Strategic Selling Personally Crafts A Story Of Leadership, Vision, Culture And Belief That Demonstrates Value And Inspires Stakeholders To Buy-In
Nothing happens, until somebody sells something.
- Creating value
- Capturing value
- Delivering value
And until a business captures value it doesn’t have validation that its products or services offer real value to its customers. Nor will it have the metrics that demonstrate the business has viable traction or the means (profit and cash flow) to survive let alone grow sustainably beyond current investment.
There are many books and training courses that fail to solve the problems faced by companies and that’s because selling is very context-specific. How you sell, should be tailored to your market and unless you really understand your market and where it’s headed you won’t truly know how to sell.
Sales don’t happen in a vacuum, so without strategic marketing identifying value creation opportunities salespeople can’t capture value sustainably. Sales is also a vital feedback loop to marketing to help strengthen the understanding of who the customer is and what their buying journey looks like.
Selling is also most effective once a process has been identified that can predictably lead to an outcome.
The sales approach you chose is generally the root cause of problems you are experiencing such as:
- prospects going dark
- focus on price
- being held hostage over an irrelevant features
- competition swooping in at the eleventh hour
- buyers choosing to do nothing
- emails, voicemails, letters and LinkedIn messages go ignored
- Uncertainty about how long it take to close deals
- Lack of clarity about the length of sales cycles
- Deals going dark faster than you’d like
- Constantly surprised when deals drop out
- Sales pipelines smaller than the goal and low conversion rates
External And Internal Sales
As communication channels have opened up with the expansion of digital landscapes so have the option for selling remotely.
Before digital, direct marketers understood that less complex ideas could be sold remotely within a letter or direct response advertising. A similar approach is used by sales teams that leverage digital demonstrations, webinars and zoom calls.
Consultative And Transactional Selling
Complex things with complex outcomes require a more consultative approach.
Narrow concepts that are often understood or established tend to be more transactional as they become more commoditised.
Human And Digital Sales Processes
The more consultative the sell the more human orientated it tends to be, however technology is often used to facilitate the exchange.
Complex sales are often more fraught with problems than transaction sales.
Where as the more transactional the sell the more likely that it can become digital, or entirely automated with some human intervention required to resolve issues or answer simple questions.