One Minute Pause No 43

Selling is considered a reasonably complex area and everyone seems to have different opinions on what makes a successful salesperson. A search with the keyword “sales” in the books section on Amazon this morning revealed 18, 234 titles dedicated to the subject. That’s a lot of analysis and advice to soak up.

During our workshops we break down the barriers to successful selling, bringing it down to a few simple concepts. The message is always the same: if you get the basics right then you’re 90% of the way there. The secret therefore is getting the basics right.

One of the sales basics is understanding buyer behaviour. It seems to make sense - how can we sell if we don’t understand how our target market buys? Yet it is surprising how few salespeople really examine their buyers - how they act and respond, how much thinking time they like, how they source their information and what’s involved in making a decision.

Quite often I find there’s a disconnect between the salesperson’s own buyer behaviour and that of their market. For example recently during a workshop I asked a frustrated salesman (”David”) whether he had made any major purchases lately, and if so to tell me what happened.

David said that he he had recently purchased a new laptop and from his initial desire to delivery it took exactly 70 days. During that time he researched the products, sourced different quotes, popped into Dixons for a demo, and asked a few friends about what they thought about three of his top choices. One of his friends turned out to be a bit of a laptop geek, and he received impartial, valuable advice that he appreciated. After that he checked his bank balance and put it on hold for nearly a month, received a bonus towards the end of the next month, did another search, found the same model cheaper, then purchased it.

Then we analysed how David sold his services (catering solutions for schools). He established a shortlist of schools in his catchment area, picked up the phone, booked a meeting, pitched his company and then called every week for the next few months expecting a decision. He admitted to sometimes pressurising his market, giving them strict time periods or they would miss out. He also admitted that he never really provides any more information to them than his company credentials.

Therein lies the disconnect. David was expecting others to buy in a different way to how he enjoyed buying.

The biblical golden rule in life is probably “do unto others as they would do unto you”. The sales twist to that is to “sell unto others as you would be sold to.”

Appreciating this and truly understanding how your market buys is one of the keys to sales success.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 1:31 pm and is filed under One Minute Pause, Sales advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.