals the problem cost the company $5M last quarter. As a result, the prospect is in a state of fear and stress. Ultimately, it is determined the company’s inefficient manual processes are too slow to catch fraudulent transactions.
The sales rep could then present their solution to the problem. Specifically, their solution uses artificial intelligence algorithms that perform three-way matching every time a transaction gets entered. The sales rep would describe how the system alerts the appropriate company leaders if the transaction looks suspicious. For example, if the company also handles visual records or scanned documentation as part of verification, integrating an AI generated image checker can help detect manipulated images or falsified invoices. That way, the prospect’s company will detect issues earlier and avoid catastrophic financial losses.
Achieving Success With Gap Selling
Successful implementation demands in-depth research, domain expertise, and the ability to empathetically diagnose customer pain points.
Tips for Preparation:
- Conduct thorough industry trend research.
- Use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to deeply understand your prospects.
- Implement a weekly team challenge: Share successful “gap reveal” stories in brief, focused meetings.
Is Gap Selling Right for Your Organization?
A strong sales methodology is essential to a successful sales process. Aligning the methodology with your sales process makes your reps more efficient. When deciding on a sales process, use your product and corporate culture as a guide.
Sales Process vs Sales Methodology
A sales process is a set of repeatable steps that guide sales reps toward closing a deal. The typical sales process involves several steps, including prospecting, preparation, approach, presentation, handling objections, and closing.
A sales methodology is the model for how to execute the process. A sales methodology maps to specific stages of the process. The model you adopt will depend on your organization’s process, culture, and values and may change or evolve as your company grows.
Gap Selling vs Solution Selling
The key difference between gap selling and solution selling is the focus. Solution selling focuses on the need, whereas gap selling focuses on the problem. Although the concepts seem the same, the difference is subtle. In a solution-based approach, the seller looks for a need that’s causing pain. The seller then identifies how their product meets that need in comparison to others. This approach overlooks the root of the pain. Sellers using this method rely on the perception of a need rather than the actual problem. And because of that, they risk selling a product that does not meet expectations. Solution selling is best for highly customized products or services.
Gap Selling vs Customer-Centric Selling or Challenger Sales
Gap selling is similar to customer-centric selling or challenger sales in that it focuses on identifying problems and solutions that will deliver the most value. However, gap selling takes a different approach. The gap process is collaborative and empathetic. With this approach, sales reps remain in discovery mode through the entire sales process. Reps are always looking for new ways to deliver value. Challenger sales help sales reps build trust and differentiate their offerings from competitors by controlling the conversation. It is most effective in B2B sales environments where the rep can influence the discussion to lead the customer to the benefits of the rep’s product or service.
Gap Selling vs S.P.I.N
S.P.I.N. is an acronym for Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff. This approach uses questions that focus on these four areas. This methodology is all about sales reps building rapport with their buyers and understanding their challenges.
- Situation questions help define the state of things.
- Problem questions get to the heart of the issue.
- Implication questions probe the prospect to consider the consequences of not fixing things.
- Need-payoff questions encourage prospects to consider how their environment would benefit from change.
The key difference between S.P.I.N. and gap selling is the focus and the level of detail collected. The gap method focuses heavily on identifying the gap between the problem and the solution.
S.P.I.N. selling helps salespeople create authentic relationships with their clients and add value. It’s best used when the prospect hasn’t identified their problem or isn’t fully aware of the implications.
When Is Gap Selling the Right Fit?
Gap selling works for any product. However, If your product is easy to understand and doesn’t take much effort to turn a lead into a prospect, gap selling isn’t for your team. If your organization has a complex product or service, taking a problem-centric approach is ideal. This is also true if your client is in a complex or heavily regulated industry.
Transitioning to Gap Selling: Unlearning Old Habits
Gap selling can be a tough transition for some sales teams. Getting them to unlearn old habits such as focusing on features or making assumptions about the problem may take time. The best way to get reps more comfortable is by giving them the right training and tools. Here are some skills your team may need to develop when starting your journey with this approach:
- Strong listening skills: Salespeople are trained to talk. However, they will need to adopt active listening skills to learn what matters to the customer.
- Problem-solving skills: Sales reps will need to move from product specs to see how the product solves a problem.
- Empathy: Emotions play a big role in purchasing decisions. Reps need to be able to understand those emotions to recommend the best solution.
- Inquisitive attitude: Sales reps will need to keep digging on each topic. This can be uncomfortable for some. However, doing so is critical to uncovering the root of the problem.
Gap Selling With Teamgate
Gap selling is a problem-centric sales process where sales reps work collaboratively with their leads to identify the gap between the current state and the ideal state. Closing this gap is the motivation for the buyer to purchase the product. This sales approach helps you build better relationships with customers, save time, and drive revenue.
Teamgate offers a head-start on the competition by providing you with the tools needed to accelerate your gap selling process. Our CRM platform gives you customizable tools such as lead management, sales pipeline management, call recording and more of your favourite integrations. Access notes from your initial discovery call, contact history and more all from one location. With customizable fields, tags, tasks and pipelines, you can create your own sales process to match the gap selling methodology. Plus, your Teamgate sales management CRM hands you the insights, reports, and forecasts you need to keep your pipeline flowing smoothly and compare the performance of different sales methodologies.
Reach out to us for a demo or sign up for a 14-day trial to see for yourself.
FAQs: Gap Selling
Q: What does Gap Selling mean?
A: Gap Selling is a sales strategy that focuses on identifying the ‘gap’ between where a customer is currently and where they want to be. It’s about understanding and solving the customer’s specific challenges, offering solutions that bridge that gap, rather than focusing solely on the product or service being sold.
Q: What are the steps to successfully implementing Gap Selling?
A: To implement Gap Selling successfully, you should:
- Keep a problem-centric mindset throughout the sales process.
- Ask targeted questions to uncover both factual and emotional aspects of the customer’s problem.
- Use CRM tools to track and organize customer data and insights.
- Demonstrate deep understanding of the customer’s industry.
- Focus on exposing and addressing the value gap perceived by the customer.
Q: What are the advantages of Gap Selling for a sales team?
A: Gap Selling offers several benefits for sales teams, including:
- Better alignment with customer needs, leading to more successful sales outcomes.
- Deeper customer relationships, as sales approaches are more consultative and solution-focused.
- Enhanced status as trusted advisors to their customers, rather than just vendors.
Q: In what ways do CRM tools support the Gap Selling process?
A: CRM tools are invaluable in Gap Selling as they:
- Enable efficient tracking and organization of customer interactions and data.
- Facilitate effective follow-up communications, ensuring no opportunities are missed.
- Provide insights into customer behaviors and preferences, helping tailor solutions more effectively to their needs.
