From Sales Person to Trusted Advisor – Making The Transition
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 […]
Want to Build Trust? Then Minimise Buyer Risk
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 […]
Buyers Think Lean, But Can You Sell Lean?
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 […]
Try Walking A Mile In The Buyer’s Shoes!
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’
Big Name Suppliers Get The Boot
Yet another big IT project is in trouble reports the The Guardian. The 750 million UK electronic border control project was awarded in 2007 to a consortium that included Raytheon, Serco, Accenture, Detica and QinetiQ. Some 3 years later The Home Office has sacked The consortium and is seeking to award the contract to another. […]
BEWARE: There Is Always A Buying Process
Just because the steps involved in making a major purchase are not documented, does not mean that there is not a process, even a sophisticated one.
Buyers Have Funnels Too!
Sales people are not the only ones who have funnels, buyers have them too! I will let the IT Director of a large multi-national explain: ‘Last year we had 300 million worth of projects for consideration across the organisation, but only a budget of 100 million. That meant we were faced with some very hard […]
Public Sector Buyers Ask ‘Where is the MEAT?’
In public Sector Buying Price Is Over-taken By Most Economically Advantageous Tender, but what are the implications for how you sell?
Better Buying Here We Come
The UK press puts UK public sector buying under the microscope resulting in some fascinating insights to the nature of public procurement decisions and an impetus for better buying.
Mass Scrapping of Public Projects Causes Seller Woe
Spare a thought for the many salesmen and women who are watching helplessly as anticipated commission cheques and purchase orders vanish as the new UK government reigns in public spending to the amount of a reported 10.5 billion of projects announced in the dying days of the outgoing administration. The cutbacks detailed in The Guardian […]
9 things unforgiving buyers don’t like
Buyers have heard it all before, which makes them a little more demanding. In short they are less forgiving when salespeople make any of the following mistakes: Not knowing enough about your own products, or the customer’s industry. The number one complaint of buyers is a lack of product knowledge on the part of sales […]
How Misreading the Buying Decision Could Cost You the Sale
Key lessons from Neil Rackham’s ‘Major Account Sales Strategy’ ‘Major Account Sales Strategy’ by Neil Rackham’s is a bible for the savvy sales professional. It is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1989. So, we dusted it off and pulled out its key points. The key message of this ground-breaking book […]
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