Elevate Your Sales Approach: Mastering Client-Centric Strategies

Discover the pivotal shift from presentation to conversation in sales for unmatched client engagement.

The salesperson was determined to provide the five leaders a high-stakes retail sales presentation. His slide deck contained 96 slides. Many of them added nothing new. For example, he had a slide for each client testimonial in B2B sales. A number of people suggest that clients would prefer a value-driven sales conversation instead of a presentation. But this salesperson was dead set on marching through every “Why Us” slide over the 90 minutes he was allotted.

The client was a very large retailer who would be spending $5 million annually, should the salesperson win their business. He brought his CEO and a couple of people from their operations team in retail sales. He believed he was the smartest person in the room. Once they started the conversation, the salesperson started the presentation and worked his way through all 96 slides, ending with a minute to spare. Proud of his accomplishment, he asked the five leaders if they had any questions, only to hear one leader say, “We had a lot of questions, but I am afraid you are out of time.” I only know this story because the CEO shared it with me after the disaster of a meeting.

Enhancing Sales Experiences and Performance

Now more than ever, you must provide your contacts a client-centric experience in sales. It is important to know that the sales conversation is—or should be—designed to create value for the client and their stakeholders. When you believe and behave as if the conversation is about your company, your solution, or anything else you believe might help you get what you want, the largest variable in winning or losing a deal is the quality of B2B sales conversations.

Your contacts are also judging you on your performance. Here is an example: You have a first meeting, and your contact asks you to call them next week to schedule a follow-up meeting in sales. Naturally, the contact doesn’t take your call or respond to a desperate email trying to get on their calendar. This is evidence of poor performance.

Aligning Self-Orientation with Client Intentions

You want to win your client’s business, so you adopt B2B sales strategies that will help you win deals and be successful. You also have a quota hanging over your head, and winning is how you retire your quota before the year ends. Each of us has a part of us that is self-oriented. But when you project that you are trying to get what you want, your contacts can sense that you are more interested in your own win instead of what your B2B client needs.

This is often a difficult idea to convey effectively, but it will change how you go about selling. First, don’t try to win the client’s business. Instead, your intention should be to create value for your contacts. These intentions may include your help explaining why they are struggling to solve their problem. Your intention may also find you helping the client to understand how best to go about making a rare decision in retail purchasing they must get right on the first attempt.

Let us go back to the salesperson who punished his contacts with a boring, unnecessary, self-oriented, and poor experience. He was pursuing his goal without any concern about what the client might need. When we look at this story and ideas about experience and performance, it was clear this salesperson believed that his company and their solution should cause the client to buy from him.

Strategies for Improved Sales Outcomes

In Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative, you will find a chapter that removes any possibility of the mistake that is the legacy approach and the awful, deal-killing strategy that is “Why Us.”

Here are the five rules that will help you improve your first meeting outcomes in B2B sales:

1. Don’t mention your company: Your contact agreed to a meeting, and they know what company you work for. You are free to focus on your contact and what they need.
2. You may not refer to your clients, their results, or the massive list of logos your company serves. Your contacts are more interested in their company, not the other companies you serve.
3. You are not allowed to share your solution with your contact. Your contacts know you have a solution, but in early conversations, it is often too soon.
4. You must not try to build rapport early in the sales conversation. Rapport is important, but it now comes later in the conversation, as your contacts need help with some important outcome. They are not trying to make a new best buddy, even if that will be true later.
5. You may ask no questions about their hot button, pain point, or problem. You should already know the problems you solve, which is why you asked for a meeting.

All of these conversations about “Why Us” are better used later in the sales conversation when it makes more sense. I will not leave you hanging here, as I know you want to know what to do in the first meeting. Our modern sales methodology and our B2B sales training would have you start with an executive briefing, proving you are credible, while replacing “Why Us” with “Why Change.”

Conclusion

It is important that you remove the old, outdated, and ineffective sales strategies that are not able to create value for your sales champion and their teams. Your focus now should be on adopting modern methodologies and the strategies and tactics that are designed to provide your contacts with a better experience and the better performance you need to succeed in causing your contacts to prefer to buy from you, instead of one of your competitors.

If this is the first time you have encountered some of these ideas, concepts, or strategies, it may clash with how you have sold in the past. You may need to spend time with these ideas. Two books that will help you see this clearly are Eat Their Lunch and Elite Sales Strategies.