Winning sales isn’t about being the market leader or offering the lowest price – it’s about how you position your solution to align with the prospect’s needs and priorities. Many salespeople lose deals because they let the prospect control the narrative, focusing on price or competing features instead of emphasizing the unique value their solution delivers.
Framing, the process of shaping how information is presented to a prospect, determines the success or failure of a deal. A well-drafted frame aligns the customer’s problem(s), potential outcomes, and emotional drivers with your solution. Let’s explore why framing matters, common mistakes to avoid, and strategies to create compelling frames that win deals.
Understanding the Prospect’s Context
Imagine your prospect is an upstart MMA promotion company. They want to position themselves as a steppingstone for fighters aiming to reach the UFC. Their goals include increasing fight awareness through content marketing and social media. However, they’re price-sensitive and slow to make decisions.
Your SaaS solution aligns perfectly with their needs. It can improve their ability to promote fights, attract talents, and build brand visibility – all critical for growth. Despite this, closing the deal remains uncertain.
Why? Because a seller’s success hinges on how you frame the solution. If you focus on price, you reinforce their hesitation. But, if you reframe the conversation around outcomes – like driving ticket sales, pay-per-view revenue, or talent acquisition – you shift their focus to the value you solution delivers.
This is a common sales challenge prospects have a clear need, your solution fits perfectly, but the salesperson’s approach determines whether the deal moves forward. Strong framing is where the win lies.
What is Framing in Sales?
Framing in sales is the art or skill of shaping how prospects perceive your solution by presenting information in a way that aligns with their goals, challenges, and priorities. It’s not manipulating the conversation or using persuasion tactics but creating clarity and relevance for the prospect.
Effective framing involves several key components:
Problem identification: clearly articulate the prospect’s core challenges
Outcome focus: Highlight the measurable results they can achieve with your solution
Risks of Inaction: Show the potential consequences of not addressing the problem
Emotional Connection: Invoke feelings like excitement, confidence, or urgency to deepen connection
For example, rather than getting into a pricing or feature comparison with competitors, demonstrate to the MMA promotions company how your solution maximizes fight promotion, drives revenue, and secures top talent.
Strong framing positions your solution as essential. Without it, prospects won’t see the difference between 2 solutions and instead focus on price or features.
Common Framing Mistakes
Many salespeople fail to close deals because they rely on ineffective or poorly constructed frames:
Defaulting to Price
Focusing on price shifts the prospect’s attention to cost rather than value. This reinforces the perception that the solution is a commodity, making it harder to differentiate from competitors.
Highlighting Feature over Solutions
Comparing features or capabilities with competitors may seem logical, but it rarely addresses the prospects’ challenges. Prospects care more about how your solution solves their problem than the specifics of its features.
Allowing the Prospect to Frame the Conversation
When salespeople let the prospect control the narrative, they often end up chasing irrelevant concerns. This can lead to stalled deals or a focus on secondary issues that don’t drive urgency.
Ignoring Emotional Drivers
Prospects need to feel emotionally connected to the solution whether through confidence in their decision, excitement about the outcome, or urgency to act.
Effective Framing Strategies
To win deals, salespeople must craft frames that resonate with the prospect’s goals, challenges, and emotions. Proven strategies to frame effectively:
Focus on outcomes
Shift from cost or features to measurable results. For the MMA promotion company, this could include:
Maximizing ticket sales and pay-per-view revenue
Increasing merchandise sales tied to high-profile events
Building brand awareness to increase sponsorships
Align with their priorities
Customize your frame to address what matters most to the prospect. For example:
If talent acquisition is key, frame your solution as a tool for attracting and retaining promising fighters.
If brand growth is their primary focus, highlight how your SaaS drives digital engagement and fan loyalty.
Use Emotional Storytelling
Use stories to invoke emotion. Paint a picture of the prospect’s success with your solution, such as hosting sold-out events or signing a breakthrough talent who propels their brand.
Demonstrate the Cost of Inaction
Show the risks of not acting. For an MMA promotion company, this might include losing talent to competitors, missing revenue opportunities via sponsorships, or struggling to establish credibility as a UFC steppingstone.
How to Start Framing: The Gap Selling Framework
If you’re struggling to frame your solution effectively, start with the Gap Selling framework (pun intended). Gap Selling provides a structured way to uncover critical elements of the prospect’s solution, helping to build a powerful frame around their needs and goals. Here’s how you could apply it to the MMA promotion company example:
Define the current state:
Use discovery to understand the prospect’s current challenges and environment.
What’s Happening now? Limited fight awareness, low engagement on social media, difficulty attracting sponsorships
Key metrics: current revenue from ticket sales and pay-per-view streams
Challenges: Lack of visibility and challenges competing with other companies for talent
Frame it: Highlight the urgency of addressing these issues to avoid falling behind competitors and losing revenue opportunities.
Identify problems and their impacts
Problem: poor fight promotion leads to unsold tickets and low pay-per-view purchases
Impact: missed revenue and inability to invest in growth
Problem: Weak talent acquisition
Impact: stagnant growth – new fighters don’t want to fight weak talent and fans don’t want to watch weak talent
Frame it: Connect these challenges to tangible losses like missed revenue targets, lost sponsorship deals, lost investors, or falling behind competitors. Focus on the problems and not the price.
Explore the future state
Clarify what success looks like:
What’s the ideal outcome? Recognition as the top feeder network for the UFC? Acquisition by the UFC? A million dollars in pay-per-view revenue?
Key metrics: growth in social media following, sponsorship deals, talent signings
Frame it: Position your solution as the bridge to their ideal future state. Maybe you can target niche MMA fans who like to find young fighters early. Perhaps you can identify small brands adjacent to MMA that can’t afford to sponsor UFC but would be interested in sponsoring this smaller company.
Starting with the Gap Selling framework, you uncover the details you need to frame effectively. It ensures that your frame focuses on the problems, addressing the impacts, and helping the prospect achieve their goals. The result is a compelling and emotional resonant narrative that positions your solution as indispensable.
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