Expert suggestions for making the sale.
As leading sales specialists, we want you to benefit from our experience. So, following our observation of over 40,000 face-to-face sales meetings, we’ve developed our own top ten tips for successful selling.
1. Be joined up – across all your customer touch points
Now, more than ever, sales organisations have numerous contact points with their customers. From traditional field sales to back office, marketing to technical support, administration to service engineers, the opportunities to enhance (or ruin) the customer experience are endless. Yet our research shows many companies are failing to maximise these opportunities. Sellers report the frustration of having carefully nurtured and cultivated customer relationships damaged by careless or indifferent back office or sales support. Customers want, and expect, the good service they experience when you sell to them to be repeated when they deal with other parts of your business. Consistency, and the highest standards of sales awareness and skills, are paramount in giving your customers an outstanding experience at every touch point.
2. Always create value
For many years the quickest, and most effective, way to find out about a product or service was to ask sales people to call and tell you about it. Unsurprisingly this created generations of sellers who were little more than talking brochures. Now that information is available on demand, on a PC or PDA, customers won’t waste valuable time with sales people. Sellers must now do more than simply impart knowledge; they must create value, every time they meet the customer. Our research shows effective sellers spend their time exploring customers’ needs, uncovering their priorities and identifying the benefits of your solution. In doing so, both your solution, and the sales process itself, has value for your customers. These sellers build deeper, more meaningful relationships and, by clearly understanding customers’ needs and drivers, secure more business, adding even more value for both you and your customers.
3. The seller is never the centre of attention
Egos aside, most sellers and sales organisations would accept the customer and their needs should lie at the heart of every sales campaign. Yet time and time again, our research shows that in the majority of face-to-face sales meetings, proposals, bids and sales presentations, the bulk of time and content is focussed on the seller and your solution. An effective seller avoids this trap and has the customer, their needs and their desired outcomes as the focus of every sales contact. In face-to-face meetings this takes the form of effective questions, in proposals and presentations it's about ensuring the customer's case for change and the route to the solution are clearly mapped. Whatever the situation, talk about your products or services in the context of how they meet a customer’s requirements.
4. Every contact has purpose and an objective (even hospitality)
We've said the customer should be at the heart of every sale, but that doesn't mean you're purely there to do their bidding. Your relationship with your customers is a commercial one, and you, quite rightly, want and deserve to get something out of it. So how often do you plan to get it? Far too often, we see sellers arranging meetings or sending emails "just to keep in touch". Where's the value in that? When it comes to social contact, corporate hospitality and the like, it's even worse. Whole events are planned, and tens of thousands of pounds spent, without a single real thought to why it’s being done. Effective sales organisations challenge this thinking, and make sure that through their skills, management, processes and culture, every customer contact is considered and planned thoroughly, to ensure real purpose and achieve a meaningful objective.
5. Spare the Sales Manager
Sales Managers are busy people, often juggling the needs of their sales team as well as looking after their own (often the biggest) customers. Unsurprisingly they often feel pressured and under-recognised. Yet effective sales management is key to a high achieving sales organisation. So what do effective organisations do differently? 1) They don't assume the best sellers make the best managers. Sales and management are different roles requiring different skills; effective companies train their sales managers to be sales managers. 2) They let managers coach, which means they are both trained to coach and given time, and recognition, for coaching. This is done by observing and helping sellers, not taking over their calls. 3) They use managers sparingly – if a manager can't add value by attending a meeting they shouldn't be there. And finally, when it comes to negotiations or problem solving, effective organisations remember the only thing a manager can do that a seller can't is make bigger concessions.
6. There's more than one way of selling
Perhaps surprising coming from the company so well known for SPIN®, but even we think there's more than one way of selling. That's because, now more than ever, there's more than one way of buying. Not all sales situations are the same and, whilst everyone knows buying a yacht isn't the same as buying a can of beans, price alone is no longer a reliable guide. For some organisations €1million purchases are routine, for others €10,000 is exceptional. Similarly the speed or complexity of the decision-making process, or the depth of the buyer/seller relationship, can vary enormously and often in the least predictable way. So, you can have short-cycle but high value sales or lengthy, consultative but lower value ones. Even B2B or B2C isn't always a reliable indicator. Each sales channel is different and requires a different approach to selling; effective companies avoid over-simplistic analysis of their sales situations, recognise what their selling scenarios really are, and train their sellers accordingly.
7. Logic, and being right, are not persuasive
How many times have you made it blindingly obvious that your solution is exactly right, only to have the customer buy from someone else? No doubt the logic behind your solution, and the cost/benefit analysis that went with it, were rock-solid and flawless. But in who's eyes? The problem is, your logic isn't necessarily the same as your customer's logic. So, whilst your solution looks 100% right to you, it looks less perfect to your customer. Our research shows that effective sellers put themselves in the customer's shoes and use skilled questions to get to the customer's perception of the perfect solution. Then, when they present the solution, it's logical and correct from the customer's perspective, and gets the approval they're looking for.
8. Don't always start at the top
There's a lot of sales training that advocates you should sell to the most senior person you can, as soon as you can. The logic being that it's easier to have a senior person refer you down the organisation than the other way round. What this approach fails to recognise is that if you see a senior person before you've built a strong business case, he or she is unlikely to be impressed and will probably refer you nowhere. Our research shows successful sellers time their contact with senior people more strategically, having first used friendly contacts to give them the 'lie of the land' and problem-owners to uncover the needs and drivers that will sit at the heart of your business case. Only when that business case is well formed do skilled sellers contact the senior decision makers. Having said all that, if the CEO is your oldest and best contact, go for it!
9. Know what to do (and how to do it)
This may seem insultingly obvious, but that's not what we see in practice. The key is the bit in brackets; whilst most sellers know what they should be doing, far fewer know how to do it. For example, we all like sellers to be tenacious, but we don't want them to be pushy. We admire confidence, but distrust arrogance. What's the difference? Whilst there may be a lot of them about, few sellers want to be perceived as pushy or arrogant; what we're seeing are unskilled attempts to be tenacious or confident. The sellers know what to do, they simply don't know how to do it. It's rarely the seller’s fault; in most cases it's the result of short, high intensity sales training that's packed with knowledge (what to do) but with no skill development (how to do it). The sellers have little option but to do their best, and hope for the best. Effective organisations ensure their sales training is focussed on skill development, helping their sellers know how to do it. It takes longer, but they recognise tenacious and confident beats pushy and arrogant every time.
10. Don't take price objections at face value
For most sellers the words "you're too expensive" are, quite understandably, one of the things they least want to hear from prospective customers. For many sellers, it’s one step away from "no thanks". But it doesn't have to be. Our research shows effective sellers have a strategy for addressing price objections, based on not accepting the objection at face value but trying to get to what lies beneath it. So what could that be? There are four possibilities; it could mean they don't value your solution, it could mean they can't afford it, it could be a signal that the customer is ready to negotiate and finally it could be a smokescreen covering a wholly different worry or concern about your proposal. Skilled sellers correctly identify the 'real' objection, and address it accordingly.
And here’s the inevitable eleventh point:
11. Sell first, negotiate later (and only if you have to)
Selling is about getting the customer to value your solution; negotiation is about trading concessions to reach a deal. So, by definition, negotiation involves moving away from your ideal position. Obvious isn't it? But too often we see sellers who, as soon as they encounter the slightest resistance (real or imagined), begin to offer concessions to keep customers 'warm'. Skilled sellers avoid this trap, using effective questions to build value and so maintain their 'best' position until the negotiations really start. For example, mid-way through the sale the customer says " I think it's bigger than I need"; the typical seller responds with something like "If you're worried about paying over the odds there will of course be an x% discount for you". In contrast, the skilled seller would respond with "Let's look at your capacity requirements again" and go on, by using questions, to get the customer to see what's been proposed is the right size.
