Strategic Selling & Creating Demand With Executives
Posted by
Dan Fisher on Thu, Oct 20, 2011 @ 01:37 PM
Last week I presented at the American Staffing Associations Staffing World, held in New Orleans. Below are the highlights and key takeaways from my presentation, Strategic Selling: Building Credibility and Creating Demand with Executives.
Today's Customer....
- They're more sophisticated in how they purchase products and services and more educated on the products and services available to them
- They're inundated with sales calls...all services look alike, difficult to differentiate which is why they have "bake offs"
- Slower to say
- Result is vendor margins are being squeezed
What Your Customers Think About
- They think in terms of their "current state" and "desired future state"
- Sales people need to understand and recognize this and ask...
- "How happy is the client with their current situation?" What business issues must be addressed?"
- "What is the end goal they are trying to accomplish and how can I help them achieve it?"
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Transactional Selling
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Meaningful Dialogue
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Monologue or scripted
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Natural conversation
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Broadcast message (F&B's)
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No manipulation
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"Telling"
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Real, open, honest dialogue
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Customer's role is to ask questions
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There are no steps: Customer fully engaged in conversation
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Industry Examples of Transactional Selling
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"I'm just checking in"
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"Do you have any needs?"
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"I saw on your web site/Indeed that you're looking to hire...."
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"Our screening process consists..."
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Accept job descriptions as client requirements (sales orders)
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Call 1-2 contacts in an account then stop
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Creating Demand: What Executives Are Interested In
- Industry trends & best practices
- Benchmarking data against competition
- Fresh ideas & insight on hot topics
- Speak like a thought leader
- It's the sales person's job to share this with their clients through educational based marketing
Become a SME to Generate Demand. How?
- Write/repurpose content
- Tweet/re-tweet content of value: build your community online
- Gartner, Aberdeen, Forrester Research
What Executives Expect From Sales Professionals
- Functional knowledge
- Situational knowledge
- Capability knowledge
- Technical competency
- This knowledge allows sales people to build credibility
Preparing For The Executive Level Call
- 10K statement (risk factors)
- Attend client webinars
- Functional business line executives
- Slide presentations (investor conferences)
- Work this information into your dialogue to build credibility and probe for business issues you can solve
Impactful Story Telling
- Executives love to hear powerful client success stories
- Be able to explain your customer's business and their business objective
- Explain the technical/business challenge you faced
- Articulate how you approached the problem and the specific steps and tasks you completed to solve the technical/business issue
- Articulate how your client has benefitted from your solution. How has your client increased revenue, decreased costs and/or better utilized assets as a result of your solution?
Strategic Selling
- Align around your customer's critical business issues
- Be able to connect the dots between your client's business issues and your service offerings (solutions)
- Understand how business issues flow throughout corporate America
- Identify all the executive stakeholders and understand their role and influence in the organization
- Develop and leverage account champions
- When talking value propositions talk outcomes, not processes. Tie results to critical business issues and include metrics when possible.