How to stay in control of the sales process

In uncertain times, winning new business, either from new contacts or from existing clients, can get harder. Buyers may have less appetite to buy, they are often forced to cut back on their spending or at least be far more careful how they spend. On the sales side in good times, being a well-liked order taker is often sufficient to hit targets and quotas. In more challenging times, that strategy doesn’t work nearly as well. In other words, waiting for an incoming enquiry and fulfilling a request for a quotation will not win enough business, even if you have the cheapest solution on the market.

So what can you do to take more control, particularly in the manufacturing sector?

The overriding principle must be to have equal business stature with your contact so you can have open and honest conversations. That means having the confidence to speak to the right people in the way they need to be heard and understood.

The next question to consider would be is your solution a good fit for the problem they have? That inevitably means not all prospects are right for your organisation, and you may have to invest more in finding the ideal client. Once you are speaking to the ideal contact, make sure your have set out clear expectations so everybody is aware of what is happening without hiding behind powerplays and psychological games.

Ask great questions. In particular ask questions about the problems they have. The hard truth is, nobody much cares about your solution, but they do care a lot about how it might solve their organisation’s problems and, even more, how buying from you impacts on them personally. So spend plenty of time working those impacts out with them.
During this process of unpicking the problem, you will often find the real problem isn’t what the buyer thought it was originally. This is important; if you identify the real problem then you can safely leave your competitors to quote for things that will not solve the problem, leaving you in the ideal position of being the only correct solution. In that scenario price suddenly isn’t quite as important as it would have been in a competitive bid.

Once you have gained their trust and you have helped them identify what the real problem is, it is a lot easier for them to tell you what they would be prepared to invest to fix the problem. That investment will be not just in terms of money but also time and resources. Moreover, they will also be a lot happier about working out with you what their process needs to be for them to purchase from you. Who else will be involved, when, where and how?

If you already follow these steps and do them well, you will have discovered an extraordinary thing. Buyers will have, to all intents and purposes, committed to buying from you at this stage. You have helped them discover the right solution at the right price and they know they can purchase it from you. But you haven’t furnished them with the full proposal, demonstration or quote yet. In other words you should have the mentality that quotes are for almost-clients only who have qualified for them.

The point where so many opportunities get de-railed happens once the proposal is ready. When you put together a proposal and send it or even present it, the instinct of the buyer is to take their time to assess and analyse and so the whole impetus is lost. Obviously, they need to be sure and that might take some time, but the key here is to have previously worked out with them what will happen once you present your solution so you can support them in that decision process and so you are not left on the outside, wondering what is happening. If you suspect that nothing is happening, your instinct is probably correct.

Don’t forget to help them with dealing with incumbents and alternative providers. Help them to feel comfortable and confident they have made the right decision to buy from you. Plan out with them the next steps for delivery, performance reviews and referrals.

Recent research from Sales Mastery has identified that buyers are waiting ever later in their buying process to engage with salespeople. They will have done an enormous amount of research before ever speaking with you. They need to feel in control and confident in their buying decisions as they can’t afford to make a mistake. However, remember that research is often wasted as they probably don’t know as much about your field as you do and even if they do, they will often have missed the real problem because they are too close to it. So don’t be afraid to take those highly-researched enquiries back to basic questions.

If you’d like more and you’d like our book “Selling in Manufacturing and Logistics”, contact me at pglynn@sandler.com, and, while stocks last, I’ll send you a copy.