You want the customer to view you as more than a sales person. You want them to view you as more than a consultant. You need them to view you as a trusted advisor.

Only then do your views, your comments, your suggestions, your advice actually hit home to the client and make them pay attention to the ideas you bring to the table. So how do you bring this value, this creativity, to the attention of the prospect you have in front of you? Here are the four dimensions of being a trusted advisor:

1) The value you bring to the client’s company; this is the essence of what makes you who you are. The concept of people buying from people they trust has never been truer, and how you sell your own personal value will determine which way the sale goes.

2) The value your company’s resources bring to the client; these will be judged in the future by the prospect, but can create a firm foundation for growth now. What back-up, guarantees, warranties and such-like you can offer are important, but what you as a company can offer in backing up the validity of your support means even more to the prospect and their future business.

3) The value your solution brings to the client’s company; how they will benefit and prosper from what services you can provide for them will boost your chances of becoming the partnering company with them.

4) What you and your company add to the value your client brings to its own customers; this area is sometimes missed by salespeople, because they are considering their own products and services more than the customer’s customers. By providing market opportunities for your client to exploit turns you into a valued team member for their business, and creates a position of trust.

By ascertaining what value you bring to the client in these four dimensions, you build your reputation and trustworthiness at all levels within their business. And that’s the way you build toward being a trusted advisor.

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

The days are long gone since you could pitch up at a client’s office, tell him about your products and services, do a little negotiating and close the deal. Today, the emphasis is on building relationships, long-term and mutual.

To do this, the salesperson needs to earn the right to continue the discussions, build integrity, establish reliability and offer the confidence to understand and recommend solutions.

How can you do this in today’s environment? Well, clients are looking for these things:

* Up-to-date knowledge of their industry and their business. There is simply no excuse these days for turning up ignorant of the prospect’s business. Asking the question “So, tell me what you do”, is the biggest warning signal to the prospect, because it means you haven’t done your homework and it shows that the prospect would have to do all the background work for you if he did start working with you. The message you are sending is you are more interested in your product than their company, and the prospect will wonder what else they will have to do to help you out.

* A readiness to exchange ideas between your company and theirs. Clients are looking for support mechanisms between you, so they can ascertain how the support they can get from you will mean greater market opportunities for them. The more you can identify the correlation between their company and yours, the greater the chance they will consider working with you.

* A long-term alliance between you and them. This alliance will achieve a great amount for the client, and that’s where your emphasis in the relationship should be made. If you just rely on transactions, your products and services will be commoditised by the client, and you’ll end up talking price and discounts. Forge an alliance with all parts of their business, and you open up relationships that will survive price issues in the long run.

* Suggestions on how they can improve their business and discover new markets. If you can become their ally and help them see how your products can open up new markets or build on existing ones, they will see you as a preferred partner and approach you for advice, guidance and recommendations when the going gets tough. You’ve definitely build up a good reputation when that happens!

Build your strategic plans with your prospects and they will soon become loyal clients.

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

Many salespeople have heard the reasoning behind why they should be concentrating on consultative selling, and may have even tried to achieve that end goal.

But many more have wondered how they actually start on the road to consultative selling, so here are some ideas to get the ball rolling and the confidence flowing:

Firstly, don’t talk about price or cost to your prospect; talk about investment. Price is a cost and has a negative value in the mind of the buyer. Customers want to pay as little as possible and still get great value. On the other hand, investment signifies a return on that investment and customers will gladly pay out to receive a larger return in exchange. Get the prospect thinking about how they can invest in your services, and the whole conversation changes.

Secondly, talk about your product/service as monitory value applied to the customer’s business. You can assign values to benefits such as reduced lead times or down time so that the customer knows exactly what value they will get from securing a deal. You can also add the positive side of the equation, too, so the prospect will see how achieving their goals could be measured in monitory terms.

Then, change your focus from standalone sales to a relationship of recurring sales. A customers profit-improvement proposal should not be a one-time event. Instead, you should aim for multiple streams of new business that can be predicted. Once you can prove that your products and services improve profit reliably, over and over again, then you becomea real partner to the customer.

If you follow these steps effectively, there should be a solid movement towards you offering a consultative approach and mind-set to your customer base.

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

Our buyers have changed over the past few years. Those who were around in the early part of this century have either been replaced, moved on or changed the way they buy.

Selling in the same way as we always have means we miss out on opportunities, because the buyer who bought from us with that style doesn’t exist any more.

Today’s buyers are more sales savvy, have different needs and offer more challenges than ever before. What can we do to meet these new challenges?

I believe there are three key skills you can develop that will increase your chances of gaining more business:

Become more collaborative and consultative in your role

Become more proactive with your best customers

Widen the difference between you and your competition

Let’s take these in order:

Becoming more collaborative and consultative means identifying how you can build and maintain a relationship with your buyers, partnering with their organisations. Collaboration means working with people inside and outside your company to create close working relationships with people who can help their businesses thrive in the current economic climate.

By collaborating you will not only learn about the products your customers sell, but also be able to use that expertise to better serve your customer as a true subject matter expert, not just a knowledgeable sales person.

You need to understand and demonstrate the real impact you and your product will have on the customer and their objectives.

By becoming a collaborative resource your customer will not only see more value in your meetings, but begin to rely on you as a source of valuable knowledge about the industry and the processes they need to deal with day to day. This allows you to move the discussion from the product or service and onto areas that will make a real difference to the way your customer markets their services to their customers.

Get into your buyer’s world, and understand their market through their eyes. This gets you more engaged with the customer, offering more than just the products and services in your portfolio

Secondly, you need to become more proactive. We have often talked about why buyers buy…to relieve the pain of the current situation or grow towards an opportunity in the future. Without that movement, most buyers will stick with what they currently have, without realising the opportunities they are missing, or are willing to tolerate what they know is inefficient. Some prospects have stopped looking because they believe there is no alternative, or no affordable alternative.

As a proactive seller you need to understand and focus on the fact there is a viable cost effective alternative with a real return on the investment they have to make. You need to focus on the cause, not the symptom.

This helps you develop a solution that the prospect maybe had not considered before, offering a direction and a way out that will assist their business to move in a direction that they hadn’t seen or though of before. This is where the true partnership starts to develop and the prospect becomes a customer or client that comes to rely on you as a solution to their problems.

Next we look at widening the difference between you and your competition. In my ‘Sales Person’s Crisis’ Book (you can download your free copy below), I talk about how much more knowledgable customers have become these days, and how important it is that you take your products away from being classed as a commodity. Many buyers we talk to find it difficult to differentiate all the services and products that are available to them.

So what can you do?

You can start by building value in the customer’s eyes before you start to sell. This may well involve taking the product out of the equation and differentiating by what you as the sales consultant can offer that the customer would miss without you. This means your approach and process become the differentiators. What value does the customer get by dealing purely with you?

How much do you know about the customer’s business? Their industry? Their products? Their customers? Their competitors?

How much more can you help them with than their current suppliers can, so they come to see you as a business partner rather than just a salesperson, like all the others?

If you can consider yourself as being collaborative, consultative and proactive, there will be every reason for your client to see you as a business partner of real value to them, now and in the future.

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

There are many levels of service that you can achieve with your customers, and many salespeople are quite happy to achieve the status of supplier to their businesses. At this level, you continue to offer products and services as and when the customer needs them, and the relationship rarely goes beyond making sure the goods are delivered on time.

Some salespeople, however, build up closer relationships with their customers to the point where they become a trusted advisor to them, offering much deeper information and much better assistance for their future needs.

So how do you become one of these trusted advisors, creating a partnership that will be of mutual benefit to both sides?

Here are some examples of what you need to do to prove you can be of major benefit to their business:

1) You must understand your customer’s short and long-term goals, objectives and priorities, as specifically as possible. Ask where they see their market share being in the near future and what their plans are to achieve that. Get close to them on financials, as the more you know in these factual areas, the more you can assist in their buying processes to help keep them on track.

2) You must understand the company culture and its values. By doing so, you can link in with the way they operate and offer advice on how your services can add to that value base.

3) You must understand the customer’s decision-making process. What I mean by this is you must be sure you know the people involved in making choices, not just in respects to your products, but also in other areas of decision-making.

4) You must understand the needs of your customer’s customers. This will allow you to advise on the best way of marketing your products to the end user. You know you products and services better than your customer does, so help them achieve their goals by advising them on how to sell them.

5) You must understand how your customer’s competitors work. Do some research on what their competitors are doing at the moment and present it to your customer. You will get lots of thanks and loyalty because very few of your competitors will think of doing this.

6) You must understand the opportunities that exist for your customer in their market place. How competitive are they? What major USPs do they offer to the market? By knowing this information, you can offer trusted advice when it comes to new campaigns and products.

By becoming a trusted advisor to your customer in these areas, you make yourself an invaluable resource to them and create reasons for loyalty in the future. It will take away the attention from price because you offer something more valuable than money. And that’s something your customer will always thank you for.

Happy selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

What’s happening in sales in 2010 has been predicted for a long time now. By whom? By your customers.

You have been warned! The way we sold in the nineties and even the early part of this century is now dead. Or it should be. Why?

Because the type of customer who bought in those days isn’t around anymore. Even if they are still the same person, the change in the global economy has changed the way they buy.

Research has shown that today’s buyer wants to be treated differently. So how can you be a successful salesperson in 2011? This is what they want you to be:

1. An Engager – The modern buyer wants to work with a sales person who is engaging and will go out of his or her way to “help” the customer. This sales associate has a visible and obvious sincere interest in the needs and desires of the customer.

2. An Educator – The study found that customers want a sales person who is an expert in everything there is to know about the product, service and the company. The buyer also wants the sales person who can educate them and to teach them.

3. An Expeditor – This is the sales person who is sensitive to the customer’s time and gets things done quickly and correctly the first time.

4. Authentic –  Customers want a sales person who is “for real;” genuine and sincere.

When looking at the above four traits, you can see that they all fall under one general category—education. The modern buyer of today wants to deal with sales people who are more educated than they are; they want an expert.

None of the other qualities are possible if the sales person is not a bona fide expert.

Sales people are going through a bigger crisis today than they have for a long time. But all is not lost. Some sales people are doing very well out of the downturn and cutbacks. If you want to know what to do, download my free report that gives you details on how to get real in this changed world of selling. Putting the ideas into practice will create many more selling opportunities for you.

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

‘If you build it, he will come’. Remember that line from the film Field of Dreams?

Well, you would be wise to follow Kevin Costner’s advice and build it yourself.

Build what? And who will come?

If you don’t build it, you won’t be around in 2011. Or at least you won’t be as successful as you could be.

What should you build? I’m talking about your ability to read how your clients’ businesses are going. In other words, you need to build your business acumen. It’s a Latin word meaning sharpness, keen insight or shrewdness.

Naturally it’s important to have all the sales skills that will differentiate you from your competitors. But you will need more. Much more. Let’s look at what average salespeople do today:

• Average salespeople struggle to understand how their own company competes and wins business, and they look for situations that don’t fit their company’s target market. They try to sell on price when their company isn’t that competitive.
• Average salespeople struggle to speak business language with their prospects. They lack the understanding to be able to discuss the issues, challenges, and opportunities their clients are facing a way that means something to their prospects.
• Average salespeople don’t comprehend the financial metrics that affect their prospect’s business, so they can’t provide any solutions to the challenges those metrics throw up.
• Average salespeople cannot explain how their solutions create a better future for their prospects or how their value over the competition is of great benefit to them.

On the other hand, great salespeople create value to their prospects by building their business acumen:

• Great salespeople understand their own company’s marketing strategies, their own company’s unique value proposition and how they compete against others in the marketplace.

• Great salespeople sell symbiotically, knowing how their clients compete in their markets, knowing their client’s unique value propositions.

• Great salespeople are able to discuss financial and business figures easily and comfortably, helping clients see the value of the product or service to their business.

• Great salespeople use their business acumen to pinpoint specific areas where value can be created with their products and services, to communicate how that product will create a competitive advantage to the client, and develop a solution for future business that will take the client into new markets.

Up to now, sales acumen may have seen you through the tough times, but for the future, it may not be enough. Build your business acumen, your knowledge of how businesses work, particularly your current customers’ businesses, and you’ll find your customers will come.  You’ll be able to offer much more quality to your clients and prospects, and avoid being seen as ‘just another salesperson’. And that can only be good for business!

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

Your ability to sell is most often tied in to your ability to help customers make the best decisions for themselves and their businesses.

Having seen many salespeople try to persuade customers by telling them how good their products and services are, we have written many times of the need to put on the buyer’s mind-set, see things from their perspective and determine what makes them make the decision to buy.

How others make decisions was the subject of a study by Daniel Kahneman, who developed ‘prospect theory’ and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002.

Kahneman’s studies describe how people make choices in situations where they have to decide between alternatives that involve risk, e.g. in financial decisions. Starting from empirical evidence, the theory describes how individuals evaluate potential losses and gains. Interestingly, in its original form,  the term prospect referred to a lottery!

How does this apply to us? Well, here are six points from Kahneman’s work that help us understand how customers can be helped to make decisions:

1. Anchoring. Do more or less than 15% of the population have life insurance? The question is anchored around 15% and you are getting your customer to start with that figure in mind. So, before you start dealing with figures, have an anchored figure set the tone for the discussions.
2. Loss aversion. Losses to a customer could be rational and economic. How much would they lose if they didn’t take up your offer? Remember also the emotional losses they might encounter if they don’t go with you. How would they be made to ‘feel’ by their end-users or stakeholders if they made the decision to change?
3. Social proof. Have you noticed that sports fans like to wear the same kit as their heroes? At the deepest level, they think ‘If it works for my favourite player, maybe it could work for me’. Show your customers how others have succeeded in using your services and the benefits they gained. This social proof is a good tool to get people to make a risk-free decision.
4. Framing. Do you prefer savings and investment or cuts and spending? Basically, they’re the same thing, only the language is different. By framing the words in such a way that you are talking the same language as the customer, you enjoy a closer rapport and understanding.
5. Repetition. Advertisers know this. By maintaining a stance on a subject, you use their convincer style to recommend a decision to the customer. Repeating an idea three times in a conversation hammers the idea home.
6. Emotional credibility. Make your point relevant to the specific customer you are with. If the recession didn’t affect them, no amount of description of the economic situation will hit home. But if they had to close businesses and set up again, the recession will have a major credible impact. Persuade them from their vantage point, and you will have a good basis for decision-making.

Decision-making is emotional, and if you recognise this in your discussions with customers, it will help you to get to the decision-making point quicker.

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

One of the most powerful strategies you can develop as a sales consultant, is the ability to manage, and effectively lead, the relationships with your clients. And if you adopt a strong profile with your best clients, it opens up so many avenues for you to identify further opportunities where you can assist them. When you manage customer relationships well, you prove yourself an  invaluable asset to your client. Here are some ideas you might want to consider in driving forward the long-term business relationships you have:

Understand who has the power in the company. This isn’t just the hierarchy that exists, but the people who actually make decisions. And who are the people who are coming through the ranks?

Get to know how these people make decisions. Do they require long-term strategies explained to them, or are they looking for quick wins?

Make sure you have lines of communication open with these people, and you know how they want to be contacted

Build the relationships with these people by showing how much value you offer them, in every aspect of the relationship

If someone in the client business leaves, make it your business to check in and see if there’s anything you can to help the new person create a good impression by dealing with you

Assess how your company image is being perceived within their business, and manage expectations closely and carefully

Be aware of which competitors your client is dealing with and consistently be ahead of the game by planning your future with them

By being consistent in your relationship-building with your clients, you won’t find yourself panicking if they start courting other companies as well as you. You will always offer something that others can’t, if you manage your customer relationships proactively and efficiently

Happy selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…

Have you heard of symbiotic selling?

Symbiosis is a cooperative relationship between two dissimilar organisms in which both organisms receive beneficial reinforcement (mutualism).

Like a shark and a remora fish. The remora will enter the shark’s mouth and clean out debris, getting food and protection. The shark gets clean teeth and gills, allowing it to swim in new waters more efficiently. That’s in the biological world. What about our world?

A cooperative relationship between the sales person and a customer is the foundation for building a profitable partnership.  Just like the relationship between the shark and remora, you need the customer and he or she needs you.

Symbiotic selling harmonises your products and services with your customer’s needs. It delivers a level of service that makes you indispensable to your customer. It creates a relationship with your customer that is far beyond a transactional arrangement. And it develops a loyalty to your brand that is hard to break.

How will the customer benefit if you establish a symbiotic relationship with them?

Just as the shark will be able to swim in new waters, your customer will be able to enter new markets and identify new opportunities.

How will you benefit from the arrangement?

You will enjoy the special relationship that preferred supplier status will create. And you’ll help develop new markets for yourself as your customer will refer you to prospects you wouldn’t have known about without your new relationship.

By building this close consultative partnership with your customers, you reduce the emphasis of pricing for your products and services, as your client becomes an advocate of your company. This develops trust and builds mutual respect.

Help your customers swim in new waters. Become their remora by offering the kind of service your competition can’t match. Then watch the business relationship (and your profits) grow.

Happy selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
The UK’s #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling
MTD Sales Training

Have you downloaded my latest report “The Sales Person’s Crisis”? Over 10,000 sales pros have.

Click on the image below to find out why you’re very existence as a sales person is in doubt…