To increase sales, you need to stop selling.
With customers being more informed then ever, the old paradigm of push selling is dead
“Always be closing!” A phrase still shouted out by sales mangers the world over with the same results: no one be closing. In the last 20 years the role of a salesperson has changed dramatically from being a product pusher and into a trusted advisor and customer advocate.
Thanks in large part to the internet, prospects can seek out unlimited amount of information, not only on your company but down to the individual sales person. Not to mention your competitors. By the time a customer has talked to your sales person they have already completed about 75% of the buying process and it often results in a price bake off.
So what is your sales team supposed to do in this new reality? Become teachers.
With customers having more information at their fingertips the role of an outbound sales team is to educate a prospect before they enter into the buying mode. Since most purchases in enterprise accounts have long sales cycles, the role of the sales person is to provide education to the prospect and to keep the sales pitch out of the pitch for as long as possible.
But with the traditional sales person, who often has to juggle multiple roles, this is something that isn’t always possible. So the solution is to have a rep that is dedicated to bringing pre-purchase customers down the pipeline and warm them up to the point that when the customer starts looking for a solution, they come to you. And the real opportunity is that a large part of the process can be automated with the right technology which both doubles the efficacy of your sales team, but dramatically reduces the cost per lead and the total acquisition costs.
Your competitors won’t know what hit them.