Selling doesn’t work anymore. At least not the way you were taught it worked.
When I entered the profession of selling, it was a game of persuasion. Get your customer’s attention and hold it. Turn on the firehose and drench your customer with features and benefits until they cried uncle. Close the sale, mop up the mess. Deliver your goods and move on to the next one.
As I gained some experience, I observed other salespeople who seemed to be more successful than me. They did something else. They had relationships with their customers. They went to lunch and ball games and played golf together. They still seemed to shower their customers with persuasion about their products and why they should buy from them. But they had established a quid pro quo relationship. The perks were the quo and the obligation to purchase products to keep them was the quid. Less aggressive but creepier. I didn’t love this approach.
Enter needs-based selling.
Then, as I began sprouting a few gray hairs, the game shifted again. Features and benefits were still relevant. Relationships mattered but were more mutually respectful. They didn’t depend on false friendships and capitulation. Company cultures clamped down on buyers receiving gifts from sellers. Manufacturers and distributors adopted new practices that didn’t depend on throwing money and entertainment at customers to sell products.
We salespeople began understanding customer business objectives. We surfaced needs and gaps between the customer’s current situation and the realization of those goals. We developed products designed to satisfy those needs. We made a compelling case of the efficacy of our products and connected the dots for the customer so their selection of our products would be a total no-brainer.
Selling had reached the ultimate in sophistication and precision. The model was built. Now it just came down to which salesperson could follow it most effectively and bank the most sales, right?
Wrong.
The selling paradigm has shifted again.
Think about how you form opinions today in the information age. The social media age. Think about how you decide to make a significant purchase. A house. A car. A mountain bike. A sandwich.
You don’t simply take in information from a single person. A salesperson. You don’t even gather information from a few people or a group.
You are bombarded with information. You seek it actively from a number of sources. You receive it passively from all directions. Each time you are touched by a piece of data, even if it is a degree or two removed from your focused subject, you are influenced. Person to person inputs. Advertising. Social media. News. Many other sources.
Your purchase decision about any product you put more than a moment’s thought toward selecting is an evolutionary process. You can try to map it. But you won’t. It is an airborne phenomenon. Just get used to that.
As a salesperson, you need to understand this about your customer. They make decisions the same way you do. If you spend all your time pushing information at your customer, taking them out to lunch, or filling their gaps with your products, you are missing something.
Salespeople are never off-duty.
People buy things they feel good about from people they feel good about. They feel good about things they encounter in each of the corners of their lives that validate their core values, beliefs, desires, needs. You are simply one corner of that picture. Probably not the most prominent.
Make sure you’re doing everything you can to ensure that your products, your company, and your communication is consistent across all the corners of your customer’s vision. Help point your customer to sources of validation in the public domain. Sources that you don’t control. Let your customer discover the virtues of your products and services in the same way you discover the value of that house, or car, or bike, or sandwich.
Keep your public persona attractive to your customer. Make sure your digital footprint doesn’t leave mud stains on your customer’s carpet. Walk your talk in a way that accidental encounters with you add to your personal brand.
Then let your customers sell themselves. And be ready to deliver the goods.
Lead well.
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