Best candidates for sales teams connect with potential customers
Ken Cook
(Second in a three-part series on building a successful sales team.)
Great candidates for sales teams are those who are predisposed to comfortably connecting, building trust and building strong relationships. Why? You can teach product knowledge and industry expertise, but you can struggle to teach people how to connect and build trust.
Once you know who will be on the sales team, you want to focus on how they'll interact with customers. After all, they will be the face of the company with each customer and prospect. What do you want those interactions to look like? How do you want customers to feel when they interact with a team member?
To help figure this out, consider these hypothetical questions you could ask customers:
• Do you want to buy when the opportunity is right for you, with no overt selling from us? Or,
• Do you want us to sell to you, proposing solutions we know are the best answers for your problems and needs?
In reality, the ideal answer today is more of a collaborative approach that resides somewhere between the extremes posed by the two questions. Today's informed C-level customer would most likely answer, “I would like to be given the opportunity to explain my needs and wants to a salesperson who listens, asks questions based on what I say, and comes to an understanding of how to fulfill those needs.”
Customers are well informed. They know their vendors' products and services almost as well as the vendors do; in some cases, even better. The value today for customers is the authenticity of the interaction. Can customers get information and collaboration focused on them and their issues, rather than a sales pitch on vendors' products and services?
The answer lies in how one approaches a customer interaction. For example, on a recent trip I was sitting in the airport terminal next to two co-workers who were rehearsing a slide presentation for a customer. Most of their conversation focused on the ir products and the benefits the customer would get from them.
This got me thinking about the essence of a business relationship in the context of a sale. Consider four statements that encapsulate that relationship and sales situation:
• “This is the solution and what it does.”
• “These are the benefits of the solution.”
• “From a business perspective, this is why the solution is valuable.”
• “We're the best at this, and you should trust us to deliver.”
Most salespeople sell in the exact order of these questions. That's what the co-workers at the airport were rehearsing, emphasizing a payback of less than two years.
But C-level executives usually buy in the opposite order; they're looking for that authentic interaction focused on their business. They're focusing on the following:
• “I need to trust you.”
• “I need to have a clear value for my business before I consider doing this.”
• “What are the benefits associated with your solution?
• “Okay, tell me how it works.”
If C-level executives focus on trust first, great salespeople need to do the same. Establishing trust enables collaboration.
If you've built a sales team of individuals comfortable with connecting, building trust and building relationships, unleash them to do that. That's what the C-level executive is looking for and values it above everything else.
Ken Cook is co-founder of How to Who and co-author of How to WHO: Selling Personified, a book and program on building business through relationships. Learn more at www.howtowho.com.
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