An Inside Look at SNAP Selling: The Four Basics (+Checklist)

Interested in trying out SNAP selling? In this blog post, we explain what SNAP selling is, how it works, and how you can get started with it.

What is SNAP Selling?

SNAP selling is a methodology developed by Jill Konrath. It's the basis of her best-selling book, ‘SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business With Today’s Frazzled Customers’. 

Essentially, it’s a strategy that helps sellers win deals in today’s modern sales landscape.

Per Konrath, SNAP is an antidote to the “too much information problem,” where buyers have too many resources and too little time to interpret or make sense of it all. 

The SNAP selling methodology breaks into two main parts: the four basics and the three decisions. Here’s a bit more about each of these core components:

The four basics of SNAP

The four basics of the SNAP sales methodology are the source of its acronym, with each letter representing a core principle that guides the sales process. 

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1. Keep it simple

Make things clear and transparent for buyers. A key theme throughout Konrath’s book is that you’re dealing with “frazzled customers” who are juggling too many priorities. Konrath says that showing buyers everything that your solution can do can overwhelm them — even if they truly stand to benefit from what you’re selling. 

Instead of trying to do too much at once, you’ll want to feed buyers the right answers at the right time — and avoid giving more than they asked for. 

Key considerations:

• Aim for fewer, higher-quality, hyper-personalized meetings.
• Propose fewer options to simplify the decision-making process.
• Keep presentations and content short and to the point.
• Set an agenda for each meeting.
• End meetings by going over next steps.
• Map out each touchpoint in the sales process.
  

2. Be invaluable

Stand out by positioning yourself as the go-to expert. In the SNAP selling method, the salesperson must embody the role of a “trusted partner.” Here, the goal is to connect the value of your solution to the problem the buyer wants to solve but doesn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to tackle on their own. 

Key considerations:

• Think about what you can do to add value to every buyer interaction.
• Avoid debating with buyers or using overt persuasion tactics.
• Engage buyers on “equal footing” — you’re aiming for an intelligent conversation between peers.
• Present data-driven, well-researched insights and solutions — you want to come across as confident and prepared.

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3. Always align 

Align your business goals with buyers’ needs, priorities, and beliefs. You’ll need to develop a clear understanding of what matters to buyers and keep their goals front and center throughout the sales cycle. Ultimately, it’s not worth bringing up goals they’re not focused on right now — even if you think they need to shift their priorities. 

Key considerations:

• Align with your audience.
• Understand their needs and concerns.
• Identify organization-wide goals and the goals of key decision-makers.
• Align your solution with prospects' goals, pain points, and concerns.
  

4. Raise priorities

Keep important decisions top of mind. Frazzled customers are typically juggling multiple priorities at any given moment. As such, you’ll want to make sure you align your solution and messaging around the priorities that matter most. 

Key considerations:

• Create a quantified gap between the status quo and the ideal future state.
• Leverage trigger events (acquisitions, IPOs, a global pandemic, etc.) to shift prospects' priorities.
• Focus on presenting a vision of a better future.
• Emphasize business drivers and metrics in your presentations.
  

We’ve put together a SNAP selling checklist to help sales reps keep the basics top of mind:

The three decisions

The three decisions represent this understanding that there are three unique stages—or decisions—that need to happen before a buyer decides whether to buy or not. 

Konrath asserts that buyers actually work through the following three decisions before making the final call:

1. Allowing access – The first decision the buyer makes is whether or not they should let you in or hear what you have to say.
   

2. Moving away from the status quo – Whether they realize it or not, people tend to lean into the status quo. At a certain point, the prospect needs to decide if they’re willing to change — whether that means switching vendors, embracing something new, or updating a legacy solution. If you’re going to close the deal, you’ll need to convince the prospect that making a change is worth the effort and expense. 
   

3. Changing resources – The last decision the prospect makes before committing to a vendor is making sure they choose the right solution. At this stage, your goal is convincing the buyer that your solution is the best solution. With that in mind, you’ll need to provide tangible evidence that you’re prepared to solve their problems and help them achieve the desired outcome. 
   

SNAP selling: key terms

Konrath introduces several terms in her SNAP Selling book. 

While this isn’t a comprehensive glossary, the following terms come up repeatedly and play a central role in helping sellers understand the methodology:

Frazzled customer syndrome

‍Frazzled customer syndrome is a “condition” among modern buyers where they’re impatient, distracted, demanding, and super busy.

SNAP factors

‍SNAP Factors are a series of four questions that “frazzled” buyers will be asking themselves about your solution. 

1. Is the solution simple—and will it require significant time, effort, or resources to implement? 
2. Does this company, solution, or sales rep provide value?
3. Does the solution align with our goals, challenges, and pain points?
4. Is solving this problem a priority, or can it wait?
   

Buyer’s Matrix

‍Konrath defines the Buyer’s Matrix as the core foundation of your sales strategy. It’s designed to help sellers get inside the heads of decision-makers so they can better address their needs and help achieve their goals. Like the Sandler Selling System, the goal is to match buyers with the ideal solution. It’s important to note, however, that Sandler breaks the sales process into a sequence of seven steps, while SNAP goes broader — you’re kind of on your own when it comes to figuring out timing or what kinds of questions to ask. 

Go Zone

‍The Go Zone refers to the space where SNAP factors have been addressed, and the buyer has responded to your outreach efforts.

D-Zone

‍The D-Zone represents the space where sales outreach and communication are ignored or deleted.

Tips for successful SNAP selling

Here are a few ways you can successfully apply SNAP selling:

Tap into the “frazzled customer” mentality

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the “frazzled customer” is the focus of the SNAP methodology. 

With that in mind, the first thing you’ll want to do is make sure you understand what buyers are experiencing.  

According to Konrath, frazzled customers share the following characteristics:

• Anxious – Buyers want to immediately understand whether your solution is worth their time. This means that you’ll want to be clear about who you serve, what you do, and how you can help. Don’t make people book a call or even download a bunch of whitepapers to figure out if your solution is a fit. 

• Wary of complexity – People tend to avoid anything they perceive to be overly complex, time-consuming, or risky. Sellers can combat this by helping buyers understand the implementation process, what they stand to gain, and the risks and missed opportunities of not taking action. 

• Distracted – Prospects are being pulled in a million directions. They’re dealing with demands from colleagues, clients, and their day-to-day work—and on top of that, fielding offers from competing sellers.

• Demanding – Finally, these buyers have high expectations. People don’t want to waste their time dealing with sellers who can’t offer unique, personalized solutions and expertise beyond what a basic Google search might turn up.

Bottom line: prospects want to work with smart reps that will serve out-of-the-box ideas, relevant insights, and, most importantly, information about how to achieve critical business objectives.

With that in mind, your approach should focus on how frazzled customers can overcome these barriers by addressing them head-on in your messaging.

Dig into Your Buyer Personas

While frazzled customers might share some common traits, they’re not experiencing the same problems or challenges. 

You’ll want to analyze your most common customer types, then create a profile of each decision-maker within those accounts—which essentially acts as a template you can use to guide each conversation. 

That way, you can come up with relevant discovery questions for each type of customer and develop content and solutions to common problems. 

Now, it’s also important to understand that every customer is unique. 

The persona templates are more of a shortcut to personalization and are aimed at helping you serve up answers and solutions on the fly.

Use the Buyer’s Matrix

The Buyer’s Matrix is a low-tech, but effective tool for personalizing the sales process.

It's designed to help you better understand your potential customers. That, in turn, makes it easier to personalize your message based on what prospects might consider valuable.  

The matrix essentially looks like a worksheet:

Ultimately, this worksheet allows sellers to really put themselves in the shoes of each decision-maker associated with each persona. 

The more time you spend filling out the matrix, the easier it will be to understand the unique pressures they face on the job and during the buying process. 

As a result, sellers can align their strategies and messaging around critical business objectives and individual needs and challenges.

Use Weflow to implement SNAP selling

Weflow's note-taking and note templates features allow you to implement SNAP selling (and other sales methodologies) with ease, as well as ensure your sales team adheres to it. Sales managers can create custom note templates with Weflow, and then assign them to different team members or sales teams for use.

Here's how to create a SNAP selling note template in Weflow that your team can reuse with prospects:

Log in to Weflow and navigate to the Notes section. From here, click the Use template button in the upper right corner of the screen.

Click the +New template button in the window that pops up.

Now, enter a name for your note template (e.g., SNAP) and fill out the note section with steps you'd like reps to take and the questions you'd like them to ask each prospect (see the questions outlined in the matrix above).

Once you're done, click on Use template.

That's it!

Final thoughts

SNAP Selling helps sellers understand their prospects and the sales landscape so that they can directly address needs and pain points and, ideally, exceed expectations.

It also requires reps to become experts in the nuances and trends shaping their target market. So, as you might imagine, it’s not exactly something reps can pick up in a day.