The ADAPAC sales method makes it easy for a novice salesperson to memorize the key sales steps and quickly become effective.
- The stages
- Approach
- Discovery
- Abstract of the solution
- Proposal
- Benefits of the proposal
- Conclusion
- The approach concerns the first few minutes of the meeting: you need to introduce yourself, establish your credibility through your experience, and arouse your interviewer’s interest through what you can bring to the table. It’s also a good idea to lighten the mood with a general topic that brings you closer together, such as having gone to the same school, been involved in the same association or played the same sport.
- Discovery allows you to find out what’s on your customer’s mind, and what their objectives are. Your discovery must include not only technical discovery, but also the discovery of your customer’s psychological motivations. You can use the SONCAS or SEC method for this. Discovery is the most important phase of the sale, and should last around 70% of the overall duration of your process.
- Proposal priming allows you to sell the general idea of your proposal in order to gain general approval for your solution, which you can then detail in the next stage. The advantage is that it’s easier to sell a general idea, using a progression in the customer’s buying and awareness process. If your proposal doesn’t work, you can still easily change it to suit.
- The proposal allows you to detail your offer: the product, the packaging, the technical characteristics, and possibly the price. It’s a good idea to wait until the last moment before discussing the question of price, which can also be called investment or budget.
- The purpose of the sales pitch is to convince the customer to go ahead with the purchase, by presenting the specific advantages and benefits for your customer. To be effective, you need to present benefits that correspond to your customer’s psychological motivations, using CAP pou CAB techniques.
- The conclusion must lead the customer to make a decision in your favor. The worst thing is to make a good sale and not close, which could benefit a competitor – you’ve done the work and they reap the benefits. You must therefore try to close your process and obtain an agreement using a sales closing technique.
The ADAPAC sales method has the advantage of being simple to use for a novice salesperson, but lacks subtlety for experienced salespeople, who will prefer the SPIN or SOS methods.
Of course, for this method to be most effective, you need to use a good CRM in which you’ll put all the information you’ve obtained about your customer, so you can follow up effectively.
