How to Prescribe Your Product to Buyers

A breakdown of Prescriptive Selling, and how to use it to sell more.

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Good Morning! It’s National Loosen Up Lighten Up (LULU day for short). The perfect day to tell your prospect to lighten up a bit and hear out your sales pitch. Best case? You've got a meeting. Worst case? They hang up and never talk to you again. Fair gamble. 😎

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Prescribing Your Prospects a Solution

Salespeople are like the doctors of the business world. (At least the good ones).

Great sales reps find and diagnose problems, then prescribe solutions to solve those problems. They're diagnostic experts.

And when they know they can't help, they don't try to prescribe a solution that won't work. Instead, they refer the problem to someone who would be a better fit.

This is the basis for Prescriptive Selling.

And the best part is… we don’t have to go to medical school to use it.

What is Prescriptive Selling…?

Prescriptive selling is a proactive approach that helps customers navigate the buying journey.

Rather than using the same sales pitch for every prospect, prescriptive sellers understand their prospect’s exact problems so they can recommend the best solution.

Example: Imagine walking into an automotive shop and asking the sales rep what the best tires are. They could spend two hours walking you through all the specs and price points of every tire, but that doesn’t actually help you.

You want to understand what tire is the best for you and your car specifically.

The same goes for B2B buyers. There’s too much information freely available these days, and buyers don’t have the time to learn it all to diagnose themselves.

Using Prescriptive Selling…

The first step to successfully using prescriptive selling is mapping out and understanding your customer’s buying journey.

Because once you understand the buying journey, you can find the common obstacles, and help your buyers overcome them.

Here’s an example of a typical buyer journey:

Early Stage: Information Overload

Common Obstacles:

  • Too much information

  • Unable to distinguish meaningful from irrelevant details

  • Struggling to interpret conflicting competitor information

Your Role: Be a filter. Help them navigate the information landscape.

Middle Stage: Organizational Chaos

Common Obstacles:

  • Multiple stakeholders with different priorities

  • Competing internal criteria for purchasing

  • Misalignment on the need for change

Your Role: Create alignment. Help bridge internal gaps and bring all stakeholders into the buying process.

Late Stage: Decision Paralysis

Common Obstacles:

  • Overwhelmed by too many options to buy

  • Confusion from late-introduced alternatives

  • Unclear implementation plans

Your Role: Provide clarity. Remove decision-making friction, and prescribe the solution that’s best for them.

What Prescriptive Sales does…

The entire objective of prescriptive sales is to make the purchasing process easier for your prospects. An HBR article found that suppliers who make buying easy are 62% more likely to win the sale… and also contribute to actual quality of the deal.

Traditional sales approaches assume buyers know exactly what they want. But the truth is… they don't.

Buyers are confused and overloaded with more information than ever.

They don't need more information. They need guidance.

So, sellers who ‘prescribe’ solutions win the trust and business of uncertain buyers.

Do you use a prescriptive sales approach?

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