Sales Effectiveness Lesson 1
May 2010
Sales Effectiveness: Lesson 1
In our May newsletter we challenged you with a sales effectiveness quiz to support your success in our challenged, but recovering economy. Now let's take a look at lesson number 1 that begins to get to the heart of your success in 2010 and beyond.
Our first question was: "Have you revised your offer to effectively address people's new needs and budget restrictions in this current economy? Are your clients agreeing by taking action?"
The principle here is everything is changing so fast that whatever you knew about your clients' buying patterns yesterday is becoming obsolete today. You may have lost some of your best customers. Some of your most popular offers may no longer be relevant to as many people as they once were. Or customers may need what they've always needed from you, but they can't devote the necessary resources to it anymore.
It's critical that you remember you are not selling a product. You are not selling a service either. As always, you are selling solutions. Your value proposition must "wake people up" to the point of having them rearrange their priorities or keep you on their team because you are offering a direct solution to whatever they are most concerned about.
To do this well you will need to be an amazing listener. You need to deeply understand what your customers are in pain about and how that pain is changing the way they are running their businesses. You must also know where your customers' opportunities are. How are they reinventing themselves in order to thrive?
Another opportunity is to listen for specific value drivers. There are numerous reasons people have been buying from you over the years. These reasons are the specific features and benefits of your offer that matter to them when it comes to saying "yes." You can not assume that people's value drivers are what you think they are. You will need to understand which value drivers are most impacting your customers' purchasing choices now.
This may take a lot of work. You will not be able to move forward with people as fast as you would like to. You will need to be patient and trust that your long term relationships can continue or be renewed. But this will only occur if you can refrain from pitching your expertise and solutions long enough to truly understand how they need to be refined or reinvented to match what is happening inside of your customers' minds and hearts now.
Innovation is required. Innovation is the magic that occurs when you suspend your solution long enough to see where your customer's world is going. You also suspend your understanding of which value drivers are behind your customers' decisions. Once this magic occurs, you will feel exhilarated when you discover the next version of your offer that people are genuinely excited about.
Perhaps even more importantly, you will also need to innovate how new customers will find you. With the explosion of so many electronic marketing methodologies, how do you begin to know where your prospects are? Does the 50 something CEO really use LinkedIn to find people like you? Should you hire a 20 something geek to manage your social media? Who do you listen to, to figure all of this out?
Our wisdom is to reassess your tried and true methodologies of finding new business in dialogue with your existing customers. Perhaps technology can help you reach new people, perhaps not. Your work here is to keep your eyes open to what's still working, and be aware of the trends your prospective customers are actually using before you rush into endeavors that may not suit the buying patterns of your prospects. Ultimately, purchasing occurs when there is sufficient trust. So you would be wise to interview your customers and prospects about this precise question, "What is the least painful or most satisfying means of developing the trust you need to make a decision?"
So, while everything has changed on one level, nothing has changed on another level. Effective selling begins with effective listening. It's impossible to listen deeply, when you "already know" what works, and don't check it out. So your first assignment in this new economy is to listen like you don't know a darned thing about how your offer matches people's needs. And don't change what's working until you learn what's necessary from people who are buying from you. And once you "get it," then innovate and, better yet, begin to build a culture of continuous innovation.
If you know someone who wants to create a sales breakthrough, please pass this article along to them!