Discover why your clients are seeking a different type of salesperson and how you can adapt to meet their evolving needs.
Your clients and mine want us to be a certain type of salesperson. If we do not meet their expectations, they may refuse to buy and will look elsewhere for the type of salesperson they need. It is no longer true that you can win deals simply by asking about their problems and shoving your solution in front of them.
What does seem true is that your clients want to work with a salesperson who knows far more about their problems. They also want to work with a salesperson who is consultative, meaning they can provide counsel, advice, and recommendations. Your contacts are experts in their industry, but they lack the expertise in your industry.
Increasing Challenges in Sales Decision-Making
Perhaps you are aware that over the last decade it has become increasingly difficult to make a decision to change. If you haven’t noticed this, you may be a little behind the curve. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that buying is quite difficult for buyers.
- Longer buying cycles: First, you need to know that buying is more difficult than selling. But much of the time, buyers are struggling to acquire the insights and information they would need to be confident.
- Uncertainty: When the environment is marked by uncertainty, it causes many buyers and their companies to pause, hoping things get better. When you don’t want what may come next, it can seem safer to delay than to make a mistake. You must be able to provide a conversation that can ensure your client will succeed in spite of the uncertainty.
- Consensus: In the past, you might have sold to someone called “the decision-maker.” You would have found this to be a much easier way to win a client’s business. But in the 21st century, you will find that there are more people in your meetings. I remember the first time I walked into a large conference room with 14 people seated around the table. It can be difficult to include all the departments that may have some issue with your solution, especially in enterprise-level pursuits. See: Building consensus.
- Fear of Failing: When your prospective clients fear that making a bad decision will cause them to fail, it’s difficult to move forward. For many, the devil they know is safer than a new devil that brings new potential problems.
Embracing the Era of the Expert Salesperson
If your approach is to ask your client about their problem, believing that your solution is all the client needs to solve it, know that you risk losing deals by not being able to address the challenges in today’s decision-making process.
The average salesperson is not likely to know why they can get a first meeting with their prospective client, only to fail to confirm a second meeting. This pattern is hard evidence that you are not positioned as an expert in your industry and you are not able to provide buyers with what they need to make the changes that will improve their results.
In a recent pursuit, I spent two and a half hours with senior leaders. At the end of our conversation, my client asked me to meet again in two weeks, where we spent another two and a half hours. This was followed by two 30-minute conversations on a virtual platform. At the end of the sales conversation, the leader confessed that they interviewed all my competitors and were unable to buy from them.
Navigating the Era of Decision-Making
For more than a decade we have been in the era of decision-making. Still, many sales organizations choose to pretend they live in the era of the solution, which ended some time ago.
The reason you need to be an expert in your industry is because you and I are charged with helping the client to make the right decision to achieve their desired results. There is a tremendous gap in most methodologies when it comes to decision-making. Your clients need sales strategies that allow them to acquire the education they need to make a rare decision and get it right on the first attempt.
Shifting from Information Disparity to Parity
Because you and I know more about the client’s problem and the decision they face, you need to create parity by recognizing what your contacts don’t know and providing that information so they can move forward with the change they need.
In part, this is what we do when we use an insight-based sales approach and match it to a consultative one. This is what successful salespeople and sales organizations do to win deals.
If you leave a bunch of open loops for your client, you can expect them to seek one of your competitors to close them. Sales is a meritocracy. At any time of your choosing, you can change how you sell.
If you want to pursue this path, you might start by studying Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition and Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative. Both of these books can start your transformation into an expert and an authority.
