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 a, developing, sales, strategy, solution, selling and/or technical:
“The hearts of Afro-American women are too warm and too large for race hatred. Long suffering has so chastened them that they are developing a special sense of sympathy for all who suffer and fail of justice.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)
“It makes little sense to spend a month teaching decimal fractions to fourth-grade pupils when they can be taught in a week, and better understood and retained, by sixth-grade students. Child-centeredness does not mean lack of rigor or standards; it does mean finding the best match between curricula and children’s developing interests and abilities.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“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)
“The best strategy in life is diligence.”
—Chinese proverb.
“I can’t quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who ... believe it to be the solution to most of this world’s problems.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don’t know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.”
—Anthony Henley (d. 1745)
“A technical objection is the first refuge of a scoundrel.”
—Heywood Broun (1888–1939)