More and more professional buyers are adopting a ‘fortress mindset’ in their approach to dealing with sellers. In short, they have erected defenses that are designed to keep sellers at bay. In this article, we examine how you can encourage buyers to lower their defenses…
Organizations are increasingly structuring their procurement in terms of key categories. This new state of play presents a range of opportunities, as well as challenges, for the seller. Above all else, it means the salesperson must work to make the category manager his or her friend. The following article shows how this can be achieved…
If buying is becoming more bureaucratic, then what are the implications of this for sellers? We asked sellers to share their tips on how to sell more successfully to bureaucratic buyers…
Maverick buying has been all but outlawed in most organizations, even for relatively small or routine purchases. Managers today know that, if they want to spend their company’s money, they are going to have to play by the rules…
“It was like The United Nations”, observed the sales director in describing the makeup of the sales team that had just arrived from his company’s consortium partner. Planning for preparing the multimillion-dollar bid was in full swing now that the team from the lead contractor in the consortium (a Fortune 1000 company) had arrived in its subsidiary partner’s boardroom…
As with building skyscrapers, the temptation for sellers in building a business case is to add another floor of benefits in a bid to achieve the highest possible ROI for the buyer. However, it is important to remember that the higher the ROI, the greater the danger of the buyer simply toppling your figures. With this in mind, you need to help the buyer create a more credible business case on three levels…
In an effort to minimize risk buyers are taking smaller steps as they progress towards major buying decisions.
Most traditional sales techniques presuppose that the sellers knows more than the buyer. However, this does not fit with reality in respect of most complex buying decisions.
As more salespeople are learning to their cost, assumptions about how the buying decision is going to be made can be dangerous.
All it takes is for one of the many CC’d recipients to raise a question, or a query to impact on the pace of the sale.
Typically, salespeople wonder if asking ‘what is your buying process?’ is a question that will either startle, or draw a blank stare from the buyer.
As salespeople it is easy to assume that buyers have become more machine-like in their approach to buying and that means they overlook opportunities to engage with buyers to the full extent possible.
The 5 steps model of buying is a one dimensional picture of buying can catch the salesperson off his, or her guard.
As a salesperson it is easy to assume that buyers are obsessed with price, or more to the point getting the lowest price. But is that really true? Is it perhaps too easy to blame our sales failures on an unreasonable buyer obsession with price? Well, let’s ask buyers and in particular public sectors buyers. [...]
The modern buyer is a team, not an individual. Indeed, as the example shown earlier suggests, the roll call of all those involved in the buying decision is a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the organization. The excerpt below highlights the number of levels involved in the buying decision, the seniority of the decision makers as [...]
When it comes to major buying decisions, managers are pulling rank. Senior managers are not just rubber-stamping buying decisions. They are taking an active role to ensure all major purchases underpin organizational goals, priorities and strategies. When Buyers Pull Rank All this means the job titles of those involved in making today’s major buying decisions [...]
Once upon a time a question like “who makes the buying decision?” was easy to answer; one or two names were typically sufficient to describe where the power lay. But this is no longer the case, and nowadays sellers almost need a map of organizational buying to reflect all those who make and shape the buying decision…
The term business case can mean different things to different people. For this reason it is helpful to explain the key elements of a business case in terms of other more universally understood business planning and analysis tools. The business case combines four elements as shown in the diagram. Fig: The Building Blocks of the [...]
Predicting the future is not easy, but that is exactly what the business case must attempt to do. This is particularly true in a time of market turbulence. Today’s perfect plan could be completely invalidated by a change in the competitive situation, an upset in the market or any one of a host of other [...]
Why do buyers do what they do? Why do they choose one supplier over another and choose some projects to be scrapped, while others are advanced? These are questions that understandably intrigue salespeople. Buyers tend to reveal little, leaving many salespeople complaining that they don’t know what buyers are thinking. They may even complain buyers [...]
© 2012 Buyer Insights. All Rights Reserved. Contact The ASG Group