The marketplace has changed and with it the role of salespeople. Customers are educating themselves on how to solve their own problems, self-prescribing solutions and then looking to salespeople to provide a best price. How do salespeople succeed in a buying process where the customer sees them as almost extraneous?
Sales experts believe that high-performing salespeople deliver unexpected value through the sales process, especially with educated customers. That can mean new insights and challenges to how the customer is framing a business problem, specialized education, referrals and access to expert resources, going to bat for the customer, and other cool ideas.
In a study for a manufacturer, Singularity Group, Inc., collected data from more than 400 customers on their salesperson’s behavior. Ratings for high and low performers were analyzed. The results show what customers see high performers doing more frequently than low performers. High performers:
- See beyond the immediate situation to identify emerging and future needs, suggesting how these needs might be addressed, not necessarily with the salesperson’s product or service. High performers know potential problem areas, are in touch with trends other customers are engaged with, and challenge the customer to think beyond their perception of the current need.
- Bring in expertise that can help the customer solve problems, customize applications, anticipate challenges, and provide service beyond customer expectations. High performers are talent orchestrators, able to bring people with ideas to the customer to design solutions that augment what the educated customer sees.
- Manage a customer’s uncertainty by emphasizing experience, expertise, rapid resolving of and pre-empting predictable problems. Salespeople can anticipate blind spots that self-educated customers can often miss such as critical details of solutions or unanticipated consequences.
- Influence and help shape a customer’s fragile ideas by being supportive, offering suggestions, challenging, questioning, and encouraging. As an interested partner, a salesperson can bring focus and structure to a customer’s thinking.
Bottom line: High performers add new dimensions to how smart customers see problems and solutions. If that’s the case, then the path to high performance needs to include educating salespeople about that role and the expertise needed to fulfill it.
With more than 30 years of experience as a management consultant, Michael Maginn, Ed.D., has designed leadership strategies for clients such as New York Federal Reserve Bank, UBS Investment Bank, CIGNA, Coco-Cola, IBM, Sears, and Pitney Bowes to help them achieve sustainable strategic outcomes and improve performance. President and CEO of leadership, sales, and management consultancy Singularity Group, Inc., Dr. Maginn is also the author of “Effective Teamwork,” “Managing in Times of Change,” and “Making Teams Work” (McGraw-Hill), and “5 Skills of Master Salespeople.”
