Are you a Sales Braniac? Today’s buyers and decision makers are not looking for more information. They can easily access this online.
Today’s buyers and decision makers are looking for relevant and valuable insight. That means moving yourself out of order-taker mindset. Dare to become a sales braniac!
How many of these habits do you incorporate into your daily professional practice? Reflect on the following questions. Do you:
1) Use more than your company’s marketing communications materials to make your point to buyers and decision makers? Stop the laziness. Do your homework.
2) Carefully select sales enablement information to provide customized suggestions and recommendations to buyers and decision makers? Don’t recycle the same stuff. One size does not fit all in today’s globally competitive marketplace.
3) Go outside your company’s data toolbox to understand the source material for statistics created for these reports? Source material can contradict the data points which have been extracted to support your own company’s marketing and selling position. Discover these discrepancies before buyers tell you about them. Ouch!
4) Research industry, marketplace, supply chain, manufacturing and economic trends which may impact your prospect’s ability to buy – even if they want to purchase what you are selling? Differentiate yourself as a thought leader and innovator instead of a commodity order-taker.
5) Understand that buyers will buy, regardless of whether anyone sells anything to them? Stop selling at them. Instead, collaborate with them.
6) Collaborate with your technical and engineering colleagues early on – and throughout – the business development and selling process? Choose to make them part of your team, not just the guys and gals who you haul in to “demo.”
7) Learn the language and mindset of everyone seated around the decision making table? Sure the concepts, mindset and lingo of their professional disciplines are outside of your current comfort levels. Grow the left side of your sales brains.
8) Ask questions to move the left side of your brain forward? Somewhere along the line, sales cultures reinforced that you have a weak left side of your brain. Prove them wrong. Upgrade the left side of your sales brain. Your technical and engineering colleagues have a lot to teach you. In fact, you have a lot to teach them, as well.
9) Always focus on the right answer or the optimal solution? Learn to listen longer than you feel you have to. Allow your customers to reflect on issues impacting their company’s viability in the marketplace. Identify more impactful opportunities to serve up long-term value to them. If you stop the discussion once they’ve identified some “pain point” you can prescribe your solution for, you’ve missed out on all the great stuff that follows.
10) Always learn? What’s the last book you read? Fiction or non-fiction? Top performers in business and technical/engineering fields are cross-functional learners. They are always reading, upgrading their own knowledge base, always connecting the dots between seemingly disparate ideas. That type of synergy makes your brain recombine what you thought you knew, differently. You benefit. So do your customers. Aha!
Focus on adapting, adopting and applying at least three of these practices into your professional habits over the next three months. You’ll find more tips and tools for cross-training your brain in my book, Do YOU Mean Business.
Let me know the impact these new habits have on your becoming a Sales Braniac.
Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, catalyzes revenue-producing business transition, startup growth and professional development in the manufacturing and engineering space as well as in the B2C space. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page – on how to sell to skeptical decision makers.
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