How To Avoid Being Treated as a Commodity in B2B Sales

Discover how to elevate your B2B sales strategy and turn challenges into opportunities, ensuring clients see you as an irreplaceable asset, not just another commodity.

Here we will address a B2B sales challenge.

There may not be any better way to learn how to sell than to sell a commodity. Selling something that lacks any real difference from what your competitors sell forces you to become the value proposition. If you understand that your experience and your sales conversation are all you have to win deals, you move away from the way your competitors sell.

Even if you are selling a commodity, you never want your contacts to treat you as a commodity. What follows here is a number of things that will signal you are a commodity, followed by what you can do to be treated as an asset instead.

Being Viewed as a Commodity

You may complain that your client treats you like a commodity, but most of the time, one or more of the following will cause your contact to treat you as just another salesperson. Let’s explore what you may be doing to deserve to be treated as a commodity.

• Use the Legacy Approach: The legacy approach is how people sold decades ago. If you start the conversation by providing a history lesson on your company, followed by a list of your clients, before ending on your solution, this will cause your client to reach for smelling salts to prevent themselves from falling into a deep sleep.
• Believe You Are Not a Commodity: Believing that what you sell is different from your competitors is almost certain to cause your client to believe that you are a commodity, as your competitors all try to make something that everyone does seem different. Unless you are the first person to try to build up something that everyone does, you look like a commodity.
• Treat the Sale as a Transaction: In some deals, selling should be nothing more than a transaction. But for our purposes here, being transactional in a competitive pursuit will confirm you are a commodity.
• Offer a Poor Sales Conversation: A sales conversation that doesn’t create value for your contact will cause you to project that you are fungible, which means your contact could swap you out for another salesperson without losing anything.

Key Tactics to Being Seen as an Asset

If you don’t want to be treated as a commodity, the following strategies will pull you out of the pack of competitors vying for the client’s business. It may take time to build this competency.

• Start with an Executive Briefing: By providing an executive briefing that proves you know what is causing your clients' problems and why they must change. This approach ensures you create value in the first three minutes of the sales conversation. It also makes it easy for the client to find you quite different from your competitors.
• Be One-Up: When you have greater knowledge and experience than your contact, you are One-Up. This requires you to be an expert and an authority in your industry. When your sales conversation proves you are different, despite the fact that you are selling a commodity, it is important to know that you can sell a commodity without being treated like one.
• Lead the Client: These first two strategies will allow you to lead the client. Because your contacts don’t often make the decision they are considering, a consultative salesperson will avoid being treated like a commodity, something that isn’t taught in B2B sales training. Your competitors will lack the courage to lead their clients.
• Gain a Deeper Understanding of the Client’s Problem: Most salespeople want to be an expert on their solution, proving they are no different than other sales reps. You want to be the salesperson who is an expert on the client’s problems. This may be the first time encountering this idea. It may take a couple of readings for you to understand how being an expert on the client’s problem can cause them to treat you differently.
• Focus on the Client’s Decision-Making: The average salesperson is all about their solution, ensuring they are just another person trying to sell their solution. You will make it close to impossible for your contact to treat you like a commodity if you spend your time helping your contacts with the education they need to make the best decision for their future results.
• Adopt a Patient Pursuit: When your competitors are told they need velocity, they project themselves as a This is a B2C strategy, but it isn’t a good strategy for B2B sales. You should want to run out the clock by spending more time with your contacts than your competitors.
• Recognize How to Differentiate Yourself: The way you differentiate is limited to the sales conversation. The person who creates the greatest value is the one most likely to win the client’s relationship and their business.

Insights on Elevating Your Sales Approach

When there is no real difference between you and your competitors, you must shift from the way others sell to how you sell. The shift from selling your solution and focusing on helping your contacts with their decision-making.

Those who have never sold anything but a commodity will eventually recognize that their solution is parity, and their competitors' solutions are also able to provide the outcomes the client needs. You are not going to find these strategies anywhere else, as what shows up here are the strategies of a modern sales methodology and the sales strategies that lead to success in B2B sales.

If you don’t want to be treated like a commodity, don’t sell like a commodity. Leaving this article, look over this list and identify what you might be doing to be treated as a commodity. Then start replacing them with better strategies. Do good work and practice consultative sales.