Transcript:

Value Selling requires a new set of sales activities for your prospects and customers.  No longer can we just look at creating Value from our products or services months or years after the deal is done.  To get the order in the first place, you’ve got to be adding value way before a PO is raised and a vendor selected.

This video explains this paradigm shift in selling and explains what you need to start doing today if you want to dominate your market in the future.

Everybody is familiar with the concept of selling value, the process of creating value for your customers from the product or service that you sell. However the world of sales, the world of business, and therefore the world value has changed.

Value selling is different today.  Sales people need to adopt a new approach to creating value for their clients.  An approach where the value isn’t just realized after the sale. To truly differentiate yourself as a salesperson and to truly differentiate your business i.e. the company you represent, value needs to be created long before the contract is signed or the purchase order is raised.

So what is the reason for this change in Value Selling?

The business world within which we operate today has evolved. More and more technology is becoming commoditised, and buyers are finding it harder and harder to differentiate between different vendors.  This is especially the case when many technology companies in the marketplace are not actual manufacturers but are channel partners of the large technology giants like Cisco and Avaya and are therefore selling the same technological solutions.

This approach to value selling isn’t an alternative, it’s an addition to the current consultative way business to business salespeople should be selling already. Business to business selling and value creation is all about finding the business needs for your prospective customer, and aligning your products and solutions, as a means of addressing that business need and creating measurable business value. The value that you identify is usually measured in things like cost reductions, productivity improvements, process reengineering.

So what is this new Value Selling activity that I refer to?

In business today, before you even get the opportunity to do the consultative sell to find the opportunity and create value from your products, you have got to make yourself stand out from the crowd. The role of the “Trusted Advisor” is becoming more and more important.  If you achieve this status, buyers will turn to you for advice on what to buy, thus putting you at the front of the queue when they then come to actually make an investment. Thus you migrate from not just being a “Trusted Advisor”, but you become a “Business Partner”.

How do you achieve this status?

To achieve this status, you need to be Creating Value irrespective of any current sales opportunity.  You need to be using your expertise, your experience of the industry, and your understanding of your products and their application to business, to provide value to your prospective clients, not when there’s a sales opportunity.

You need to be offering what we call “Perspective”.

You need to be commenting on your industry, advising on what’s moving and shaking. You should be talking about what are the latest technologies that are up and coming. You should be providing case studies and examples of where people have used similar technologies and realised value from them. You should be talking about the competitive landscape. Perhaps you could be advising on what products, services or technologies are becoming obsolete, therefore forewarning your customers and prospects on what upgrades they might need to start planning for.

The bottom line is that you should be offering a perspective as an industry expert on everything about your industry and it’s relation to your customer’s business and their industry.

So go now, start setting some time aside on a regular basis to send your prospects, your clients and even your old customers that you’ve lost, Valuable information about your industry.  Once you are seen to be offering value, you can then intersperse this with information or offers about your business to which your prospects will be more open to, because of the  previous value you have provided.

We know this works as we’ve done it to build pipeline for ourselves and many of our customers.  So start the process today, and join me in future articles for more detail on how to do this, and how to partially automate the process so it becomes a very time efficient activity.

It’s the little things that make a good sales person a great sales person or a great sales person and outstanding one.

Here’s a couple of more tips for improving the interactions you have with your prospects when dealing with and handling sales objections.

Even after answering a customer’s sales objection, we still recommend one more small step, that has both immediate and longer term effects on your relationships with your customers, as well as providing a better way of dealing with sales objections.

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As you’ll now see, actually answering a Sales Objection can be easy, especially when you haven’t jumped in and answered it too early. This video provides a couple of quick tips to make your answer to your customer’s sales objection a better answer.

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This is stage of our objection handling process shows why and how to test for clarification of what a customer is objecting about.  This has many benefits to you, some more subtle than other, like the non conscious reassurance a customer feels that you truly understand their concern.  Mike also shows how to use this step as a great test close point.

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This video is the fifth part of a training session we ran at the ISMM conference where Mike Willshare explains the importance of “Exploring” any sales objection in more detail before answering it.

Mike gives you specific sales questions and key words you can ask use to really understand the objection.  It also stops you making assumptions and gives you the exact words to use to answer the sales objection so it has the most impact with your prospect.

Selling doesn’t have to be hard.  A step by step framework like this Objection Handling model is one of the many sales techniques we teach in Serious Selling™, to which we are currently offering free access.

If you haven’t already got FREE access to SERIOUS™ Selling – CLICK HERE

Mike Willshare and I have just arrived back from 5 days in Dubai, where we presented SERIOUS™ Selling to some of Cisco’s key partners in the region to improve their Consultative Selling Skills.

Value and Consultative based selling is key when selling technology so you can demonstrate the value of an investment to your customer’s business. Differentiation is also key, especially if you are a reseller, selling the same products as your competition.

“How you sell, not just what you sell becomes your Unique Selling Point.” - Quote from Brian Conway

Cisco sponsored this course for many of their partners in the United Arab Emirates, so I would like to thank them for the opportunity to work with them and for trusting us (Skills Connection) enough to put the success of their partners in our hands.

For details on the sales training courses we run visit: www.SkillsConnection.tv

In this video, Mike Willshare, speaking at the ISSM conference, explains why asking for sales objections from your customer is a great sales technique. It seems wrong for sales people to actually ask for more objections, but here we explain how to do this correctly and some key benefits to you in doing so.

It also shows how using this 6 Step Process for Handling Difficult Sales Objections is also a powerful sales qualification and closing tool.

Selling and Objection Handling doesn’t have to be hard, especially if you have control of the sales situation, which this process gives you.

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Leave us a comment below, we appreciate the feedback!

This video is the third part of the training session we ran at the ISMM conference where we were asked to speak on “How to Handle Difficult Objections”.

In this video Mike Willshare introduces our 6 step process for handling any Sales Objections easily and systematically.  This is one of our many sales techniques that is proven to make selling easier.

After a full overview of the 6 step process, Mike explains the dangers of answering sales objections too quickly with specific phrases to avoid and how to minimise confrontation when Objection Handling

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There are specific sales skills you can use, as well as tips on using NLP and mindset to be more successful in selling.

This video is the second part of a training session we ran at the ISMM national sales conference where Mike and I were asked to speak on “How to Handle Difficult Objections”.

This second video focuses on the benefits of being able to handle sales objections with ease; that’s the benefits to both you and the customer.

It also explains why proactively introducing objections can work in your favour and how how sales objections can be one of your greatest closing tools, if used correctly.

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Recently we were asked to speak at the ISMM’s (Institute of Sales, Marketing and Management) national sales conference in the UK.

Our subject was “How to Handle Difficult Sales Objections”.

The following video is part 1 of that presentation where we impart some sales training techniques on how the right mindset can make the difference between success and failure.  Enjoy…

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