The amount of consumer’ attention your business can get goes a long way to determine its sales success or failure. Everyday consumer life is filled with endless sales messages from marketers and salespeople. Traditional salespeople have done the rest of us great harm by embracing a self-centered and interruptive approach to selling products and services. An average buyer dislikes being sold directly with alter disregard to their interests, time, and convenience. The obsolete techniques most often used are cold-calling, print advertising, TV commercials, and even junk mail. However, the advancement in technology is making these techniques less effective and expensive. The consumers (B2C and B2B) are terribly short on time for usual sales pitches.
Interestingly, buyer’s priceless attention is gradually becoming a scarce commodity. Consequently, too many businesses are jostling to grab ‘buying attention’ needed for business survival. If you must be heard in the marketplace you need to innovate and evolve your approach to selling.
There are six best practices that you need to keep in mind. These practices will help you to transform your sales process to support new buying habits of people.
#1: Be Truthful to Changing Time
The times are changing so fast. The buying habits of people are witnessing a paradigm shift from the way we know it. As business executives, if you don’t believe you need to tweak your sales process and improve sales performance to align with present day reality, you will be left with only option of shutting down. In the early 90s, you could sit in your brick and mortar store, ask your marketers to share a few handbills to potential customers in the neighborhood. And before you knew it, your store became very busy. Nowadays, not having an online presence means your business will not be found on the Internet where your prospects and customers are spending more time. Customers prefer to shop and make payment online. In fact, they research on the Internet to find out if your competition offers are better. The physical office in this an age is becoming irrelevant for B2C business model. The truth is selling technique needs to evolve with emerging buying habits and lifestyles.
#2: Re-Analyze Your Target Accounts
Targeting the right people for sales is more important than ever before. You will limit the challenges and hurdles on your way to converting leads if people you are targeting are your ideal customers. The innermost wish of every sales rep is to have all the leads become customers. In reality, this is difficult. So bringing in the right targets into your sales funnel is vital. If you make sales pitch about a product to an unqualified prospect, no matter the amount of time in this world he is willing to spend with you, the deal will not be closed.
#3: Understand that Buying Powers Belong to Buyers
Every consumer wants to be in control of their buying journey, and not being sold forcefully. There are different reasons why prospects buy from us other than our brilliant sales pitches. According to Hubspot, 60% of a buyer’s purchase decision has already been made before even talking to a sales rep. It then means that buyers now have better knowledge of products and services through research either on the Web or Offline. So, if your organization can provide educational contents that can help a prospect make buying decision while you have built trust and earned authority in the process, you certainly stand a better chance of converting them to customers.
#4: Sell Values Not Features
This seems too obvious, but it is the fact with present day consumers. No time to listen to a long list of features your products have. What consumers want to know is how your solution can take away their pains. While some salespeople are desperately eager to exchange their products for dollars, the ones that sincerely exchange product values for dollars make repeat sales.
#5: Sell on relationship
It is easier to sell to customers than prospects. Imagine making sales presentation to a satisfied customer. The possibility of closing the deals is high. Identify the stage your prospect is in your sales cycle and deliver the right sales message or contents through an effective channel. When you build relationship that is based on trust and integrity, you won’t have to make the same market noise like your competitors before you can sell.
#6: Understand the role of Smarketing Automation
The fusion of sales and marketing led to the coin of the term Smarketing. It explains the synergy between sales and marketing to achieve common revenue goal of an organization. Selling to smart consumers also requires sophisticated technology. Sales and marketing process have evolved, and technological advancement is helping us to build business relationship and close sales more than what we experienced ten years ago. When you want your salespeople to be consistent in the way they interact with customers at every stage of the sales process, you need sales automation solution. Sales management is easier when you leverage easy to use automated software. In a recent survey by SmartInsights, 20% of participants believe marketing automation will be the single digital marketing activity with the greatest commercial impact in 2016.
Final Thoughts
The current fast changing consumers buying habits will not slow down. Obviously, the traditional sales methodologies cannot cope with present day time constrained consumers. The competition to gain potential customers attention will be tighter in the future. The sales success will not be how well you can make sales presentations or come up with best sales scripts. The future consumers are going to build more defense mechanism to shield them from marketplace “buy me” noise. The business executives and sales managers, who are consumers-centric, sells on relationship, sell values and not features, know the ideal buyers and understand the changing time will continue to close deals.
