Adapting Your Sales Technique to New Buying Behaviours

The world of sales is constantly changing. Where we are seeing the most change right now though is the nature of the engagement between the salesperson and customer.

The reasoning for this change comes down to two fundamentals:

1. We’re coming off a deep recession. Buying processes have become more complex because people don’t have extra money to spend, and in some extreme cases, no money at all. Customers have much higher expectation of what they want on presale, creating a more complex process overall with a lot more people involved.
2. The explosion of social media and its change on the way people consume and receive information. When individuals are looking to buy something they do research, they read reviews, they search different social media channels and they come to decisions on their own. Rather than a salesperson providing the information on a product or service, people are going elsewhere to get information about you.

Salespeople now have to look at how they are conducting sales in this new landscape of buying. They need to ask themselves what value they bring to the process and how to get involved in the process. If buyers are going elsewhere to get information and engage in conversation about your product or service, how are salespeople going to insert themselves?

To reflect this new order, salespeople have to rethink how the engage with clients. Hanging out where your customers hangout is step one. Visit the sites they frequent, join the LinkedIn industry groups they’re a part of. Find out where they are getting and discussing information and insert yourself there. Once that connection is made and you’ve joined the conversation, be open to providing value without an expectation of initial return. Making the shift from a relationship-focused salesperson to a knowledge worker is also important in this new business landscape. Salespeople have to also be really good researchers, they must understand their customer’s business segment, what’s happening with them on both a macro and micro level, and bring all this information together before making contact. Once that contact is made, it’s important to make sure it is relevant. Before initial communication, you have to understand them, what they care about and their strategy.

Tip: It’s important to be good at filtering this information. You have to be able to pick out relevant bits because there is so much. Being able to this and then focus your conversations will help ensure the few moments you have with a customer are conducted in a value creating way.