From Selling Products to Building Trust

Today’s Selling Environment and How We Got Here…

Selling in today’s market can be frustrating, upsetting, and confusing. There’s a good reason, too. The selling process most companies follow is outdated—developed for a market in a different time and with different needs and priorities. In the past, vendors and their salespeople were the main—and very often the sole—source of information for the customer. The dawn of the information age and the rise of the Internet have irrevocably altered the market environment and have rendered traditional sales processes obsolete.

Today’s more sophisticated and informed customers have numerous and readily accessible sources of information about products, competitors, and industry developments and trends. They no longer want to be “sold” to. Instead, they want to “buy,” and they expect salespeople to help them through the buying process, not simply move them along the salesperson’s sales cycle.

As in Darwin’s theory of evolution, sales organizations must adapt to the changing environment in order to survive. Think about the long-established job of the salesperson. Salespeople traditionally present and explain a company’s products to prospects. The product and its features are, in and of themselves, enough to cause the prospect to buy, as long as the salesperson understands the product and presents it in the best possible light. A personable, affable, and enthusiastic demeanor on the part of the salesperson also helps.

In this new millennium, however, salespeople have a different job to do. They are no longer required to educate customers in quite the same way or provide the same information that salespeople traditionally provide. For one, you, the salesperson, are competing with companies all over the world. You’re also facing sophisticated customers who may know even more about your company, products, and competitors than you do.

• How are you going to compete?
• How do you keep from becoming one of the usual suspects who get the request for proposal (RFP) for the sake of form but not the business?
• What value are you going to deliver to the customer?

As you think about these questions and start to formulate you answer, next week will share with you how “The Sales Game Has Changed”.

Until next time…

Putting the Win Back In Your Sales-
Dan

You’ve just read an excerpt from the book, “Put The Win Back In Your Sales”.   If you’d like to take your sales to the next level and really understand How & Why People Buy, click on the book link to the left and get the book.  You’ll be glad you did!

DAN KREUTZER is an accomplished sales executive, sales trainer, author, speaker, and a Partner of Samurai Business Group, LLC. He has extensive expertise in business development, product and service marketing, and strategic leadership. Dan is a sharp and intuitive student of human behavior, and has fused his observations with a deep knowledge of sales culture to design the Samurai Sales Mastery™ programs. His book, “How to Put the WIN Back in Your SALES,” seeks to shatter the myths associated with traditional selling, and raise the level of professionalism in today’s salespeople.