When you are selling a product, it's only natural to promote the product itself. For example, if you're selling a vacuum cleaner, why discuss abstract ideas when you can highlight its suction power and hose length? Because customers don't care. They want to spend less time vacuuming and fussing with the machine, and they want to spend more time doing something else. Yes or no: Can your product help solve these problems? Whatever your industry, your sales methodologies need to focus on figuring out the issues and problems faced by customers. Here are three issues with product-focused selling.
You Need to Diagnose the Problem, Not Sell a Product
Salespeople who follow the old style of selling try to promote every detail and feature of their product. They talk about processing speed, third-party integrations, rotation rate, and all the other technical terms that put a customer to sleep. If you do this, you’re getting in your own way and jeopardizing the sale. To sell your product, you need to help diagnose the buyer's problems to help them reach the desired outcome.
B2B sales training should teach salespeople how to get to the root of the buyer's problem. The problem is on their mind and it’s eating away at them because they don't know how to fix it. When a salesperson diagnoses the problem, the buyer perks up. They’re intrigued at how their life can get better. The best part is they’re willing to listen to a salesperson if that discussion ends up saving them hours spent on tedious tasks or money spent hiring additional employees. Forget about your product and focus more on identifying and diagnosing the buyer’s problem.
You Don't Know the Buyer's Struggles
You’ve probably spent hours making sure your salespeople know the ins and outs of your product. They know how it works, why it works, and what it does. Yet, they don't know a single thing about their prospects. Do they know the problems the buyer faces daily? Do they know the causes of those problems? The pains the problem causes? Salespeople need to understand the life and challenges of their buyers.
Salespeople need to build immediate credibility with the buyer by proving that they truly understand the problems their buyers are struggling with. Take software as a service (SaaS), for example. A good SaaS sales training program should tell you not to talk about APIs and churn rates but instead discuss the time your software saves by integrating your customer's databases or automating their sales process. The salesperson should empathize with the customer's pains in their business because of disjointed databases and manual sales transactions. Salespeople should understand the buyer's problem and prove to the buyer they know the struggles.
Misunderstanding the Gap
Product-centric selling causes a salesperson to misunderstand the gap in their buyer's life. The customer is stuck in one situation (the present state) and wants to achieve a desired outcome (the future state). A salesperson needs to pinpoint that outcome and understand the problems keeping the buyer from reaching that goal. This is the value of what you sell and a good salesperson will demonstrate this value. Spending $50,000 on a program is worth it when revenue increases by $5,000,000. If you come across a marathon runner with no shoes, you don't sell them on the benefits of your shoes—you sell them the chance to finish the race 3X faster and with less pain than if they didn’t have shoes.. This is the gap that you should identify and EVERY buyer has one.
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Conventional sales training is struggling to come into the 21st century. That's why A Sales Growth Company doesn't offer conventional sales training. For over 10 years, they've helped redefine the relationship between customer and salesperson, putting the customer's problem front and center. A Sales Growth Company will help your organization get to the root of its sales problems and introduce innovative sales methodologies that will help your team accelerate sales growth. A Sales Growth Company uses the ideas of Gap Selling to attack new and old sales challenges with unprecedented efficiency and success. Transform the way your team thinks about selling and build a culture where winning is a daily occurrence with A Sales Growth Company.
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Original Source: https://bit.ly/3J0emuU
