I recently read an article on how business is changing and
how these changes are impacting sales people.
The author suggests that sales people need to stop selling and add value
for their customers, “If you want to
create revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and drive brand equity, stop
selling and start adding value.” From
my perspective this isn’t a new idea, I’ve seen this throughout my sales career
over a number of different industries, agriculture, telecommunications,
financial services and the oil and gas sector.
If you want to know what the best of the best are doing, regardless of
the industry they’re in, they are becoming business partners and also becoming
a sustainable resource for their customers.
We define a sustainable resource as a relationship where the
customer does business with us because of what we can offer them above and
beyond our products. In other words
their business would suffer if they stopped doing business with us. How many of your customers can say this of
your sales people?
An example of this from the agriculture business where a
young fertilizer rep in New Zealand worked with a customer and built a solid
trusting business relationship. She discovered
that this customer didn’t like the business side of a multi-million dollar
dairy business as much as he liked getting out and doing the hands on
work. The customer trusted his partner
so much that she started leading his business meetings and reporting back to
him. This may be an over the
top example, but it leads to the question, is this customer looking at other
fertilizer suppliers? Is he bickering on
price? What are your sales people doing
to build solid trusting business relationships with your customers?
Many years ago when I first started my selling career in the
agriculture business, I met a sales rep
that was one of our suppliers, a large chemical company. This particular rep said that his goal was to
help me be as successful as possible with my customers as I wanted to be. He said call me whenever you have questions,
whatever your question is, if I can’t answer I will find someone who can. Even if it’s about products we don’t
sell. I will never forget how this made
me feel, here was someone that cared about me and my business. Our relationship spanned many years and his
expertise and experience helped me build better relationships with my customers;
which lead to higher market share and higher customer loyalty. As I said, this isn’t a new concept.
At Dale Carnegie we believe that the consultative selling
approach is a more successful long-term approach to selling, compared to models
like FAB selling and SPIN. These selling
models promote product pedaling and are short sited on the big picture. As our new partner Jeffrey Gitomer says, “People
don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.”
The diagram below shows different levels of selling, where
is your sales team? A true professional
sales person knows when to be all of these things, but if you’re stuck on the
bottom you are likely considered a vendor by your customer not a partner and
not a sustaining resource.
If you think that it’s much too difficult to change your
sales culture think again. We have
successfully done this for many customers over a long period of time. We recently did some sales training for
Business in Vancouver. Their entire
sales staff was trained to become more consultative and less about pedaling
their products. The Sales Manager, Kerry
McDonald said this about his team, “Not
only have I seen a marked improvement in how they build relationships with
their customers, becoming a resource rather than an order taker, we have seen
double digit growth over the previous year’s sales numbers since the completion
of the program. I would recommend this program to anyone who is in the business
of sales!”
