An Introduction to Sales in the 21st Century

INTRODUCTION

When I started working in international sales, quite some time ago, I lucked out. Not only did I have a great boss who was excited to teach me (and was a great teacher), but I landed in an industry with relatively low competition and a product that sold itself.

At that first job, after being taught how to identify potential clients, I started sending out personalized cold emails. The response rate for these well-researched prospects was about 20%. I would then pick up the phone and call the others - and at the end of the day, among everyone I contacted, I would close about 20%-25% of those initial cold leads without having to make much more effort than picking up the phone.

A well-researched lead was relatively simple to close - but even those that did not close were useful because they helped me generate further leads. So I had emails, a website and the PHONE - and I ended up contacting 100% of the leads - being turned down completely by only 10%-15%. As most of you in sales know, this was an abnormal response rate, and set my expectations for cold calling a little too high.

Those numbers are no longer achievable using the old methods.

Over the last two decades, the world has moved forward considerably and the selling world has moved along with it. Selling like it's 1970 or even 2004 doesn’t work like it used to anymore. The way buyers and sellers interact during the buying and selling process is no longer the same and it is constantly changing with the times.

This book is dedicated to giving the readers accurate information on selling techniques that work in this new business world. It provides its readers with concise methods of applying consultative selling to their businesses and other sales processes, achieving the most fruitful and profitable business results.

DITCH YOUR OLD SELLING TECHNIQUES

It’s not news that the world of sales and marketing has changed drastically over the past two decades. In the past, sales representatives thrived by discovering (or creating) a customer need and selling the feasible solutions they knew best. This method worked to a very large extent because customers didn’t know how to solve their own problems even though they had a better understanding of them. However, with the advent of accessible technology and internet, buyers no longer rely heavily on salespeople to provide them with reliable information about their intended sales; instead, they are already armed with virtual knowledge about the product or service they are interested in.

The traditional method of closing sales was a model that worked with highly trained salespeople trying to align a sales solution with a recognized customer need and demonstrating its advantage over the competitions. This method presented salespeople with a very practical approach to closing sales. A sales representative begins by identifying potential customers who have a basic and imminent need that a supplier or producer can solve. The salesperson gives priority to those who are ready to act. Then, by simply probing and asking the customer further questions, the salesperson can easily identify a hook where he can easily link his company’s products as a solution to that identified problem. But this method was adapted for the 80’s and 90’s – today’s customers are radically departing from their old ways of buying, and successful salespersons that are lucky enough to recognize this shift are also changing with the times.

Old sales skills and business strategies are no longer relevant if you want to keep up with the changing demands of your ever-growing customer base. If you want to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors then you have to adopt a better strategy towards sales. At this point, you might begin to ask, what exactly are the old methods of selling which I should discard? The obvious answer is solution-based push-selling. Top performers in the sales world are radically departing from the concept of solution-selling and have adopted a better and effective sales approach built on the solid foundation of insight-selling/consultative selling.

Solution-based sales do not work in today’s business world anymore. The sales market has become so complex that most customers today cannot fully comprehend what their problems are, let alone distinguish your product from that of your competitor’s. The acclaimed solutions offered by most brands or companies fail to deliver real value for a variety of reasons. Maybe the product or service itself does not deliver on the promise offered, or perhaps the customer is not able to fully implement the product or service. However, none of those reasons matter in the end. The truth is that unless you are able to define, address and connect with real value on your customer’s terms, you lose!

The solution is simple. Stop being a Sales Person and become an expert advisor. Be known – and show your knowledge in the relevant area. Show value. This can be done using a number of techniques.

One such technique is insight-selling. Insight-selling can also be regarded as the Challenger Sale Model, it is simply a way of challenging your prospective buyer’s notion and pointing them to a better sales solution that you think will fit. This is the simplest way of creating and winning sales opportunities and driving change with business ideas that matter. Insight-selling works by shifting a buyer’s perception of his own business and pushing him strategically out of his comfort zone by feeding him with cogent and value-pumping content.

Currently, insight selling is one of the hottest trending topics in business sales and marketing. It is a game-changer in the international business and marketing world. This sales approach is engineered towards reframing a customer’s or prospect’s thinking and driving them towards positively adopting a seller’s solution. Insight selling is important if you are looking forward to differentiating yourself from your competitors.

This new approach to selling proposes that the best and most efficient way to win more sales is to challenge a customer/client’s preconceived notions and lead them to a better and more feasible solution. To sell insight is knowing more than the prospective customer about their own markets! It is all about bringing a completely different value to the table.

Insight selling offers sales representatives a research-based approach to win complex Business to Business sales (B2B). It was originally formulated based on research from a buyer’s perspective in 2014 by Rain Group’s Mike Schultz and John Doerr. It argues that relationships are dead and, as a matter of fact, a salesperson’s ability to build and establish personal connections and trust is the foundation and sole requirement to winning sales in this current market situation. One sales guru who consistently advocates this approach (of creating personal relations) is the highly acclaimed James Keenan.

This new sales model totally abandons the problem and solution technique of the solution-based sales method and rather focuses on providing a proactive source of value to the customers’ needs. With insight-selling, sales representatives play the role of a business coach or a business strategy consultant to the prospective customer, holding their hand throughout the process of buying while still recommending feasible solutions to them.

Insight selling is all about understanding your customers’ problems proactively. It is about collaborating with prospective customers in order to reach a productive end. Insight sellers work by sharing new ideas and perspectives and collaborating with their buyers to form the best possible solution. Insight sale representatives don’t just sell the value of their products or services, they are the value.

The true purpose of this model is to help your prospective customers identify problems they didn’t know they had in the first place. The traditional selling model (i.e. the solution-based selling model) identifies and sells to a buyer’s already identified need. But as bestselling author Daniel H. Pink acknowledged in his book To Sell is Human, Your products and services are far more valuable when your prospect is mistaken, confused or completely clueless about their true problem. Pink’s opinion drives home the point that selling is more profitable when it offers relief to prospects. Insight selling is not focused on confusing your customers or disrupting their already established mindset. Rather, it is geared toward illuminating and providing them with a better mindset. Insight selling projects better value to customers, it shows them something new and better you want them to learn or benefit from.

Selling is never going away, but the door is open for a new breed of salespersons to embrace the wave of insight selling/challenger sales. Sale is an ever-evolving concept and buyers are constantly changing the way they make their purchase decisions. Only those companies and businesses that adapt to these changes will thrive, and those who don’t will perish. Businesses and brands that are looking for sustainable business growth process must be willing to arm their salespeople with insights into their customers. Proactive salespeople should be competently armed with insights that their customers are not aware of, they should be willing to lead their sales conversations with insights at all times.

Buyers no longer need salespeople to guide them through their purchase process as much as they used to in the past. For businesses to stay in the game and retain their customers, they need to find better and more resourceful ways to sell their products. The insight selling/challenger sales model presents businesses with the privileged opportunity to look intently at the hidden need of their prospective customers even before the customers realize such need ever existed in the first place.

When an insight sales representative delivers insight, he shocks his prospective client/customer by breaking their thought patterns, and then jumping in to rescue the customer/client by offering a new and better pattern. An insight seller reframes a client's buying perspective even when they are already halfway down the road of their buying circle. They reframe their clients/customers thinking so that they can sell more value and differentiate their products from the rest.

Buyers are ready to listen to sellers who are willing to bring something new and different – and obviously valuable – to the table. Thomas H. Gray in an article titled Insight Selling Replaces Solution Sales (July 25, 2012) admits that the payoff of insight-led sales in business is repeat sales. He also went further and acknowledged that the biggest driver of B2B customer loyalty is a seller’s ability to deliver new insights. Selling with insights makes your customers willing to pay more, not just for the product or service which you offer, but for the value-added benefits which you deliver in the process of closing a sale with them.

Insight selling is all about making sales differently. With insight-selling, the focus is no longer on how well the sales representative projects his company’s product to the buyer, rather it focuses on the buyer and the buyer's needs. Insight-selling is more effective because it is more targeted at the customer’s needs and presents a collaborative approach between the seller and the prospective buyer to uncover the customer’s needs and approach possible solutions.

The truth is, each customer is different and looking for different things. They also follow a different buying decision-making process and their decisions also vary. This is another important reason that salespersons should be more customer-focused rather than going after prospective customers with practiced sales pitches. To genuinely succeed at insight selling, sales representatives should be more than willing to solve their prospect's problems. They should also strive to thoughtfully discover and present solutions with quantifiable benefits.

Insight selling is not about solving already identified buyers’ problems, it is all about identifying new problems and equally providing solutions for them. The best salespersons are problem-finders and not problem-solvers. Your job as an insight seller is to take a critical look at