For too long sales has been seen (and promoted) as combative – us versus them – an arm wrestle on price and terms, a face-off as we sit opposite each other.
What if I told you that doing the exact opposite would actually make selling and buying easier, quicker and more enjoyable for all concerned?
Most people want relationships of all kinds, to be open, honourable, honest, productive, positive, and above all safe because this means we can concentrate on what’s important and get things done together.
However, the more companies operate in the technical space, looking for technical solutions to sales challenges, the more they tend to underestimate the human factor in their interactions. In addition, in businesses where the human and emotional factor is highly prevalent, salespeople often tend to retreat to the technical aspects of the business to avoid having those human centred interactions because they don’t know how to set up them up.
Getting to that safe place where we can have open, honest, and productive discussions and interactions, especially in a buying-selling situation, requires a human-centred communication and engagement system that puts genuine human interactions around helping others at the heart of the sales process.
Effective buying-selling relationships are built on creating a safe space to first understand where our customers are coming from and what they want to achieve, then collaborating to develop viable solution options to solve problems, deliver results, and build healthy relationships – which cannot be achieved by not listening but waiting for our turn to speak, or showing off our list of products and services, or trying to charm our way into a sale or win an argument.
The best thing about creating healthy viable relationships is that we can be more honest and open with each other. Working like this helps salespeople and clients have conversations around real content and evidence, human and task needs, cost and value, and viable solutions rather than just focusing on price and discounts.
And once we know how to have these types of business conversations then the magic really starts to happen, and we can sell better, faster.
Selling Better Faster Case Study:
We are currently working with an international B2B sales team (50 people) across India, Asia, the Americas and Europe. We meet with them every 2 weeks to work on practising and implementing a human-centred sales communication and engagement system.
In less than 6 weeks they are already starting to see the rewards for their efforts: they are already winning new business with new clients and more business with existing clients. Case in point: one of the salespeople in the Brazilian team, in the midst of the worst health crisis ever, has closed out a new client project worth US$1.5M in less than a week with only 3 meetings that would normally have taken 3-4 months if they were to be considered at all. This is but one example of many stories like that now emerging from this global team. Prospect and client doors are opening up everywhere.
Their feedback to me: Whilst they have read many, many sales books and attend various high profile sales training programs over the years, they said they have never been exposed to anything like our human-centred sales communication and engagement system before and are amazed at how easy it is to implement and the speed it delivers to driving sales forward. They couldn’t thank us enough for the insights, tools, processes and stewardship we are providing them with when it comes to selling better, faster. They said this approach has fundamentally changed the nature of their relationships with clients for the better.
This is very heartening for us as it demonstrates that our human centred sales communication and engagement system is universal, culturally neutral and can work anywhere.
If you want to learn more about this, you know what to do, contact us or 03 9533 0000
Remember everybody lives by selling something.
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