Today’s sales professionals are under intense pressure to differentiate themselves, their solutions, and their companies, in a complex business environment. They face powerful web-savvy purchasing organizations and well-trained buying teams.
Asking the same old boring questions of customers that everyone else is asking simply doesn’t work. But just telling customers who you are, why you are the best, and what they should do is also a prescription for failure.
The bottom line: The internet has created a new kind of buyer, confident in their ability to make decisions without the help of a sales professional. And this new kind of buyer demands a new and better approach focused on Dialogue-Based Selling rather than the structured probing-and-present strategy.
It requires a critical shift in focus:
|
INSTEAD OF … |
SHIFT TO … |
|
Using structured, scripted presentations |
Engaging dialogue based on compelling questioning and informative Nuggets of Value |
|
Focusing training on “the one best way” to sell your solution |
Planned flexibility creating a sales strategy that is planned but not scripted to provide the buyer with Nuggets of informational Value and follow-up dialogue |
|
Making your buyer as comfortable as possible |
Courageous selling based on harnessing the natural tension and stress in effective sales dialogue |
Implementing this critical shift enables the sales team to
- Execute a dialogue that is planned but not scripted and engages the customer in new, thought-provoking ways;
- Gain control of the sales process from point of initial contact while encouraging the customer to want to know more and share more;
- Leverage the inevitable tension and pressure inherent in every sales situation to drive more creative agreements;
- Ask qualitatively different, insightful, thought-provoking questions that educate and inform buyers and sellers, by creating a very different depth of dialogue;
- Identify, gain agreement, and prioritize new and previously unappreciated needs;
- Anticipate and handle objections, not try to avoid them; and
- Share information and insights that differentiate your sales people and your solution from the competition.
The sooner a sales team makes the shift to this approach, the better they will be able to engage their web-savvy buyers in dialogue that delivers actionable insight, differentiates your solutions, and keeps the focus on value rather than price.
What techniques have you tried? How did they work for you? What have you learnt by approaching sales from a different perspective?
