Selling Techniques

Why would anyone say “no” to exploring an arsenal of effective selling techniques? For those who want to improve how they sell, there’s already a lot of research backed techniques that you can utilize. Here are seven you should consider:

Describe the value your solution offers from the buyer’s perspective

Create a solution that improves the buyer’s situation by solving their problem

Show the buyer how they will be the hero

Seek to disrupt the buyer’s status quo and present new and creative solutions if your are an outsider

Defend the status quo if you’re expanding the business

Present how your solution will meet what have been “unconsidered” needs

Frame the solution using an emotional lens

Combine Sales Techniques and Approach

Today’s successful salesperson must meet the needs of buyers who expect sophisticated, consultative, and technology-enabled salespeople. The stereotypical B2B salesperson, who fights over leads, only works the phone, and takes clients to golf, is obsolete. Instead, successful selling techniques require the salesperson to negotiate data deals, leverage relationship analytics, and attend industry events. The quintessential 21st century B2B consultant seller will:

Take an omnichannel approach. Today’s business consumers want to interact with sellers inmeaningful and personalized ways, and they want a contextually relevant and positive experience across all of their preferred channels. It’s important for the sales teams to work with marketing to create tailored content that’s relevant for each stage of the funnel so that salespeople engage with purpose and meaningful insight.
Be empathetic and trustworthy. While machines can never foster trust or empathy, they can alleviate B2B sellers’ time constraints. With more time in their day, sellers can develop a deeper understanding of stakeholders’ roles and business challenges, build trust, and project more empathy. In the financial services world, for example, trust is paramount. The ideal consultative seller is someone who can build trust by using the buyers’ preferred channels and by sharing content that speaks to them.
Have strong soft skills. Because B2B sellers can no longer succeed by pitching detailed product knowledge alone, the best sellers will employ refined soft skills, including the ability to communicate value, tell a story, and convey enthusiasm.
Be quick and nimble decision makers. The consultant seller must consume and process data to learn about buyers’ affiliations, challenges, and objectives and make informed decisions. The sales consultants of the future will “have a dashboard that will notify them of different buyer activities across the life cycle and will serve up recommendations for prioritization and triage.” These sellers will process and evaluate that information and then quickly decide how to execute.
Engage in strategic collaboration. Internally B2B sellers will partner with data scientists to identify patterns that help uncover additional revenue streams and will partner with marketers to increase the level of personalization of their messaging. Externally with prospects and customers, they will collaborate around initiatives and objectives, using shared metrics of success, and will co-create proposals, business cases, and account reviews.

Consultative Sales Principles

While there are many successful selling techniques you can employ, don’t forget to lean into the 4 key principles of successful consultative selling: Know your customers, know your products, know your solutions and build long-term relationships.

Know your customers

You need to research the marketplace and your customer. Even more importantly, you need to experience your customers’ products and services. All the reading and research in the world won’t match actually experiencing your customers’ products and services.

Know your products

It’s imperative that you understand the features and functionality of the products you’re selling. This can be especially challenging as the product you’re selling may evolve over the course of the sales cycle. Don’t rely on others in your organization to explain the value of your product to your customer. You must have this knowledge and the ability to expertly explain the features, benefits, and unique advantages of your product.

Know how your products can become solutions to your customers’ needs.

It’s not up to your customer to connect the dots for you. You need to be able to articulate how your product delivers solutions to real business problems. Often this means being able to provide relevant case studies and success stories at the right time and in the right words.

Long-term relationships

Ultimately, successful enterprise selling requires the building and nurturing of strong, long-term relationships.

Elevate Your Status as a Consultative Seller

Salespeople are stretched. They may have difficulty gaining and sustaining attention, buyers may have made decisions in advance of their first sales interaction, or organizations may be migrating to a new model. But it’s also an exciting time. New sales technologies are maturing at breakneck speed, consultant sellers are evolving, and marketers are turning their attention inward to help their sales forces succeed in a digital-first environment. Strategic deployment of personnel and tools and a robust sales enablement plan will allow B2B marketing and sales leaders to rebalance the inequities of the current buyer and seller dynamic. To begin recalibrating your sales organization to succeed both today and further into the 21st century, we recommend that you:

Assess your existing team. Leverage a salesperson assessment to clearly understand and categorize your individual sellers. Although not every salesperson will make the journey to consultant, nor is it necessary, know which sellers have the mindset and makeup to succeed in this role.
Update sales profiles. As we let go of dated stereotypes, we need to revisit and revise profiles for the consultative seller. In the past, we looked for top-tier sales talent to open doors, demonstrate product expertise, and overcome objections, but successful consultant sellers, both today and in the future, will have very different characteristics and skills. Update your profiles to include key attributes that make sense for your buyers and business.
Pursue talent from new channels. Sales recruiting strategies have typically focused on acquiring talent from competitors, industry analogs, or employee referrals. As you modernize your sales organization, consider sourcing sales talent from nontraditional channels such as top-tier business schools and consultancies or from internal marketing, customer success, or delivery teams.
Infuse technology advocates into the organization. As technology and data know-how becomes more critical to sales success, consider integrating specialists, as either advocates or overlays, into your sales organization. For example, IBM is experimenting with embedding data scientists into its sales teams. Having data expertise that focuses specifically on sales behaviors allows forward-thinking sales leaders to tap into an entirely new level of predictive insight, informing the tactics that will prevail both today and in the future.
Reevaluate your sales tech stack. Today most sales technology strategies are set up to deliver seller efficiencies and provide management visibility into activities and pipelines. But an abundance of new and exciting technology options can help restore the equilibrium for consultative sellers. By using automation tools, salespeople can minimize downstream activities and elevate themselves by delivering personalized messaging at scale and engaging in cocreation with partners through strategic collaboration platforms. Revisit your sales technology stack with an eye toward ensuring that your sellers make it rain as we head further into the 21st cent

What is sales enablement?

In a nutshell, sales enablement means equipping sellers with the right resources to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and sign bigger deals. Sales enablement, as a function, evolved in response to the evolution of the enterprise buyer. With a wealth of information available online, buyers are in more control of the buying process than ever before. In many cases, enterprise buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they reach out to a seller.

What does this mean? It means that sellers must take the initiative to reach out to enterprise buyers, winning the buyers’ attention much earlier in their journey. This is a task typically associated with marketing. So, sellers need to think more like marketers, and marketers need to think more like sellers – about the day-to-day experiences of buying and selling.

Sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the enterprise selling process. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.

Ultimately, the goal of sales enablement is to align the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, brand management, legal, and human resources to boost seller productivity and improve the buyer experience. In a nutshell, a sales enablement strategy is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

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