Selling Your Value Proposition
Starting on the far right, where the buyer knows exactly what he or she needs to buy, transactional selling comes into its own. The salesperson only has a limited range of offerings and needs to assess quickly whether anything fits the prospective customer’s requirements. There is very little ‘wiggle room’ in this situation. These purchases are often made by individuals in procurement who are far removed from the business people who have the issue being addressed. The salesperson’s offering either fits or it doesn’t. Most successful selling comes down to price, service and determining whether unique product features are important. This situation is ideal for the transactional sales model.
A competent, transactional salesperson is very directive and good at trying to uncover needs that map onto his/her offering’s unique features. The conversational style is questioning, so as to qualify and guide the prospect or customer to the next stage of the sales cycle. Most of the time and effort is focused on qualifying and closing, and they will race through the selling and proposing stages, doing only the minimum required. It is only a bad transactional salesperson who may try to sell an inappropriate offering when the prospective customer clearly does not have a need.
How does the salesperson prepare? Typically, the selling company has already gone to the trouble of configuring some outline solutions that can serve as templates in solutions selling. This work is vital in order to provide guideline pricing and positioning. For this style of selling, no solution will be off-the-shelf but there will be building blocks that can be assembled and configured to provide the basis for a proposal. The salesperson should be well versed in the common issues and opportunities facing companies in his/her prospective customer’s market niche and feel comfortable taking part in a business discussion. Because of this business orientation, often solutions salespeople focus on selected markets, but are able to sell a broad range of their own company’s products and services packaged as a market specific solution. These individuals need to be creative and be able to shape solutions.
The final sales style is consultative selling – a term often misunderstood as ‘selling consulting’, but nothing could be further from the truth. These professionals are closest in type to solutions salespeople. Where possible, they focus very early in the buying cycle on the key decision maker who feels the pain or an issue, or wants to exploit a market opportunity. A prominent difference between the two is that the consultative sales approach is peer-to-peer and conducted by a very senior individual in the selling company. This style is the only approach that works for joint ventures – both parties must be empowered and able to respect the expertise and authority of the other. Clearly, this style works best where a company – or a division of the company – sells few, very large and complex deals.