Too many salespeople limit their success by adopting a myopic view of how their solutions will be employed by customers. In particular they fail to consider all those ingredients –particularly people and process – that are required to ensure their customer’s success. The Custmer Sees in 3 Dimensions: The customer has a problem, which as [...]
Applying the Golden Rule to Sales What goes around goes around. So treat salespeople as you expect to be treated. Call it good karma, good manners or simply The Golden Rule. Almost everybody in business will have to make a sales call at some time, or other. When they do they hope to be treated [...]
We are continually moving between the buyer and seller side of the table in order to understand the requirements of both sides as they evolve. Indeed, a constant theme of our presentations, talks and articles, is the great irony that sales success requires a greater focus on the buying, as opposed to the selling. After [...]
RFX Mania Takes Hold As concern about the spread of Swine Flue mounts, buyers and sellers are being afflicted by their very own pandemic – that of the RFP (Request for Proposal). How serious is the pandemic? Well, it is demonstrated by the fact that 63 companies recently responded to two public sector tenders valued [...]
What makes a good supplier? Well, who better to ask than the buyer, or those who have written the bible of buying for UK Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply. Here are the answers: · Delivers on time · Provides consistent quality · Gives a good price · Has a stable background · Provides good [...]
Newsflash- Buyers don’t want to be treated as a lead, a prospect, or a sales opportunity. Here is what they are increasingly telling salespeople: – Don’t treat me like a lead… – Don’t prequalify me… – Don’t give me your sales pitch… – Don’t force your sales process on me… In short, buyers are increasingly [...]
The cost of selling to an organization is only a fraction of the cost of that organisation’s buying decision. For example where a major buying decision involves 3 competing suppliers, the time that the seller spends with the buyer has to be multiplied by 3, with the buyer allocating time to each of the suppliers [...]
There is a word we find ourselves using more and more in respect of managing sales cycles and that seems to keep coming up again in reviewing pipeline opportunities and accounts. That is COMPLICATING FACTORS. When it comes to the complex sale, things are never straightforward. There are certain to be complicating factors. Understanding what [...]
Organisations are increasingly organized, structured and careful in terms of how they buy. As salespeople we know this to be true. Yet, it is easy to underestimate just how sophisticated many buyers have become. Let us take the example of the buying process for major IT purchases in a large telco (as shown in the [...]
Professional buying has come of age, reaching new heights in terms of importance and sophistication. But what are the implications for sales people? In this article we turn to the UK Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply and the US Institute of Supply Management to provide a new insight to the changing roles and perspectives [...]
How Skeptical Buyers Have Caught on to Salespeople and their Wily Ways! Buyer beware was the dominant concept for decades. No longer, the balance of power has shifted, with the seller ceding control to a more sophisticated and cynical breed of buyer. To demonstrate this point we have taken two recent books for buyers and [...]
To borrow from the lyrics of the popular song ‘buyers are doing it for themselves.’ They are ”standing on their own two feet and…’ identifying their requirements, defining the solution, writing the specification and building the business case. All this often takes place before they ever meet a vendor! This leaves the salesperson looking for a [...]
Selling Technology to Increasingly Cautious Buyers If analysts are to be believed, then as many as 2 out of 3 IT projects go south (Standish Group 2003). That is they go over budget, fall behind schedule or gets scrapped. So, according to the statistics, then as many as 2 out of 3 buyers will have have [...]
Relationships between buyers and sellers are often dysfunctional, often being motivated by fear. For the buyer that is the fear of being talked into buying the wrong solution. For the salesperson it is the fear of missing target. Rather than working together for a win-win outcome, both sides are often pulling against each other. However, [...]
Wouldn’t your job be a lot easier if your customers and prospects saw you as a trusted advisor, rather than a salesperson? Well if the answer is ‘yes’ then ‘Trust-Based Selling by Charles H. Green’s is a must read. Do Buyers Trust Salespeople? The reality is that the words ‘sales’ and ‘trust’ are rarely used [...]
A salesperson’s needs to hold a mirror up to the buyer in order to fully understand his, or her needs. The objective is a two-fold one: 1. To understand what buyers sees as their needs so that they can be resolved by the seller’s solution 2. To shape that view by raising buyer awareness through [...]
Finding the issue of trust a little difficult to deal with? Well, look at it interms of the buyer’s risk can help. Specifically the risk of making the wrong buying decision and the consequences in terms of; embarrassment, annoyance and cost. Your concern for and efforts to reduce the buyer’s risk are probably the most effective [...]
The professional salesperson is a student of buying. This is particularly important at a time when buying decisions have become increasingly complex. The success of a deal depends on understanding now only how the buying decision will be made, but also the business decision that so often underlies it. With this in mind we have put [...]
We met with some pharma buyers around a barbeque recently. Although the food was rich, the talk was of lean. Lean manufacturing, lean distribution, lean marketing and of course lean buying! Naturally ‘lean’ is a word that appeals to buyers, more than sellers. That is because rather than spending more it means: Doing more for [...]
Indeed, to understand the full complexity of the purchase requires that the salesperson ‘walks a mile in the buyers shoes’. That is because as the Spanish puts it ‘it is much easier to be in the bullring, than to talk about bulls’
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