I’m sure you’ve heard the old English idiom, ‘the devil is in the details.’ Involved in any plan or scheme are often things that will take the most thought or time in the long term to smooth out. The same goes for criteria elicitation. Sometimes we need to get deeper than the surface answers we’re getting from our prospects. We need to explore the details and definitions of exactly what it is they want.
Criteria is the cornerstone of all sales. It is, to use a sports metaphor, like getting the ball down the alley each and every time. When we further define the criteria, it’s a strike dead on every time.
Here’s how definitions work.
I have students and clients from all walks of life, who come to see me for a myriad of reasons. I can have two people who come to a training for the same reason (on the surface). I can ask them both about their criteria and they’ll respond that what is being taught in the training is really important to them.
If you ask them, “Is this important to you? Do you really want to learn this?” Both of them will say yes. Yet each one has different deeper definitions for their criteria when we elicit it.
The first student might say that the training is important because they want to learn new skills and grow in their business. Your follow up is to ask what that means. They might say that they want to see a list of skills and they want to participate in exercises using the skills so they can learn them.
The second person when you ask them what’s important about what’s being taught in the training, they say, it’s to be recognized. That’s a completely different criteria. When you ask what that means, they might say, they want to have the class participants recognize their skill and they want to be recognized by the instructor as skilled.
These two students are both willing to come to the training, both willing to pay for the training, but if you think about it, despite the similarities in their criteria, they’ve got wildly different definitions of what a successful training looks like for them.
If you’ve ever taught in front of a group, you’ll know what I’m talking about. In any group you’re teaching, there will be a section of people that probably know your material and maybe reasonably well, or at least think they do. There will be a group of people that are thinking, wow, I’m really in the presence of a master who I’ve studied for years.
Another subsection and also a majority of the students are there for knowledge for its own sake and will gain their value simply from what you’re saying.
It is very important that you begin to understand that every time you think you know what someone wants, unless you ask the questions, you don’t know what they want. You’re not on target or on track and until you elicit both the criteria, the meaning, and the definition, you are missing the boat.
Knowing criteria is an awesome start. And if you want to bowl strike after strike, the key is to learn how to define their criteria.