When I buy any new computer software or hardware, I buy from companies who are able to provide me with sound advice about computers. But I also want to deal with a salesperson who understands my business, and can show me how the products I am interested in will solve my business problems.
If I find myself dealing with salespeople who are bluffing, or trying to avoid answering my questions, or who don't even seem to know about their own company's' products, I don't feel they have sufficient knowledge to provide me with long term support. Therefore I will probably not buy from them.
Now I doubt that my attitude is much different from yours. I am sure that you have walked out of shops because the salesperson was unable to answer what you felt were reasonable questions. Of course, if you and I feel this way, the chances are that most of our prospects have similar attitudes and beliefs.
Knowledge is important and needs to be acquired on an ongoing basis. No matter how long your company has been in business, your markets, products and services will be constantly changing, as will the needs of your customers. You too, must adapt to change. Today you need up to the minute knowledge about your products, your company, your marketplace, your industry as well as the psychology of buying. Without any of these, you will find achieving success a very hard struggle?
When you visit a prospect or customer you're expected to have complete knowledge of both your products and their applications. You need to be able to demonstrate how the customer can benefit from using your product. Let me repeat my warning about product knowledge. To most people who are new to selling or are introducing a new product, the greatest fear is looking foolish in front of a prospect through lack of knowledge. As a result they devote too much time to acquiring knowledge and too little time to the other important elements of successful selling.
Except in very specialist markets, most prospects you meet will have very little knowledge about your product. They like you and I will have in their homes various items like washing machines, video recorders, hi-fi systems and probably a computer. How many of us understand the technical specifications of these standard household items? How many of us even want or need to understand them? Most of us are more interested in how they look and whether they will do the job. "Does the product fit our needs?"
A week's intensive training in any one of those products would make us experts in the most people's eyes. But even if you have in-depth product knowledge, your prospects don't want to know how much you know about the product. They want you to provide them with enough relevant information to enable them to make a sound buying decision. The knowledge that is required is at a practical, rather than technical level
Admittedly, there will be prospects who not only understand your products and your business, but their knowledge will far exceed yours It may be that you sell a very technical product or service into a very specialist market, or that you have to deal with technically qualified buyers or evaluation teams. The more specialised your market is, the more likely you will be dealing with this kind of buyer.
If you find you are selling to prospects who know more about the subject than yourself, it is even more essential that you do not try to bluff. You will have technical specialists whom you can call in when needed, to handle the technical questions that you cannot answer.
What you must do is acquire enough knowledge to be able to communicate with your prospects and customers. Remember, they will expect you to have a good knowledge of the application of your products and services in practice. You need to study the market and know your strengths and weaknesses against your leading competitors. Most importantly you need to be able to demonstrate that you can provide answers, and that you can respond quickly.
The role of the salesperson in technical sales often becomes one of 'project manager and co-ordinator'. At the end of the process, you are the one who knows how to complete all the formalities and organise delivery of the product. In other words, someone has to close the sale.
I am sure you believe your products and services are the best on the market. You may believe that your approach is the best and that your competition don't have it right in one or two important areas. It is these areas in which you excel! If you do not believe this your chances of success are pretty low. We have to believe that we are the best. Otherwise, morally, we should be recommending the competition. If we think, even subconsciously, that the competition is better, we will communicate that belief to the prospect non-verbally.
Your prospects are the same. They see things only through their own biased 'rose coloured glasses'. This means that sometimes they do not see weaknesses in their own business. But you will, because you see their market objectively. If you are trading with two of three companies who are competitors, will you see one as the best, or will you simply see them as different? If you deal with a number of companies who compete with each other, you are able to see things as a consultant and this provides you with an important level of market knowledge of which your customers will be more than happy to avail themselves.
I used to sell large mainframe computer software packages to insurance companies. I did not have any real technical knowledge of the system. I am not a programmer, a systems designer, or a consultant, yet most of the buyers were. We did however have plenty of specialists in the company whom I could consult when I needed expertise. I understood the business applications of the system and could speak and write with authority on these subjects within a few months of joining the company. I brought to the job some knowledge that was far more important than technical knowledge.
With fifteen years of sales and marketing experience in financial service, I understood the marketplace extremely well. I was known and respected in the market and understand the problems facing prospects in their attempts to become more successful. By adding to my understanding of the market, a little knowledge of computing, I became an expert. If I needed technical backup, I called in a technical expert to help. In fact, most of the time, I let our experts talk computer technology to their experts, while I continued to talk business issues to their managers and decision makers.
Of course, you may be just another supplier to your prospects, so you need to be aware of your weaknesses in their eyes, and be able to turn those weaknesses around. To do this, you must either emphasise your strengths or eliminate your weaknesses by making them appear unimportant.
While you can provide your prospects with valuable comment on the marketplace in which they compete, they can provide you with equally valuable information about your position in your market and enable you to enhance your knowledge. Most importantly, by increasing your knowledge of the marketplace you become more aware of sales opportunities as they arise. Only by being actively involved in the market and studying it in depth can you appreciate the full impact upon it of technological, political and regulatory changes. Probably, one of the greatest skills you can develop is the ability to foresee the likely impact of changes on your market and adapt your selling skills to respond, in advance.
One of the worst sins salespeople can commit is to demonstrate that they do not know what is going on within their own company. If the company does not communicate internally, then what hope do we have, as customers, of trying to get help and information. If salespeople do not know what is happening inside of their own companies, how can we trust them to help make ours more efficient?
You must make sure that you are right up to date with everything that is happening in your company. Get yourself on the circulation list for press cuttings about your company. Make sure that you attend all the staff review meetings. If you read or hear about something your company is doing for other customers, make sure you get all the details. News and press coverage about your company is always helpful as a sales support aid and can help to open up opportunities.
I have also always made a point of creating good communication lines with other staff in the production and support departments, or in fact with anyone who may be able to assist me in securing sales and better customer relationships. It is an important internal public relations task for any salesperson. You need to know if there are delivery problems, or other difficulties that might put sales and customer relationships at risk. You need to know about sales to high profile customers which could influence other prospects to buy from you.
You also need to have good contacts inside your company to help get the odd favour done to either impress a customer or even save a customer. Being able to occasionally demonstrate that I could make things happen and pull a few strings has helped me secure substantial long term deals in the past. Often it was simply that I knew the right person to talk to, and that can often be a junior member of staff. Treat junior staff as important people and they will respond because most people tend to ignore them.
The first question you need to ask yourself before looking at the industry knowledge you need to acquire is "Which industry?" The industry you are selling into or the one you work in? When I first started selling computers I was not working in the computer industry, I was working in the financial services industry because they were my customers.
I needed to be much more aware of the needs, problems and opportunities facing insurance companies in their marketplace than the needs of my competitors and other companies in the computer industry. I did need to keep abreast of what was happening generally within the computer industry so that I could demonstrate to my prospects that I was up to date with the latest developments. However, they were much more concerned with the day to day problems facing the financial services industry; and my ability to discuss how technology could help them cope with the latest set of regulatory changes in their industry was of much more interest than the latest computer hardware developments.
It is, of course, also essential that you are aware of what your competitors and the suppliers of alternative solutions are doing. Focusing only on your products and services and not being aware of the latest developments from the competition, puts you at a serious disadvantage. I have often found that when prospects mention competitors' products it is because they have been impressed by some aspect of the products and feel this to be an important ingredient in any potential solution to their problems.
The more you become aware of what is happening in the industry, the better prepared you are to respond to changes. You demonstrate that you are a professional, you can be relied upon for comment and information. Through your knowledge you demonstrate that you care, and that you are committed to the industry and to supporting your customers. Not just now but also in the future.
Part two of this book is devoted to the study of buyer behaviour, the psychology of how and why we make buying decisions. By understanding buyer behaviour we can modify the sales process to be more effective in selling.
There has been a great deal of study conducted over the past 20 years on the subject. Many books have been written devoted entirely to buyer behaviour, mostly from a pure marketing outlook. Little seems to have been written about buyer behaviour from the perspective of the salesperson. More important, the subject is usually absent from sales training programmes.
In this book I want to correct that by introducing you to the subject in a very practical way, with exercises to enable you to better understand your particular prospects and markets. So let me first introduce a basic model of buying behaviour which will allow you to see your own behaviour in its constituent parts. This will then enable you to better understand what is happening with your prospects.
A model is simply a means of representing a process, so that it is easier to understand. This model is a representation of the steps in the buying process. The process can be a few seconds or several years. It can involve wide consultation or none at all. It can be a high risk decision involving the livelihoods of thousands or low risk where the impact is hardly noticed.
It doesn't really matter what the buying decision is, the process is the same. By understanding the process you will be better able to understand your prospects. No matter how complex the buying decision you will find that it can still be broken down into these basic steps.
We are all constantly receiving information from the world about us,. too much information! As a result, we consciously notice only that information which seems important to us. That information comes in through our five physical senses, the things we see, hear, feel, taste and smell. The inputs are processed by our brain, mostly subconsciously, and sometimes the processing reminds us of an unsatisfied need and that triggers our buying process.
A need is a problem or a desire - not a solution. Our needs have nothing to do with products. Our needs are related to our drives to both avoid pain and seek pleasure. This often causes difficulty for salespeople who believe that there is a need for their product. Any product is simply one of a number of solutions to a need. We have a huge number of unsatisfied needs. Every time we hit an obstacle to satisfying our drives to avoid pain and seek pleasure we identify a need. Some we don't even think about again - it were a one off problem which never recurs. Others keep on nagging at us day in day out, begging to be satisfied.
We all have hundreds of unsatisfied needs and because limited resources of time and money are limited, most of our needs must go unsatisfied. We really only remember the ones that nag away regularly. It is these needs that we usually choose to satisfy first, those that make us the most uncomfortable. This discomfort is called motivation. It isn't always unpleasant, the desire to feel good is almost as strong as the desire to avoid pain. However, we seldom ever buy anything unless we feel personally motivated to do so. .
When there is sufficient motivation for us to want to satisfy a need or desire, we look within our experience for solutions. We recall everything we have seen, read or experienced and decide which solution to our needs and desires we prefer. The most significant contribution to our decisions is previous experience. Choosing a new product is both time consuming and risky and we are most likely therefore to make a choice that has proved successful in the past and suits our beliefs, attitudes and personality. We are also strongly influenced by what our friends, family and business acquaintances say.
Making a decision to buy also involves some discomfort. Once we make a decision to buy, other decisions have to be abandoned or deferred. We are constantly making relative buying decisions, balancing our various unsatisfied needs. Sometimes we simply defer taking action to see if we will feel as motivated tomorrow, and often tomorrow something else is more important. Motivation is always relative. Which is more painful, the problem or the solution. Every buying decision impacts upon other potential buying decisions. Taking action is an emotional process and the skill of a good salesperson lies helping people to take that final step to say yes when it is the right decision.
Once we have made a decision to buy, we usually feel very good about our choice and we will have clear expectations of the product or service. If the decision was an important one, we are likely to tell our friends what we have done and be quite emotionally excited about it. We continue doing business in the future with those companies and individuals who consistently meet or exceed our expectations. However if a product or service does not meet our expectations, and leave us feeling disappointed we will probably decide never to do business with the supplier again without even bothering to complain.
We humans are essentially creatures of habit. We like to find a safe and reliable way of satisfying our needs and desires and then we tend to stick with it until it ceases to be appropriate or something better comes to our attention. Many of us buy Heinz products because we believe they are consistently good quality, When I ask my children to get a tin of beans they always buy Heinz because it is an automatic response. They do not think about the solution, the product has become synonymous with the need.
Of course nothing is perfect and that particularly applies to any model of human behaviour, There will always be exceptions. For example we may buy something from a shop we said we would never do business with again because it is the only local shop that supplies the product, and we need it now. The exceptions to the rule are what give companies the opportunity to convert us into a new customer when our usual salesperson is away. We may spot an advertisement or get a cold call just when we become aware of a problem. If you look at your own behaviour as a buyer, I am sure you will be able to see how your patterns of buying tend to fit this model. By understanding the way you buy, you can use that knowledge to better understand your prospects and customers.
We live in an information world where knowledge is our most valuable asset. This short story will illustrate what I mean. An old man worked for many years in an antiquated water power plant. Eventually he retired and was replaced by a much younger employee. Not long after the young man took over, a serious problem developed. For no accountable reason, water ceased to flow through the pipes The pipes were old and no-one knew very much about the old pumping station, After a couple of days of searching for the fault without any luck, someone suggested that they call in the old, retired employee to see if he could help.
The old man arrived with his tool bag and, after a few minutes looking around, withdrew a hammer. He followed the pipes around feeling and listening carefully, and then paused, inspecting one particular section of the piping. Carefully positioning the hammer, he gave the pipe an almighty thump. There was a muffled, groaning sound, and then the familiar rush of water beginning to flow once more.
Walking out of the pumping station, the old man presented his bill. £1005. The young employee nearly choked. "£1005 for hitting a pipe with a hammer," he exploded. "You can't be serious, it only took you 15 minutes."
"You don't understand", said the old man. "It's only £5 for hitting the pipe. The £1000 is for knowing WHERE to hit it".
This story illustrates the true difference between top professional salespeople and average salespeople. Everyone uses the same skills. Average salespeople try to sell to everyone. Top salespeople sell only to prospects and customers who are likely to buy. They know what to sell, to whom, and they know when to approach. That requires careful study of the marketplace and a dedication to learning the right knowledge.