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Try Selling Them A Better Buying Process

Written by: Todd Youngblood

Article Overview: How much work do you expect your customers to do to for you? How much work do you need your customers to do for you? How much work are your customers doing for you?

Try Selling Them A Better Buying Process

Consider the three following propositions:

1) Customer personal do not have the time and/or wherewithal to address all of their known, significant problems.

This is obviously true. I can't ever remember a customer manager complaining about not having enough to do because there were too few problems to solve. In other words, ifthis prospect is at all qualified, there's an opportunity to sell something. The rep job here is to explain how the solution can solve the problem.

2) Customers have problems they don't even know about.

Also true. Harder to uncover, but odds of closing a deal are better because the rep is positioned to provide substantially more value. The rep job here starts earlier in the customer decision process. It consists of offloading the identification and definition of issues from the customer in addition to explaining the benefits of the solution.

3) Customer decision processes are not robust enough to deal with the complexity of their problems.

If a customer is oblivious to a problem, it is unlikely that same customer can analyze either the problem itself or alternative solutions to it. The sales rep job here extends out later in the customer decision process. It consists not only of identification and definition of issues and explaining the benefits of the solution, but also an analysis of multiple courses of corrective action. The rep would take those alternatives and add spreadsheets and graphs showing their respective cash flows, net present values and ROIs. In other words, the rep would provide a complete business case.

If the roles were reversed, which type of rep would you choose? Would you choose the one who can solve your problem? Or would you choose the one who can provide solutions to problems you didn't even know you had? The answer is neither!

You'd choose the rep who walks in with a complete business case before you even ask for it. You'd choose the rep who thinks from your perspective. You'd choose the rep who continuously improves the quality of your decision process.

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Article Tags: alternative solutions, business case, complexity, corrective action, customer decision, customer manager, decision processes, graphs, nbsp, odds, present values, sales rep job, sol, span style, spreadsheets, style text, text decoration



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Re: Kevin's Case Study #10 - When to become an entrepreneur? - When the bug bite you. A lot of successful entrepreneurs started in their teens or at school. Selling sweets to fellow students or lemonade to firends in the neighbourhood.
Re: This is Marketing Warfare! - Hey GT, I guess this was from a while back, and it'll test your memory a bit but could you possibly elaborate on Unique Selling Proposition? Can you give us some examples of good USPs?
Re: Why Some Websites Sell and Others Don’t? - There is myth that if you build websites people will come. It is never through, you need to do a lot of things to make your website to work. You have many models of attracting traffics to your site. PPC Article Marketing SEO Press Release Banner Ads Forum Posting Classified Advertising Media Buying Solo Ads and a lot of more. If you are not doing any of the above your websites will just be one of the millions of the unknown sites in cyber space
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Business magazines - Fast Company is pretty good if you're into technology although it can be very on the edge. Entrepreneur has become one giant advertisement and I cancelled my subscription. Selling Power also has some useful content if you're looking at improving your sales skills / presentations.


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