How High Can You Climb To Communicate Your Value?
You want to be thought of by your organization and more specifically the purchase of your solution to be considered important by the customer. You want it to matter – you want it to be seen as ‘strategic’. But when it comes to buying decisions, what is strategy and how can you connect with it?
Justify With Numbers – Compel With Emotions
Fact sheets, spreadsheets and ROI calculators are vital sales tools, but they are not enough. The seller must tap into the buyer’s underlying buying motivations and emotions as well as connecting with the buyers logic and analysis to improve sales performance. Moving Beyond The Calculator In Selling In business, emotions are generally considered unhelpful at [...]
Improve Sales Performance By Treating Your Customers Like Buyers!
Why thinking of your customers as buyers could win you a lot more business…
Buyers From Hell! What Your Worst Customers Can Teach You
In our training workshops we ask some of the salespeople participating to tell us about their most demanding customer, or prospect. It does not take much encouragement to get people talking and the stories they tell are compelling. Perhaps they are compelling because as salespeople we can all relate to the story of the unreasonable [...]
Sellers Beware: Buyers Know What You Are Thinking!
Buyers these days are increasingly well-prepared for their interactions with sellers. Indeed, some are even going so far as enrolling in courses specifically aimed at learning how to deal with salespeople! This is yet another reason why sellers must beware of reusing the same old clumsy sales techniques that buyers can quickly see through…
Buying Nirvana: Why Can’t Buyers & Sellers Work In Harmony?
The buying revolution requires a more advanced, mature and sophisticated relationship than before between buyer and seller. It requires a partnership of equals, built around a steady progression from dependence to independence, and onwards towards interdependence…
The Ultimate Test of The Sales Pro: Helping Buyers To Buy
‘Helping the buyer to buy’ may sound soft, compared to pitching, persuading and closing for example. However, the reality couldn’t be more different.
Buyers: Treat salespeople As you would expect to be treated
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 [...]
Sellers Are from Mars and Buyers Are from Venus, Right?
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 [...]
The Buyer Angle: What Makes a Good Supplier?
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 Like Leads
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 [...]
Think Cost of Buying, Not Cost of Selling!
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 [...]
Weary Buyers Warn Sellers: The Game is Up!
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 - The Vendor Management Office and The Contract Negotiation Handbook by Stephen Guth [...]
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 [...]
Holding A Mirror Up To The Buyer
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 [...]
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. [...]
Buyer-Seller Relationships: We Ask Dr. Phil for Advice
The straight talking TV psychologist Dr Phil Mc Graw would probably have a lot of say about the typical buyer-seller relationship. He might even go as far as calling some of them dysfunctional. After all, many buyer seller interactions are missing the following key ingredients: · Open communication · High levels of trust · High [...]
Let’s Get Real, or Let’s Not Play – transforming the buyer-seller relationship
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, [...]
Sellers Look Out for Buyer Cold Feet
Sales people are increasingly learning that there is no such thing as a ‘sure thing’ sale. That is because as the sale approaches the buyer can get ‘cold feet’ and the salesperson may be the last person to know about it. For example, the salesperson’s proposal, presentation and price beats the competition, but somebody on the [...]
From ‘Buyer Beware’ to ‘Seller Beware!’
Seller Beware! Caveat Emptor, or buyer beware was the dominant concept for decades. No longer, the balance of power has shifted, with the seller reluctantly ceding control to a more sophisticated and cynical breed of buyer. Today it is the seller who must beware! The seller is no longer ‘the ringmaster’ of the sale, often being [...]
