Success in Complex Selling

The challenges of selling technology and other complex solutions are many. The difficulty of the sale is increased by marketing spin and sales’ conception of the Ideal Client Profile.

Imagine walking into a supermarket to purchase cookies. Upon reaching the isle where the cookies are located, all the choices are packaged in plain white bags that list only ingredients. If we all understood baking and formulations, making a choice might not be a difficult task, but we don’t and therefore have to learn about what we are buying in order to make a decision.

In any sale, education is secondary to selling into the prospect’s pain. To sell on features is to say to the prospect “You figure out which problem my product solves”. Prospects are busy and already managing competing priorities with limited resources. The feature sale message makes the prospect do all the thinking including dollarizing the value. It also does nothing to minimize the risk of making the buy decision. The subtext of the feature message is “I don’t care enough about you as a prospect or customer to figure out what problem you have that my product or service solves”.

Marketing and sales need to address the specific challenges in each target vertical market by thinking about what they can do to start a conversation around improving the market position of the prospect and open conversations with that message. In addition, sales needs to address how they will reduce the risk of the purchase. Dan Ariely, a Behavior Economist illustrates how people make irrational decisions in order to avoid risk in his latest book, The Upside of Irrationality. Ariely helps readers understand that our assumptions about how people make decisions when dealing large purchases are somewhat distorted.

Some of the key factors that influence the success of complex selling that your business can control:

• Start the conversation by addressing how the solution adds value to the prospect’s supply chain.
• Dollarize the value.
• Help the prospect avoid undue risk.

P.S. Here is a case where the sales team thought like the prospect and screated a huge win for the business.

A major supplement manufacturer set out to increase sales by solving problems for their customers. They were not sure which problem to solve, so borrowing a chapter from our playbook, they sent their sales team into the field to learn more about the problems of their existing customers. Here is what they found:

• The manufacturing processes involves a multi-step processes
• Each process is costly and requires the line to be broken down, cleaned inspected and cycled
• The multi-step process allowed customers to use a line to create more products but it had hidden costs
• The business problem was the cost of manufacturing products that required multiple-steps
  

Once the supplier validated these challenges across multiple sales opportunities, R&D took over and created a method where custom formularies were manufactured to meet customer’s exact needs thus eliminating the need to cycle the through the multi-step process and store & manage multiple ingredients. What used to take twenty-six hours now took only four for the customer.

Considering the amount of labor involved in managing multiple ingredients and the changeover of systems, the customer now would realize a significant savings and a reduction in the risk of contamination.

The supplement manufacturer is now able to market and sell with a powerful message – We help you collapse manufacturing costs and reduce contamination risk by reducing process cycles with custom formularies. To right Ideal Client Profile that is the perfect formula for a sale.

Call us today for a free sales and marketing consultation and to receive a free copy of our integrated sales & marketing toolkit. 410.782.0360.