The Sales 101 imperative today-different to
earlier days
Today with the explosion of technology, social networks, information availability, data abundance and myriad access
points, effective sales need to be more pull than push. Customers are more aware than ever before and do their research
and information gathering before talking to a sales rep. As a result, the old way of selling on product features and benefits
and focusing on "let me tell you how great our offering is" is counter-productive. We as sales professionals of today's
interconnected economy need to listen more and talk less- we need to focus not on our product/ service, but on the
customer's issues/challenges and pain points.
If we cannot answer the implicit question on the customer's mind " why should I speak to this salesperson and what's in it
for me" in the first 30 seconds of the call or meeting, we have lost the opportunity to add value to the engagement.
Everything today is about value creation, value acceleration and value maintenance. We have to make the customer the
center of our interaction and use effective questioning and listening skills to uncover the pain the customer is facing as a
first step.
Next, we have to help the customer quantify the pain and the cost of non-action- "What happens if you do nothing and
continue with BAU (business as usual). Once we do that and make the customer realize the enormous impact of the pain
on his/her business, they will want to do whatever it takes "to get rid of the pain".
After that stage in the sales cycle, we can speak about how our solution will help them reduce/eliminate the pain, they are
facing. Our product/ service details and pricing should come much later in the sales cycle and only after we have taken the
customer through the Pain Funnel.
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