RSSLead Gen isn’t enough
Feb 5, 2010 Sales Related
Do you spend a lot of time collecting names that might be prospects?
Do you spend a lot of money learning how to follow prospects on line, so you can guess where they are in the decision making process?
Has all of this activity substantially increased your ROI?
What you’re forgetting – or ignoring – is that no matter what information the buyer needs, or how often they (and their colleagues) visit your site, or how deftly follow their activity with your ability to track ‘Digital Body Language,’ at the end of the day, you will not be there when they sit down to decide. Nope. The internal decisions that buyers make to choose a solution, to decide to make a change, to select one vendor or solution over another, are off-line. That’s right: you are not there when two department heads have an arguement about which vendor they prefer, or when the tech folks start clamoring to take over a project, or when a partner shows up with a good-enough solution.
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Prospects Aren’t Really Prospects
Feb 1, 2010 Sales Related
Sales has a goal: find a prospect with a need and sell a solution. You can call it anything you want, use all of the fancy terms about serving your client, be a Trusted Advisor or a Relationship Manager, do whatever you can to understand need and make nice. But at the end of the day, your job as a seller is to place your solution.
Unfortunately, we do it the long, hard way: we assume – and this is a baseline assumption in the sales industry – that when we notice a ‘need’ that our solution can fulfill, we have a prospect. Yet we consistently close 7% of our ‘prospects.’ Obviously our assumption that a prospect with a need which our solution can resolve is a specious assumption.
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Tags: buyer, need, prospect, Trusted Advisor
What do Sellers Need to Understand – and When?
Oct 19, 2009 Sales Related, Top Posts
As a sales professional, you learn early on that your need to ‘understand’ a buyer. But what, exactly, do you need to understand?
On the sales end of the equation, you NEED to understand the prospect’s situation to make sure you are placing the appropriate solution in the right place. This same data will give you ability to fine-tune your presentation and pitch to ensure the buyer understand how your solution will fit in their environment. You also need to understand the buyer’s vision, and criteria for Excellence.
There is no way to truly understand anything else.
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Tags: buyers, gps, issues, need, new skills, partner, seller, understand, vendor
Buyers Don’t Buy Because You Sell Well
Sep 18, 2009 Buying Facilitation®, Top Posts
Buyers buy when they want to resolve a business problem.
Buyers buy when all of the members of their decision team – all of the members – agree that it’s time to resolve a problem.
Buyers buy when their internal system – their culture – knows how to make room for something new without disrupting the status quo.
Buyers never buy on price unless everything looks equal.
Sales people waste their intellectual capital by merely focusing on pushing a solution: they know so much about the environment their product resides in that they can be true decision facilitators for buyers.
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Tags: buyers, culture, need, price, sellers, solution, systems
Buying Decisions: What Happens Behind-The-Scenes
Sep 14, 2009 Decisioning & Change Management, Top Posts
For some reason, it’s very difficult for sales people to think beyond ‘need’ and ’solution:’ We tend to think that because the buyer’s need matches our solution, and because we’re professionals who ‘care,’ the only thing buyers need to do is choose our solution.
But if it were that easy, buying decisions would get made more often in our favor. We certainly would not lose as many sales as we do. The problem is that the buying decision is so, so much more complex than we can imagine as we stand on the outside looking in.
Sales mysteriously treats an Identified Problem (my word for ‘need’) as if it were an isolated event. But it’s not. There are ramifications to any change, and the ramifications are ones only buyers can see from the inside and we will never be privy to.
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Tags: buyer, buying decision team, buying decisions, identified problem, isolated event, need, sales, seller, solution
Managing Off-Line Decisions
Aug 28, 2009 Decisioning & Change Management
Where do our prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back?” Most of us guess, but really, we don’t know where they go.
Where they go, in fact, is to get ahold of their colleagues and figure out how to get agreement for whatever outcomes the new solution will cause within the buyer’s environment. We rarely think that way as sellers: we see a problem, figure out if we have the appropriate solution, and go forth, fearlessly, to match the need with the solution.
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Tags: behind-the-scenes, budget, need, off-line, sales, solution
