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“Good question. Why do you ask?”
I ask because as a sales trainer I have found that most companies don't know how to help their sales people develop the tools both technically and behaviorally, to serve, sell and cultivate their markets, and at the same time have fun doing it.
American business has lost some of their worldwide markets for no other reason than that they have forgotten what true professional sales is all about. In the last 20 years, after being plump and complacent because of our trade supremacy, American business began to look for the easy way out. Market research replaced basic professional salesmanship, inundating the marketplace with products and services based on features and benefits that researchers believed were what people were ready to buy.
While market research has its place in business, to compete successfully in the national and international arenas, business must get back to the basics – creating the right environment for making people receptive to the products and service they are offering.
American business has been successful in the past by using its salespeople to find out, in an interpersonal way, what their customers wanted and needed, producing it with superior quality and service, delivering it, and having their customers feel good about it.
Most sales training programs teach the salesperson to "create rapport," ask questions that elicit yes responses, make features & benefit presentations, and go for the "close." The problem with these programs is that they are rigid, scripty, and robotic in nature. Not enough attention is paid to discovering a prospects real needs, and very little attention is paid to building a perceived value in the prospect's mind.
I recently had an experience with a large computer software company, whose sales had dropped nearly 30%, even though they had some of the best software packages in the marketplace. The corporate hierarchy believed that elaborate presentations and seminars educating their prospects on the features & benefits of their products would bring them sales. They even sent their computer consultants out on sales calls with their salespeople. The problem was simple: they did not understand that their prospects did not buy from features and benefit presentations. They failed to sell "conceptually."
What is your organization doing to get ready for the 21st century marketplace? Especially in the area of "Sales Coaching and Training!"
The new hi-tech salesperson must be able to create an aura, whereby their products and services can promise a new future and a better way of doing things – or a faster way of solving problems.
Sales training must address the salesperson's ability to create a receptive environment for the prospect to discover the value of the product or service. Salespeople need to be encouraged to use their own creative resources and individual styles to tell the story of their products and service. They need to understand people, perhaps more so than understand their product and service.
Salespeople must learn how to cultivate the skills that appeal to people's emotions, because when you appeal to the buyer's emotional level, you can create perceived value and people will be motivated to buy.
The biggest problem today with most sales training programs is that they are still teaching salespeople to sell analytically and logically, to educate their prospects with product knowledge too soon in the sales cycle, before thoroughly qualifying and motivating them to buy. Product knowledge is worthless and intimidating until the prospect is emotionally involved."
Selling Rule: People don't buy features and benefits. They buy emotionally!
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