Industrial Marketing - Developing A Sales Strategy/solution Selling/technical Selling

Developing A Sales Strategy/solution Selling/technical Selling

The "art" of technical selling (solution selling) follows a three stage process...

  • Stage 1: Sell the appointment: Never sell over the telephone. The aim of the first contact with a prospective purchaser is to sell the appointment. The reason is simple; industrial sales are complex, any attempt to sell over the phone will trivialise your product or service and run the risk of not fully understanding the customer's need.
  • Stage 2: Understand their needs: The best method of selling is to minimise the information about your goods or services until you have fully understood your customer's requirements.
  • Stage 3: Develop and propose a solution: The solution is (of course) developed from your (or the firm's) product or service offerings.

In solution selling, it is essential not to sell the solution before you understand the customer's requirements. Otherwise you may unwittingly sell him on how ill-suited your solution is to his requirements. To illustrate, imagine a couple tells an architect, "We want to build a house." If the architect immediately responds with a design without learning the details of the clients' desires and requirements, he will likely alienate them. If he patiently learns what the clients need, he has a much greater chance of successfully selling his services.

Marketing supports solution selling through methods like account-based marketing—understanding a specific target organization's requirements as the foundation of a marketing program. As research shows, sales success is heavily weighted towards suppliers who understand the customer. In UK research, 77 per cent of senior decision-makers believe new suppliers' marketing approaches are poorly targeted and make it easy to justify staying with current suppliers).

Sales force management has a critical function in industrial selling, where it assumes a greater role than other parts of the marketing mix. Typical industrial organisations depend on the ability of their sales people to build relationships with customers. During periods of high demand (economic boom), sales forces often become mere order takers and struggle to respond to customer requests for quotations and information. However, when economic downturn hits it becomes critical to direct the sales force outward to sell.

Read more about this topic:  Industrial Marketing

Famous quotes containing the words developing, sales, strategy, solution, selling and/or technical:

    ... the modern drama, operating through the double channel of dramatist and interpreter, affecting as it does both mind and heart, is the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition.
    Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

    The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife.
    —St. Francis De Sales (1567–1622)

    Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war?
    Bible: Hebrew, 2 Kings 18:20.

    Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which any thing more than an approximate solution can be had? Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
    —E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)