The whole company influences whether the salesperson gets a yes or a no. Everyone has their own task and responsibility. Just like in a beehive.
Anyone who has worked in sales knows how important it is to have a good sales conversation, plenty of prospects and contact with as many people as possible.
Simple sales processes are often about how many balls you can keep in the air. In those cases what you are selling has a low value and requires little emotional involvement from buyer and seller alike.
In more complex sales processes there are plenty of other criteria that need to be met as well. Everyone in the business has to contribute. Here we present 7 conditions for success.
1. You need a product or service people actually want.
Yes, it really is that simple. If your product lacks key features or qualities that matter to customers, a good price makes no difference. The people you see as potential customers simply have no use for what you are offering.
It is cumbersome, and they will have to use something else on top of it anyway. Whether you are buying an IT system or a pair of casual trousers, you want it to cover as many of your needs as possible. A half-decent fit is not enough.
2. You need to know who you are selling to.
You have developed the perfect product, drawn up price lists and made everything ready for delivery. All that is missing now is customers, and they are not always queuing up.
To appeal to a specific group, it helps to know something about the people you are going to talk to.
Read more about prospecting:
Data for action: Prospecting- Part 1/2
Data for action: Prospecting- Part 2/2
It should be a fairly homogeneous group that shares the same needs and that you are able to serve. You should know who they are and what their most important characteristics are. You should know how many of them there are, and what they might be worth.
In sales it is easy to spend a lot of time on the wrong prospects, or to be so wrapped up in yourself and your own message that you never stop to consider whether the people you are talking to are actually in the right target group.
3. You need to know why anyone should buy from you.
Decision makers are well aware of the biggest challenges facing the company they work for. You therefore need to familiarize yourself with what those challenges are, whether they are shared across an industry, driven by a technology shift, a downturn in the economy or something else entirely.
Your value proposition has to describe the "pain" you solve, and ideally also the "gain" (the value you add) they get from working with you. It is absolutely essential that you understand the company you are selling to, as well as the people you meet there.
If this is unclear, go back to your product or marketing department and ask for help in working it out.
Don't forget the emotional side, and remember that people buy from people. When you present why the company should be talking to you in particular, you need to appeal to what you perceive as the decision maker's emotional drivers just as much as you rely on facts.
Spend 80% of your focus on the business challenges of the company you are working with, and 20% on your own product or service offering.
4. You need to know that your customers can become profitable.
If serving the customer takes too many resources, they will never become profitable. Can you automate or set up systems that keep the customer happy while you get involved as little as possible?
Customers want access to material that answers their question there and then, preferably without having to contact anyone. A comprehensive FAQ, short video clips on how to use the solution, a community where they can post questions and direct communication channels are all examples.
In some cases you may work with customers or partners for strategic reasons, where the relationship delivers something other than money, but that should be a deliberate choice. Nor should you have too many partnerships of that kind. They take time and attention that you often need to spend on profitable customers instead.
5. You need the right timing.
There are always triggers that affect the opportunity, desire or need to buy. In B2C it might be a change in life circumstances, such as moving house or having a child. In B2B it might be rapid growth, a new management team, or the company changing strategy or direction.
Even if you have a great product, the customer has to be in the right mode, and that makes it a big advantage to keep track of the triggers that shape buying patterns. Systematic monitoring of those triggers, combined with the companies you want to follow, is a good place to start.
The image shows examples of the kinds of events that are worth monitoring. In the Enin web portal you can pull up news, ongoing court cases, Doffin contracts, announcements from Brønnøysund, changes in ownership and much more. Here with the company SuperOffice AS as an example.
6. You need to talk to both people and systems.
That building relationships is a smart move in sales will hardly come as a surprise to anyone.
By also delivering your products or services through technology that fits the customer's own, you remove a major obstacle. Early in a B2B sales process it is often essential to understand how the customer wants your service delivered, and how you can become a natural part of their workflow.
Taking ourselves at Enin as an example, we need to learn early on what kind of CRM or ERP system our customers use and what is critical in their core work processes. We can then tailor how we deliver data so it creates as much value as possible for the customer, creating a "pain reliever" or "gain creator", to use the terminology from point 3.
7. You need to know what matters most in your customers' day-to-day work.
Studies tell us that more and more people, on average 5.4 of them, are now involved in a decision. That means we have to "give something to everyone".
A customer's working day consists of tasks they perform as part of creating value in the end product. The "pain" each person associates with those tasks has to be met with one or more "pain relievers" and/or "gain creators". All 5 or 6 people involved in the decision need to feel that they gain something, directly or indirectly, by choosing your product.
So there you have some of the conditions for succeeding in sales. Some people will use these points as excuses for why sales aren't working, but it should probably be the other way around. Now that you know what needs to be done, perhaps there is a lot you can influence yourself?
These levers are ready to be used!
If you want to read more about how to get good at data-driven sales, you will find more on that here: Data-driven sales
