Sales Equations: (1) Stop Selling + (1) Start Trusting = (3) Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Sun, Jul 17, 2011

     sales meeting                                           

Last week, I was attending one of our customer’s quarterly sales meetings. The company is making solid progress along the path of transitioning their older, more traditional salesforce away from what has been their overused “relationship sale” tactic, to a more updated process with new tools and an integrated CRM platform.  Again, solid progress being made, but since it’s also very new and very different, and these are older, more traditional, heavily experienced salespeople, there’s some expected pushback.  During one of the discussions last week, one of the salespeople testily challenged one of the process steps noting that, “You don’t understand.  Most buyers regard salespeople as the enemy, and don’t trust anyone.”

And, in those few words of “the enemy” and “don’t trust anyone” is the very crux between the old way of thinking about selling and salespeople and today’s much more integrated sales processes that are built not around “relationships” (that’s simply a fundamental, a given), but around solutions based on fully understanding and fitting in to the needs and the objectives of the person on the other side of the table.  Matter of fact, just the concept of the table needs to be changed from a rectangle to a circle, where today’s most successful sales professionals are seen as partners and as advisors and most importantly, having the right to have a seat at the table.

Back when I was had my first real job as a young junior buyer at Honeywell Computer Systems, the key word was “vendor”-simply defined as “one who sells something”.  Back in the day, our objective was very simple:  get the lowest price, and the only scorecard was PPV, purchase price variance, which rated a buyer’s personal performance against how much lower you bought something compared to the standard cost set by the green eyeshade guys in accounting.  Sure we got lower prices, but the results were not pretty, and the path to these lower prices was even uglier.  Honeywell, by the way, the innovator of the first minicomputers, quickly crashed and burned as they were steamrolled by Digital Equipment, who bought not on the lowest bid, but on “total cost of ownership” encompassing price, delivery and quality, and they applied that strategy not only to what they purchased but also to what they sold.

sales ladder Just to put the concept of vendors and suppliers into scope, think of a ladder with just five rungs.  Let’s place, “approved vendor”, at the bottom rung.  The next rung up is “preferred supplier”.  The next,  “solutions consultant”.  The fourth is “strategic contributor”, and the top of the ladder, the most successful vantage point, would be “trusted partner”.  The difference is that salespeople who think and act like “approved vendors” and “preferred suppliers” live in the world of sleepless nights.  “Solutions Consultants” gain some ground and live in the world of challenging quarters.  The sales professionals who think, act and close long term partnerships based on being part of their customer’s strategic thinking participate in the comfortable land of annual orders.

As to the question of how one climbs the ladder, the answer is to stop selling…at least at the initial phases of the sale.  Too many salespeople can’t wait to tell their unqualified subject about how their offering is brighter, faster, cheaper and that most powerful of sales words, “better”. 

sales successThe men and women who become Trusted Partners are much more focused on discovering data on annual business objectives and uncovering the strategic initiatives of their new prospects while manager-to-manager, they enter into business discussions about industry trends. 

Through that process of having their prospects unfold for them what keeps them up at night, the “strategic contributor” and “trusted partner” level salespeople provide solutions that become critical to the success of their customer’s overall business and not just to one person or one department.

Gone are the days of salespeople being seen as the enemy.  Quickly disappearing are the old time relationship sales tactics of a pat on the back, a round of golf and dinner once a month.  Not bad ideas, as long as one wants to remain down at the approved vendor and preferred suppliers.  For me, I have no desire to be “preferred”, when I know that with a little more work, I can become “trusted” since I do know that if it isn’t me who’s going to stand on the top rung of the ladder, it certainly will be somebody else.

For more ideas, think about attending our Sales Management Boot Camp :
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 Good Selling !

Jack
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