Selling Skills Training | How Salespeople can Create Interesting Sales Dialogue?
Not many salesperson can create an interesting and understandable sales dialogue to a potential prospect.
If you were to ask 100 salespeople you know whether their approach was customer-centred or product-centred, what would they say? Few, if any, would boast about selling “a box.”
Most salespeople believe that they know their customers’ needs. They believe they are positioning solutions, not products. They believe they are customer-focused. These beliefs are the biggest obstacles keeping them from making the changes they need to make in their Sales conversation.
Selling styles run the entire scale. There is a sales style continuity. At one end of the continuity is generic product selling, basically a monologue, a “product dump.” At the other end is consultative selling, an interactive dialogue that focuses on the specific needs of the customer. 100% on either end is impossible. All salespeople are somewhere in between.
Some salespeople are charismatic sellers who rely on their interpersonal skills and charm. Others are technical experts, substantive in content but weak in customer focus. There are the “killers,” always rushing to the close, often at the expense of the relationship. These characterizations of sales types are extreme, but they set the context for thinking about how salespeople approach sales.
The majority of salespeople today use a combination of approaches. They want to be liked, they want to be credible, they want to close, and they want to meet the needs of their customers. But for most salespeople, this combination has resulted in a semi- consultative approach at best. While semi-consultative salespeople identify customer needs and are productive, they fall short of what they could accomplish.
Salespeople who are at the consultative end of the continuum create efficient but robust dialogues with their customers that enable them to connect and learn more with each conversation. The dialogues are active, with balanced exchanges between the salesperson and the customer. What they do looks easy and sounds like common sense, but it is far from simple and it is not common practice.
The line between semi-consultative selling and consultative selling is fine, but if all other factors are basically equal, the line means the difference between winning business or losing to a competitor. It can be the difference between being viewed as a technical specialist and being a trusted advisor. With relatively equal competitors, it is the sales conversation of the salesperson or sales team that makes the difference between winning and losing business.
You need to increase your sales dialogue to increase your sales results.
