How strong are your strategic selling skills? Strategic selling involves expanding your competing advantage by strengthening your quality to communicate your uniqueness, value, and competing differential to a customer or prospect.
How thriving have you been explaining your competing uniqueness and differentiation to your possible buyers?
What is involved with strategic selling?
So what is Strategic selling? Strategic selling involves your quality to communicate your value and competing uniqueness to a anticipation or customer throughout your whole selling process.
Strategic selling includes beginning each call with a strong strategic uniqueness or doctrine statement about you and your firm that takes less than two minutes to present. It also involves you developing a more strategic or "big picture" focus to your selling messaging, selling language, and uncut doctrine or arrival to a customer's business.
The toughest particular examine asked by customers today is "Why, based on all the competing alternatives available to me do I want to buy from you?" How thriving have you been persuasively answering this examine from your customers or prospects?
Most sales reps would answer this "Why buy?" examine with a presentation detailing their products or services best "features and advantages." It is then up to your buyer to institute and sort everything you covered so they understand the uncut value and impact of doing firm with you. However, this also means that your success is completely dependent on your buyer's quality to summarize and clarify everything said so they can understand the uncut value of buying from you and your company.
Allow me to share my strategic selling message that I use to begin a sales call. As a sales and sales management counselor and trainer, my answer to a anticipation request me why they would want to buy from me would be, "I have a very exact niche in the sales and sales management training environment. I only work with experienced "business to business" sales professionals who already know how to sell, the managers who led them, and the executives who direct them. everything I do has one bottom line focus, to increase your competing advantage so you can increase your profitability and selling success. I have the most industrialized sales training available in North America today and I can prove it!"
What did you think of my message? observation how customer focused my message hopefully appears and how it talks about how I want to help solve a customer's sales issues instead of the traditional selling arrival of just talking about the features, and customer benefits of my varied products and programs.
Strategic or doctrine selling is not in disagreement with "feature-benefit" selling. Both need to be utilized by you in your persuasive selling. However, most sales reps spend all their time on a call only focusing on explaining their features and advantages, and spending small to no time positioning their doctrine or approach.
Strategic selling is based on you being able to prove a divergence in your value.
A foundation of thriving strategic selling is an insight and confidence that you are not in a price driven market.
Here's the easy reality of selling: If you're working as an face sales rep then you're Not in a price driven market, never have been and never will be, even in a tougher market or economic slowdown.
It is not that you are in a price driven market, it is that all markets are value driven with pricing only being a distant second. There is a real easy belief in strategic selling, "the more of a differential you can show me in value the more of a differential I'll be willing to pay in price."
The reality is price will always be a factor or component in any buyer's decision. However, the challenge for buyers is not based on getting the bottom price; the real buying challenge is being able to find the seller with the best value gift so that you then do not mind paying a higher price. In fact, many buyers have told me they and their firm cannot afford to buy the bottom price available due to the lower value also being provided.
Strategic selling focuses on your customers instead of on yourself or your products.
Your quality to focus on your customers and what they want, and need, is an important component of strategic selling. Too many sales people only sell to one person...themselves! The sad reality is most reps spend all their selling time only talking about their products and themselves.
Customers are not genuinely buying your products or a service, which has no real value or advantage to them. What they are buying, and find profound value in, is what your products or services will genuinely do for them.
So how are you answering a customer or anticipation request you why they should buy from you? The foundation of strategic selling is to not spend the majority of your selling time talking about yourself, your company, or why your stuff is so competitively superior, but instead to focus the majority of your selling message on how your customer's are going to advantage and receive greater value buying from you compared to whatever else.
In addition, make sure you do not do all the talking in your sales calls. Most experienced sales pro's I have ridden with do all the talking on their sales calls. Customers might spend as small as 10% of the call genuinely talking!
What division of your sales calls are you talking vs. Listening? Moreover, what can you do to make sure you focus your discussions and selling efforts on your customer, and what you can do to address their challenges?
Strategic selling involves selling as a particular team with one voice and one message.
A vital key to expanding your strategic success is to sell as a particular team with one voice and one message. Do you and your fellow sales pros work as a team? The reality is most sales teams don't.
Do you want to test to see how independent the members of your team genuinely are? Individually ask any team members how they would answer a anticipation request them "Why, based on all the competing alternatives available to me do I want to buy from you?" If your team is similar to most, you will search for that each rep will have completely distinct answers to this question.
It is not just your fellow sales reps we need to worry about. How many distinct people from your firm will communicate with a anticipation or customer before they say yes and sign an agreement? Most companies have any people talking to their customers along with service and technical people, management, credit, and your executive team.
With all the distinct players from your firm communicating, and hopefully, persuading your customers, it is vital you have a single, simple, and focused uniqueness message that is discussed and confirmed by all members of your team.
Decide to meet with your whole sales team to begin defining why person would want to buy from you and your company, and then work to train and coach whatever who is communicating, and persuading your prospects and customers to want to buy from you.
Strategic selling incorporates the four "core values" selling language into every sales call.
Strengthening your philosophical or strategic selling language is also based on your insight of the core values or driving philosophies of why buyers buy. These terms are referred to as the core values of buying because they are the central themes, philosophies, or driving justification of why a buyer likes you over all other alternatives.
Whether you are buying for your personal consumption or buying for your company, there are only four reasons, or core values, as to why you would pick a exact seller from a field of competitors.
Why did you select that vendor? I chose them because, estimate 1 - they did more than whatever else to lower my risk. Alternatively, estimate 2 - I chose them because they did more to make my life or work easier. I chose them because, estimate 3, they did more than whatever else to either lower my total costs or to increase my profitability...and the fourth and final core value...I chose them because they did more than whatever else to increase my competing advantage.
That's it! Those are the four uncut reasons, or core values, why all buying decisions are made. All other buying reasons from customers will fit into these four core drivers or will be a sub-set of them.
These core values are remarkable selling terms because they parallel the thinking and thinking of your buyers. In addition, these four core values are not terms utilized by most sales people. How animated is it to have selling language that is both customer focused and not being used by your competitors?
Set a goal next week of seeing excuses to drop at least one of these four terms into your conversation with every customer to see if you observation any divergence in your buyer's responses or questions.
Final comments.
So how strong are your strategic selling skills? What can you now do to increase your ability, and your whole sales team's ability, to sell as a particular team with one voice and one message? What can you now do to increase your quality to communicate effectively your uniqueness, to focus more on your customers than on yourself and your products? What can you do to stay focused on the "Big Picture" doctrine of why your buyers want to buy from you, and to incorporate the four "core values" selling language into every sales call you make?
We know you're good...now the examine is...are you good enough, and committed enough, to increase your strategic selling skills and to communicate a simple, brief and effective strategic message of competing uniqueness on every call so you can accelerate your competing advantage and selling success?
Jim Pancero
Salespeople Can always Sell More, by Strengthening Their Strategic Selling Skills