Today I would like to focus on a topic that is usually ignored by most sellers.
With the advent of the Internet, more and more customers have information literally at their fingertips.
In the past, as the information was not available, customers were forced to request meetings with salespeople, often with no other focus than to get free training on the solutions.
Nowadays, as most of the information is available on the Internet, most clients don’t give a damn about the meetings and only call us when they need to ask for a proposal or clarify something a little more complicated.
If we place ourselves on the customer’s side, this even makes a certain sense, as it makes the process more effective and less permeable to the influence that the salesperson can create.
Many of the salespeople we work within the integrated training and commercial coaching programs report to us that today, in their sector, they hardly see the real customers anymore.
They are there, but they don’t make themselves known except at the very end of the process.
What is reasonable is to analyze the available solutions, collect the information, select 2 or 3, and pass the process to the purchases for them to ask for prices and squeeze the most incautious.
But you ask, well, how can we sellers deal with these situations?
The question arises on several levels.
The first level we have to look at is the lack of time or sometimes laziness the salesperson has to learn more about their solutions.
Imagine what it’s like to come to a customer for a meeting, and often he knows a lot more than we do about what we’re selling.
If you get some profiles a little more complicated, let’s say challenging, you will probably enjoy the toying with you like a cat with a mouse.
Salesman: “am I not an expert?”
Have you heard this phrase in your company?
Yeah, I probably have.
One of the ways we deal with the expert client is precisely to know more than he does.
That is, invest time to learn in-depth about what we’re selling, their business, and their market space.
With everything we have to do on a day-to-day basis, it often becomes difficult, but what experience as a salesman tells me is that the investment we make brings a big reward.
When a salesperson speaks with authority and knowledge about what he’s selling and the client’s business, a strange phenomenon begins to happen.
He is no longer seen by the customer as a sales assistant and begins to appear in his eyes as a consultant or if you want an expert.
And as you can imagine, the expert convinces and as a consequence sells!
Now, at another level, the information that companies often make available to their customers is extensive.
Think with me, if everything your customer needs is available on the Internet, why does he need the seller?
Yes! Probably for nothing.
If you want your customers to call you, make sure they need your help.
Instead of making everything available on the site, make only the essentials handy, and explicitly put something like this in writing:
“For more information…”
May sound basic, but the experience of working with companies in designing successful business strategies shows us that this is one of the most frequent mistakes.
Either the site is a stain and not at all organized or presentable, or it’s too much.
Here, common-sense rules.
Provide information, but always keep some part of the data to give personally.
Next, for another level of analysis to finish this article.
What to do when you are asked for a proposal, seeming that the client already knows everything that you have to offer?
Use a strategy of not sending proposals or prices without a face-to-face meeting with the client.
It may seem a bit extreme, but in large projects or more complex solutions, it makes perfect sense.
Sending quotes or proposals, just for sending, usually leads nowhere.
We are just cannon fodder for our client to chew prices in a simultaneous consultation process with several of our competitors.
If we are going to invest time in responding to a proposal, which, as you can imagine, has costs that in some cases are even high, the least our client can do is to give us 30 to 60 minutes for a meeting to analyze their needs.
We have had cases of companies we have worked with that even implemented a policy of not sending a proposal without at least a meeting with the client.
What we have detected is that from the moment that policy was established, the business process became more assertive and often more effective.
Much of the waste, in terms of proposals, that usually accumulates in sales pipelines are dropped.
This week take a moment to think. Is your commercial strategy excessive in terms of the information you provide to your customers?
Also published on Medium.
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