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)
“There are no galley-slaves in the royal vessel of divine love—every man works his oar voluntarily!”
—St. Francis De Sales (1567–1622)
“... the generation of the 20’s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
“To the questions of the officiously meddling police Falter replied absently and tersely; but, when he finally grew tired of this pestering, he pointed out that, having accidentally solved “the riddle of the universe,” he had yielded to artful exhortation and shared that solution with his inquisitive interlocutor, whereupon the latter had died of astonishment.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, “the whole is greater than its part;” “reaction is equal to action;” “the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;” and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)