Assumptions best-selling should never do

Assumptions best-selling should never do

One of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain: "It's not what you do not know what gets into trouble is what is known with certainty that it is not.".

Buying behavior continues to change at breakneck speed. Business-to-business (B2B) actions and reactions crawl providers at a very slow pace. It is not clear to me how many sellers refuse to recognize the changes or simply do not know how to respond - or both. It seems that your old sales approaches still work.

I have identified at least seven bad assumptions that marketers still do.

1. Unit website the same gross income.

For sellers who sell items of great complexity, the website takes me remind fairs bingo. Traditionally, marketers have visitors fill out bingo cards with contact information before getting what they had to offer - mouse pads, soft balls, key rings, etc.

Fast forward two decades and realize that most website visitors now access your site instead of visiting trade show booths. The volumes of information about the products available. Please do not confuse activity with progress. In most cases, site visitors are doing evaluations of products not start buying cycles. Marketing owns the top of the funnel, and visitors are researchers, not buyers. Most coaches are possible for sellers to higher levels when it comes to vendors. Any marketing or sellers have to qualify these cables when trying to access higher levels.

Think about the time of sale and the rate of heat loss when you start earning too low within organizations. Suffice to say that electronic bingo cards potential customers are not the way to higher revenues.

2. Buyers are a blank canvas.

knowledgeable researchers have done their homework by visiting several websites of suppliers and leveraging your social network before you arrive or be willing to talk with a salesperson. Many have been happy to avoid early vendor involvement. They have an inherent distrust of vendors and feel they can try to alter the requirements to obtain a competitive advantage without concern for how they are meeting the needs of the buyer.

The problem is that despite the fact that the sellers agree on their sellers are getting involved in buying cycles later than ever, most leave each individual vendor to determine how they will align with potential buyers who have already established their requirements. The most common mistakes they make are:

He is failing to give buyers the opportunity to share with them what the requirements have already determined. This is unfortunate, since the lack of respect for the full time of the acquisition of knowledge about offers and start from scratch as if the buyer was a rookie. Misalignment equals bad buying experience.

Sellers who ask what the requirements have been established that premature attempts to change the requirements list.This infuriate buyers and sellers and risking not make the short list of suppliers to be considered seriously.

Sellers can not understand buyers who have done research have a vision of the features or capabilities they deem necessary. In order to align with these buyers it is necessary:

They learn what they think they want.

Take them back to phase two - the development of solutions.

When making questions fortunate buyers have come to the conclusion that there were some missing requirements.

The successful implementation of this will provide a better shopping experience, shoppers have come to the conclusion sellers are competent and provide a better opportunity to be the provider of choice.

3. 'I just compete with sellers.

There is a great advantage when a seller can access a key player who has that person from latent to active need, and establish itself as the column A - the provider that most closely matches the needs of the buyer. What is especially gratifying is the fact that if a seller receives a sufficiently high level, budgeted UN initiatives can be financed. Have you ever thought about how this happens?

Even when working for companies that are doing well, top executives do not have a blank check for unbudgeted funds. If a seller may file - or the executive can see - a strong recovery in investment, the executive can take a look at all projects budgeted in a given year and robbing Peter to pay Paul. Which means you can decide not to pursue initiatives that do not feel budgeted provide the most benefit. Upon hearing about this concept years ago in one of my workshops, a student approached me in a jump and realized to try to sell the software to a distributor of heating oil, which had lost a sale of software to a delivery truck!

The best defense against displacement of competitors is to take the offensive. By this I mean working with existing and potential customers to build a strong cost-benefit that will make it more difficult to postpone or cancel spending.

4. The senior executive is the one who makes the decisions.

When working with the committees, many salespeople and their managers assume that the person is the one who makes decisions highest level. Although I think it is important to have access to the widest possible number of members of the committee, which focuses too much on the senior executive may not be the best approach.

I was working on an opportunity to sell sales training and process. While some regional directors have participated in the decision, the primary contacts were training manager (Joe) and senior vice president of sales worldwide (Allan). While we had access to Allan, Joe was the person who needs a thorough understanding of our offerings. Our main competitor left a number of traces against Allan as they were constantly trying to go over your head and hold meetings with Allan.

Ultimately, we won the business, and I asked the manager of training how the decision was made. He said he believed that our offer was a better option for the organization. When he shared this view, Joe left the decision up to him. In many cases, sellers do not know if the person highest level participating will be a rubber stamp or if he / she will want to make the final decision.

The words always and never rarely applied to sales. My suggestion is not visceral hypothesis that the top person in the organization will make the final decision.

Related: A fraudster taught me everything I know of persuasion

5. Proposals sell.

My definition of close is asking for the business. All closing techniques I know, the less effective it is to issue proposals to decision makers who will then distribute it to members of the buying commission. This is a recipe for disaster for many reasons:

In their haste to move along transactions, many proposals are issued too early.

Sellers lose a lot of control proposals are issued once. Many prospects darken after receiving proposals.

For quite complex B2B deals, few executives buyers take the time to read the proposals. Instead, they will move quickly to pricing and have no idea potential value, it is likely to conclude that the price is too high.

Executives who try to read the proposals often give up if / when not fully understand what they are reading.

Much of the potential value of making purchasing decisions must be obtained from executives buyers.

While most vendors see proposals as a step that is closer to them orders, my belief is that the proposals are not sold. Rather, they should provide the necessary information for buyers making purchasing decisions. Therefore, proposals must document and confirm:

desired business results

The reasons for the results can not be achieved

Specific capabilities that address the discovered motifs

The implementation activities

The potential value

total costs

Before issuing proposals, sellers should consider asking the highest level they have called to review a draft proposal before it is issued. It is a way to ensure that it accurately reflects what they wanted to see and there are no surprises in the proposal. If the meeting to review the content of the draft proposal goes well with a person who can make a decision, sellers may be able to close at that point in time.

6. Buyers are going to be honest with you about why you lost.

A college friend of mine uses a technique when he wanted to end the relationship with the people who had been dating for a while. Its aim was to end things and avoid discussing why he had done and who was at fault. The phrase he used was: In doing so, he took the responsibility to end the relationship without saying that there was someone new - and was not usually "I'm not good enough for you.". The conclusion was that it was not worthy.

My belief is that when fixing prices and are fairly equal, top seller earns the lion's share. The elephant in the room is that the most common reason for the losses is that sellers sell more.

When trying to get more useful information on losses, my suggestion is that sellers who lose wait a few months and have someone other than the seller's contact person who believes he is the decision maker. He explains that the company delayed touchdown, and is not an attempt to change someone's mind. On the contrary, you are trying to improve sales efforts of the company and would appreciate if the buyer could explain briefly:

The main reasons for choosing the winning supplier

perceived deficiencies in supply or lose vendor support

Aspects of the sale of effort that could have been done more effectively

Going the distance and losing is the worst possible scenario for manufacturers and sellers. Having invested time and effort, actionable reporting losses can save some benefit. I would also suggest that after a significant victory you may want to interview the key to information on the motives of the actors victory.

7. executives are interested in the offers.

Companies that do not provide guidance on how messages executives make calls to do a disservice to the significant amount of training products they offer. In today's buyer environment, it seems that vendors have few opportunities to share that knowledge, because most mid-level and below personnel prefer to get their product knowledge through the website. The main reason for this is that they are wary of sellers who believe to try to influence their requirements - in other words, to try to sell them.

While interest less personal level is mainly to learn about products or offers, executives have neither the time nor the inclination to acquire knowledge about the products. The first attempts to educate them usually as a result is delegated to lower levels or worse for a premature end to the meeting.

Executives are concerned and interested in improving business results. They want the Cliff Notes version of tenders. By this I mean that they would like a salesperson to discover their business problems, help them realize why they can not be achieved without the seller's offer, then at a high level they have an understanding of what capabilities are needed to achieve the desired result.

Remember, executive calls are all about business results, and have to learn how they can use offers - usually by the lower levels of the organization - to achieve