We have a new guest blogger in the ranks and while our worlds are different, her words ring true throughout the sales world.
One of the aims in sales, lately, is to help buyers buy. Unfortunately, we in sales continue to focus on selling a solution. And when we say we want to ‘help buyers buy’ that means we want to make it easier for them to make a purchasing decision and choose our solution.
But sales treats a need as if it were an isolated event. We haven’t been trained to realize that ‘needs’ arise in our buyer’s environments as part of a tangle of other issues that are going on. So a team building program is necessitated by a merger, by team members from disparate cultures joining together, by folks being laid off, by people being resentful they have been given new jobs, etc. Until buyers either resolve or garner buy-in from, the internal issues that necessitated the ‘need’ and hold it in place daily, they cannot bring in a solution without disrupting the other elements. And the time it takes them to do that is the length of the sales cycle.
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