The World Changed
New technologies have enabled – and continue to enable – fundamental changes in the ways we live and work. Most of us are too busy to take time out to think through the implications in detail.
What many of us do experience are new sales challenges that seem to come out of thin air. This includes the mystery of Consultative Selling.
Generally, it is getting harder to close sales. Buyers seem to be more demanding. All they seem to be interested in is price. It all has the effect of extending sales cycles, diluting sales conversion, and forcing up the cost of selling. Buyers complain that selling organisations do not understand their needs.
The fact is the world in which business-to-business sales now take place is very different from the equivalent of ten years ago.
Selling & commoditization
Because new technologies enabled globalization. Globalization empowered new competition, new competition gave customers vastly more choice and force down prices. As a result, enterprises have experienced an inexorable pressure towards.
As a service or solutions provider, the last thing you want is to be seen as a commodity. Quite the contrary. You want to give value and be properly valued in return.
Embrace Consultative Selling
If you are a services or solutions provider in a business-to-business space, you need to embrace Consultative Selling.
Consultative Selling is all about Value Creation. Formulating value propositions that meet the needs of customers and create a differential advantage.
A brief glimpse at Consultative Selling differences.
What
Successful organizations know what they are selling. That may sound blindingly obvious, but it is surprising how many times organizations are unaware about the value they create for their customers.
As the world has changed around them, many organizations find themselves clinging to ideas and propositions that are fuzzy and past their sell-by date:
For example, take a direct marketing agency that was so highly regarded in the 2000s and early 2010’s, but that now finds itself isolated and dwindling in the age of integrated marketing and broad-spectrum agencies. Where is the value it offers?
So, first, services and solutions providers of all kinds need to get clarity around their Value Propositions.
How
Success in consultative selling comes from a different process than has traditionally been used. Gone is much of the world of AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action).
Consultative selling requires a new approach, based on the value creation that can only come from understanding the prospect’s issues and co-creating a solution together.
Who
As the ‘What?’ and ‘How?’ of selling have changed, so has the ‘Who?’. People trained in, and accomplished at, the old rules of transactional selling, traditional account management and other customer-facing areas, find it hard to make the change to Consultative Selling. Not only are the techniques fundamentally different, but they also call for different personality types.
To make the switch individuals need to be accessed in order to determine suitability and training/coaching requirements.
ProAptivity are an independent CRM solution provider. We focus on the implementation, training, and support of highly customised CRM software solutions. Our CRM software provides the customer insights with the tools needed to manage your business, grow bigger, faster with more ease. We also deliver Sales Training that helps organisations embed sales best practice throughout their organisation.
If you need help in understanding why my business needs CRM, maybe some of our eBooks could help! Alternatively visit Maximizer CRM or Pipedrive CRM for more information.
Contact us today on 028 9099 6388 or via info@proaptivity.com. We can help you assess how your business is performing from a sales perspective as well as if your business is CRM ready
