Balancing Act

When we meet with clients and prospects, I am always surprised at how many business owners simply do not understand the sales process. More to the point, they do not understand the customer’s buying process.

...

First, lets agree that the life blood of any business is sales. This may be a difficult pill to swallow, especially if you have some strong preconceived notions about what sales is. However, like it or not all of our businesses depend on sales of some sort.

Now that we’ve got this sales = business stuff under our belt we are ready to dive into the buying process.

There are two predominate approaches to sales. There is the “Push” and the “Pull.” In practice, the “Push” approach is awful. The customer hates it and you probably are not going to like it either. No one wants to feel pushed into a purchase. Just think about the last pushy sales person you encountered and the reasons that push doesn’t work become painfully obvious.

When you think about the “Pull” method of sales, what I really want you to visualize is guiding your customer to make an informed buying decision. Your job as salesperson is to lead or pull the customer through the buying process. In this role you are the trusted adviser, not the pushy salesman.

So what is the buying process?

The customer typically goes through 5 stages when making a buying decision. These are:

Initial Interest
Fact Finding
Validation
Rationalization
Decision

The better you address these five stages the better success you will have at closing sales.

In coming days we will be introducing our Sales Toolbox where we will work with a limited group of professionals to develop their personal sales toolbox in depth. Watch this space for more information or contact us at (203) 404-3974 if you have specific questions.

Till the next time, we wish you the greatest success!