Fundamental Changes In Selling And How The Modern Day Sales Person Functions.
Where clients are concerned, what used to count as top service by a service provider is considered as typical service today. An excellent seller is expected to:
1. Keep consistent top quality without any any faults worth mentioning.
2. Inform the client constantly on the latest trends and contributes to the clients being able to react to these quickly and at a great price.
3. Go through the chain of value generation and looks for opportunities to rationalise and passes on any eventual price benefits to the customer.
4. Keep their prices persistently within the low end of the market scale.
5. Ensure that their production won't endanger wellness, is safe and kind to the environment.
These 5 increased requirements bring about serious adjustments in industrial field sales. The sales person needs to develop from a profit maker into a problem solver. In demand are complete solutions comprised of a number of products and services, the relevant information and comprehensive assistance. There is no-one better suited to performing this than the salesperson who keeps in close personal contact with the customer.
Thus the salesperson is increasingly turning into the customers advocate. They listen to the clients opinions, wishes and on top of that to their complaints and pass them on to their business. As the customers representative, the field salesperson will gain a greater impact on goods and quality fees than in the past.
In the long run the sales person will progressively develop into a market researcher. They know the goods, the competitors and their fees and how the customers evaluate the organizations services in comparison with the competition.
Sales managers, sales management training professionals inform us, should be mindful that this will also alter the traditional sales process their sales men and women may be working with.
The salesperson must build up a partnership of trust with every decision maker inside the customers organization: persuading is out - convincing is in!
The salesperson must go from currently being an info giver to being an information receiver. The client doesn't need to know every little thing in regards to the supplier in the first instance, rather the other way round! Regular group discussions with customers, for instance, have proved themselves worthwhile.
The sales man or woman typically takes on the role of co-ordinator of the client-supplier relationship. They are really the contact partner when customer support does not work, an invoice that has long been paid is demanded for the third time, a guarantee promise isn't kept or the shipping time is overrun.
It is really clear by this that entirely new demands will be made of the sales person:
The new sales person is a good listener, analyst and communicator. He understands the client and his needs and will provide these to his colleagues in the organization.
For this they have to be equipped to talk to specialists from departments far removed from sales, for instance research and development, both in the companys business and their own.
The pure sales stratagies like closing deals and dealing with complaints, though still crucial, will lose their significance. On the other hand, co-ordination skill, ability for organisation and team capability will turn out to be much more essential.
The salesperson who's stringently guided by quotas will quickly belong to the past. The new salesperson is self managed, self lead and self encouraged. A refresher sales management training class can be helpful for the sales manager having to direct these new sales people.