Why Change Selling Blog

Consultative Selling Myths

Sales books, blog-posts and training courses that offer “consultative selling secrets” and magical closing-techniques, constantly amuse me.

Most of the ideas in these so-called secrets are common sense and have been in practice since the “Fuller-brush man” came a calling.

If there truly were secrets to success in consultative selling or any other form of selling, then nobody would know them. Another myth is "Consultative Selling is Dead", but I will deal with that one another time...clearly it is not.

The truth is that there is a growing body of knowledge around consultative selling best-practices that anyone with a Web browser and an ability to read can access.

Great sales people are great communicators with strong ego-drive and the self-discipline, to do on a daily basis the little things that average sales people do not, that lead to successful sales outcomes. 

What is Value-created selling and why does it matter?

Why Responding to Proposals you did not Influence is a bad idea

In sales we get the opportunity to learn lessons by making mistakes and those lessons usually serve us well through our careers.

Occasionally we get to learn the same lessons over again, either because it was so long since the last time it happened and we forgot, or maybe we moved into a new line of business and went along with the buyer's request, because we were learning the ropes in the new market.

In December, I received two proposal requests; an inbound lead and an inbound phone call from seemingly genuine and very nice people. I typically generate about 50 inbound leads per month, but these are not proposal requests, they are downloads of ebooks or whitepapers or webinar registrations.

I don't advocate salespeople selling complex B2B products sending proposals when they are solicited by prospective customers and they come out of the blue. Why?

But what if the buyer has been reading your blogs for a while and follows you on Twitter....what's wrong with sending a proposal?

To understand my reasoning on this point we need to take a closer look at how customers buy and I will use the IMPACT cycle from the book Why Killer Product's don't Sell, by Dominic Rowselll and Ian Gotts to illustrate this point.

Over the Christmas holidays I took my daughter to the London Museum of Natural History, and among other exhibits, spent a good deal of time in the Charles Darwin Exhibit. Darwin has been in the news a lot lately as it’s his 200th anniversary and there are all sorts of metaphors and lessons being drawn from Darwin’s works.

I was struck by the exhibit and his genius and thought about my industry, the technology industry, and how this closed system has recently undergone violent upheaval. I asked a partner of ours, Barry Trailer co-owner of CSO Insights, (CSO Insights is a research firm that specializes in measuring the effectiveness of today's sales and marketing organizations), what his thoughts were on surviving in the current market, and they were insightful

Barry suggested, “Most companies will simply jettison people in a knee-jerk reaction to reduce cost, but this is not adapting to the new environment. The companies with formal sales process that mirrors the customer buying process, those who adapt their sales process when conditions change, are favored to be preserved while companies with informal or tribal sales process will find it very difficult and may go the way of the Dodo".

"Why Killer Products don't Sell" is a revelation and MUST READ for technology sales and marketing leaders for a number of reasons.

1. Firstly, there is original thought in the analysis of the buying cycle and the lifecycle of every purchase in the buying organization. The authors state and I agree that every purchase follows the I-M-P-A-C-T (Identify - Mentor - Position - Assessment - Case - Transaction) process, the difference is that in a mature buying category, this can happen in a couple of minutes for acquiring a "value-offered" product (Dell Laptop), vs. months for an emerging buying category "value-created" = your discontinuous technology.

2. The second key idea is that there are four different selling cultures, depending on the maturity of the buying category. This indeed explains why so many "proven" sales-people and sales managers from well known corporations (value-added or value-offered) fail in early stage companies where the buying category is still being formed (value-created) and a consultative sales approach is required....this is worth the price of the book alone.

3. The imperative is for sales teams to understand where they are in the technology adoption life-cycle in order to more effectively facilitate the buying process; and for technology sellers to align their organizations operational cultures to match the buying cultures of their target markets.

Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts have made a valuable contribution to a growing body of work in the science of professional selling.

We have spoken with both authors and with their permission will be integrating the IMPACT concept and ideas from their book into our Consultative Selling Training courses and E-Learning programs.

Highly recommended!

In the book Why Killer Products Don't Sell, authors, Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts state there are four different and distinct buying cultures, which vary based on the buyers tolerance for risk across the technology adoption lifecycle. Understanding the difference in the four buying cultures and optimizing the supply/value chain to service customers is often an after-thought, particulary for early-stage companies transitioning from start-up to company building. Indeed many large corporations have difficulty in introducing novel products through a salesforce that is accustomed to servicing customers in a mature market.

The Challenger Sale Momentum

The Challenger Selling concept is gaining in popularity based on the number of people joining the LinkedIn Group, the rank of The Challenger Sale book, (currently #2 in Amazon sales and marketing category) and the references to the book on the Internet.

Last week we saw a spat between sales training profesionals in one of the LinkedIn groups, about the veracity of the Challenger model, caused no doubt by the mindshare "Challenger" is generating in the market at the expense of rival approaches.

The Challenger behavior archetype identified in The Challenger Sale research stands out because Challengers produce better results than any other sales behavior type selling complex B2B products and services. Why? Because these individuals bring insight and informed opinion to influence the thinking of buyers and they exert a degree of control on the outcome of a complex B2B buying process.

Got a Killer-Product, but having trouble achieving its and your companies' potential?
These 6 short videos (hosted on Wistia) were produced by Dominic Rowsell of Hot Rivet. Dominic is author and copyright holder of "Why Killer Products Don't Sell".

In this series, Dominic provides new insights on buying behavior as he explains that there are four and only four buying cultures and suggests how to adapt B2B selling to match how customers buy. He explores the IMPACT (Identify-Mentor-Position-Assessment-Case-Transaction) buying process that every B2B transaction will go through, from initial idea to a purchase order.

If you are interested in The Challenger Sale method, you will see some very clear parallels in the Value-Created Selling model as the Mentor phase in the IMPACT buying process is typically where Challengers engage.

Regardless of your company and its stage in the technology adoption life-cycle, the IMPACT cycle and four buying cultures are relevant and useful for marketers and sellers to understand how people buy and what is needed to move a deal through each stage in the buying cycle.

Introduction to the Four Buying Cultures

This article is the third in a series of articles on aligning marketing and sales with buying behavior and it will be of value to sales and marketing professionals who wish to adapt their process to align with buyer behavior.
 


The first article in the series, "A Guide to Aligning Marketing & Sales Engagement with Buying Process" discussed buyer behavior and how it is affected by risk. Last week's article, The B2B Buying Cycle and How to Influence it, pt. 1 is an in-depth review of the formative stages in the buying process and the role of sales and marketing in early adopter engagement as well as the risks to the supplier.