Who has to sell? Everyone!
The common perception in a sales process is that it is the responsibility of the sales man to sell. But that is a totally wrong way of looking at the concept of selling, because in a B2B scenario everyone sells.
Amazed?
But that’s the truth. Recently we won a deal from a major health plan in the United States. After the deal was signed I walked over to one of the key decision makers from the client side and we were generally chatting up about the events. As the discussion turned towards our presentation, he casually remarked that though our presentation was similar to others, the fact that we were actively into community development programs swung the deal in our favour. Now that part on our community development programs was included by one of our Human Resource (HR) mangers. The HR manager had actually clinched the deal. He had made the sale!
Now I am a sales guy. And I am not belittling the efforts of our brethren. But everyone in the organisation has to sell, right from the Public Relations (PR) to the HR department. Often though sales guys make the pitch it is the other guys in the team who clinch the deal. And that is the difference between a successful pitch and an unsuccessful one.
As I looked back at that incident, I came to a few ground rules while making the sales pitch
Do your research
What I mean by that is apart from delivering the value proposition and understanding the client business it is important for the sales team to find out other aspects of the client organisation. Like in our case their interest in community development. These snippets of information can then be taken back to the board room and if any such activities go on in your organisation they have to be show cased.
Form a cross functional team
Often the final presentation team would consist of only the sales people and those directly involved in the domain. But it would not hurt to include other areas in the discussion. Especially the support functions like human resources.
Avoid death by ‘power point’
Most clients don’t like power point presentations. Anyways this is what your competitors would be doing. Rather think of other unique ways to get the message across, working models, video clips, walk through, site visits, among others.
Last but not the least many clients want someone they can relate to in some ways or the other and it may not necessarily be the sales team. So everyone has to make a sale!
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