Selling new business acquisition solutions
How many times have you walked out of a sales call and said, “that went nowhere”?
Ever wonder why? Perhaps it’s because you went in unprepared to make the call in the first place. Selling in today’s environment is quite different in many ways than it was just a few years ago. Customers do not have time for a sales person to just drop by. They are very busy trying to keep their business afloat. To even get in the door, you need a very good reason to get their attention. Most customers are facing complex challenges that are difficult to describe to you in a short meeting. So they don’t! If you walk in to a sales call with a product in your hand and say something like “let me show you the best darn thing I have seen in a long time”. They may just ask “how much” for the product you’ve shown them.
If you get this response, 90% of the time, you’ve just lost their attention. You might want to pack up and leave because it’s the customer’s way of politely telling you “I just don’t have time for a nice chat”.
What do they want? They want to do business with salespeople who understand them— their job and their problems, in other words a consultative approach.
The answer: start your sales process with a sales call plan personalized for that customer. Personalize it by researching your customer enough to understand their business and what drives it. How do they do business today? Who are their customers, how do they get and keep them? What potential problems might they have? When you call for that appointment you can tell your customer that you may have a solution that could improve their ________ but that you would appreciate a few minutes of their time to confirm your understanding and make sure that you are not going to waste their time with your solution. When you get the meeting, your goal is to confirm what you researched and gather as much additional information as you can. One of the key questions is: Do you have a budget for a good solution? If not, they may not be convinced that you can help them or perhaps they need to understand the metrics of how your solution can help them.
The following questions will help you create the metrics that will help you demonstrate your solutions value:
• What is your average customer value? • What is the life-time value of a customer? • What is your typical close ratio? What is this based on? • What is your desired ROI expectation? • Is there any impending event that may cause them to make a decision about your solution?
With these questions you should be able to work the math out and then create a “what if” scenario to show that your solution can produce better results than their current practice.
This is a much abbreviated version of solution selling but the key points are:
• Learn to be a consultant • Research your customer’s business before making a call • Don’t lead your sales call with a product • Make sure that your customer is interested enough to look for ways to pay for your solution before you spend a lot of time on this account. I hope this helps. Keep in mind that there are lots of other key points necessary to be successful at solutions based sales; far too many for this short email. Please call me to if I can answer any questions or for more information. Good Selling! | |
Call me with your input, ideas, or questions. 800-948-4110
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4 years ago
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