As the World moves forward after COVID-19, Technology evolves at an ever-increasing pace and competition in this space it becomes evermore Important how companies approach the Sales Cycle.
Gone are the days of having “Ruthless”, Narcissist confidence tricksters as your key customer-facing Sales Men. After all, selling Technology is not like selling a second-hand car that’s failed its MOT and its unfit for its purpose
Today, consultative selling has become the latest practice in engaging with customers. Technical Presales Consultants work together with the Sales Man and Internal Teams including Marketing and Technical teams to get to know all about the customer and his business first.
Identifying the customer’s needs and building a solution using the product or service being sold is the way that most successful sales prospecting is being managed in recent times.
Milking the Cow
Any Salesman that says “ I am Ruthless”, “ I will do whatever it takes to win”, “ I don’t care who gets caught up in the crossfire”, “ I will do a five-year deal and Milk the company for all I can” Is not really a Salesman in the modern world. Especially when he probably does not even know the proper function of what he is pretending to sell.
Having a Salesman who thinks his Pre-sales colleague is his biggest competition, playing politics will keep his job at extorted salary and continuously escalating internally and complaining to senior management that he cant sell because its everyone else’s fault will simply not allow a company to grow.
Unfortunately, there are still some companies out therewith inexperienced staff that fall for “Second Hand Car sales men’s tricks” and some companies that promote a reward “Ruthless” Salesmen even though their “Ruthlessness” is focused mainly Internally. So I suppose there may still be some limited mileage in this.
Consultative selling is the way forward and is not easy. Pre sales, Sales and Marketing need to spend time to learn and understand all about the products they are offering, the services they can offer all its characteristics and how it fits into the wider world.
They need to fully understand what their unique KSP’s are not just within the product or service they offer but how it fits in with the latest Infrastructure and modern systems such as Cloud Infrastructure, Virtualisation, SaaS.
At this stage, an exercise to identify possible areas and fields or target customers list should be drawn up in detail. In every identified customer segment, further detailing of how the product could fit in and be useful to the customer needs to be enumerated.
The next step in the homework would be to study the competition and prepare a detailed chart comparing the competition product visa vise the the product that is being proposed.
An informed salesman should know all about the competitor’s products as well. He should be in a position to discuss meaningfully with the customers about his product and compare it with the competition and bring out the advantages or disadvantages of choosing a particular product from the customer’s perspective.
A customer who finds a salesman discussing objectively competition and keeping the customer’s interest at heart will appreciate the sincerity of the salesman and is likely to trust his advice.
Many times it does happen that your product may not suit the customer’s needs. Instead of walking away a consultative salesman will either choose a complimentary product that can be associated with your product and offer a workable solution to the customer. In several cases, salesmen are known to go back to their management and canvas for a customized solution in order to win the customer and not lose out on the relationship.
There are also cases wherein the marketing and salesmen have advised customers on choosing a particular competitor’s product to suit the customer’s needs. While one may be surprised, it is actually a very genuine right thought and action on the part of the true salesman. Any professional and confident salesman will always place customer relationship and customer’s needs above everything else. When one’s product is not suitable for the customer, he would rather become an advisor or sort of consultant to the customer and guide him on choosing the next best alternative. Thereby one gets to build a relationship with the customer and wait for future opportunities rather than give up on the customer. The sign of a good salesman is that he would look at losing out on one transaction in order to gain a lifetime relationship with the customer.
See this Article on Linked-In
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/consultative-selling-way-forward-engaging-customers-kaldeep-kohli