Selling Skills Training | How to Leverage All your Resources to Increase Sales?
The most effective salespeople have strong relationships with their customers and with their colleagues internally. Especially in complex sales, it is critical to understand and gain access to decision makers and key influencers. It is also important to be able to leverage your team—specialists, senior executives, peers, and support professionals. Identify who makes the decisions for the customer and who influences them. Learn who has the power. To analyse your customer’s decision process, ask questions, observe communication patterns, and get input from all contacts. Develop relationships in your customer’s organization high and wide. Ask critical questions about commitment to the initiative and find out who on the customer’s team supports or opposes the initiative. Find out who holds the purse strings and identify your champion or coach, as well as any possible nemesis. Build relationships with third-party, outside influencers such as attorneys, auditors, and bankers, as needed.
Leverage your team early in the deal to create internal support so the resources you need are available when you need them. Create positive working relationships with specialists, senior management, or support team members—before you need them. Share credit and reciprocate in supporting them.
For example, a well-placed phone call from your senior to a senior in your customer’s organization can give you the edge you need to win. One salesperson effectively used a senior manager in his organization to win an important piece of business. He knew his customer would be buying a new system and the situation was very competitive, so he sought the support of his treasurer, who had a good relationship with the CFO of the customer’s organization. The sales- person asked his treasurer to call the CFO and fully prepared him to persuasively tell their story and reinforced the two issues that were most important to the CFO. According to the salesperson, that phone call clinched the sale.
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