Salesopedia - You Can Always Sell More…By Strengthening Your Strategic Selling Skills

You Can Always Sell More…By Strengthening Your Strategic Selling Skills

Written by Jim Pancero

How strong are your strategic selling skills? Strategic selling involves increasing your competitive advantage by strengthening your ability to communicate your uniqueness, value and competitive differential to a customer or prospect.

How successful have you been explaining your competitive uniqueness and differentiation to your potential buyers?

What’s Involved With Strategic Selling?

So what is Strategic selling? Strategic selling involves your ability to communicate your value and competitive uniqueness to a prospect or customer throughout your entire selling process.

Strategic selling includes starting off each call with a strong strategic uniqueness or philosophy statement about you and your company that takes less than two minutes to present. It also involves you developing a more strategic or “big picture” focus to your selling messaging, selling language and overall philosophy or approach to a customer’s business.

The toughest single question asked by customers today is “Why, based on all the competitive alternatives available to me do I want to buy from you?” How successful have you been persuasively answering this question from your customers or prospects?

Most sales reps would answer this “Why buy?” question with a presentation detailing their products or services best “features and advantages.” It’s then up to your buyer to organize and sort everything you covered so they understand the overall value and impact of doing business with you. But this also means that your success is completely dependent on your buyer’s ability to summarize and interpret everything said so they can understand the overall value of buying from you and your company.

Allow me to share my strategic selling message that I use to begin a sales call. As a sales and sales management consultant and trainer…my answer to a prospect asking me why they’d want to buy from me would be…..”I have a very specific niche in the sales and sales management training environment….I only work with experienced “business to business” sales professionals who already know how to sell, the managers who led them and the executives who direct them. Everything I do has one bottom line focus…to increase your competitive advantage so you can increase your profitability and selling success. I have the most advanced sales training available in North America today…and I can prove it!”

So what did you think of my message? Notice how customer focused my message hopefully appears and how it talks about how I want to help solve a customer’s sales issues instead of the traditional selling approach of just talking about the features…and customer benefits of my various products and programs.

Strategic or philosophy selling is not in conflict with “feature-benefit” selling. Both need to be utilized by you in your persuasive selling. But most sales reps spend all their time on a call only focusing on explaining their features and advantages…and spending little to no time positioning their philosophy or approach.

Strategic Selling Is Based On You Being Able To Prove A Difference In Your Value

A foundation of successful strategic selling is an understanding and belief that you’re not in a price driven market.

Here’s the simple reality of selling…if you’re working as an outside sales rep then you’re NOT in a price driven market…never have been and never will be…even in a tougher market or economic slowdown.

It’s not that you’re in a price driven market….it’s that all markets are value driven with pricing only being a distant second. There’s a real simple concept in strategic selling…”the more of a differential you can show me in value the more of a differential I’ll be willing to pay in price.”

Now the reality is price will always be a factor or component in any buyers decision….but the challenge for buyers is not based on getting the lowest price…the real buying challenge is being able to find the vendor with the best value offering so that you then don’t mind paying a higher price. In fact many buyers have told me they and their company can’t afford to buy the lowest price available due to the usually also lower value being provided.

Strategic Selling Focuses On Your Customers Instead Of On Yourself Or Your Products

An important component of Strategic selling is your ability to focus on your customers and what they want and need. But too many sales people only sell to one person….themselves! The sad reality is most reps spend all their selling time only talking about their products and themselves.

Customers aren’t actually buying your products or services…that has no real value or benefit to them. What they’re buying…and find profound value in…is what your products or services will actually do for them.

So how are you answering a customer or prospect asking you why they should buy from you? The foundation of strategic selling is to not spend the majority of your selling time talking about yourself, your company or why your stuff is so competitively superior but instead to focus the majority of your selling message on how your customer’s are going to benefit and receive greater value buying from you compared to anyone else.

And make sure you don’t do all the talking in your sales calls. Most experienced sales pro’s I’ve ridden with do all the talking on their sales calls. Customers might spend as little as 10% of the call actually talking!

What percentage of your sales calls are you talking vs. listening? And what can you do to make sure you focus your discussions and selling efforts on your customer and what you can do to address their challenges?

Strategic Selling Involves Selling As A Single Team With One Voice and One Message

A critical key to increasing your strategic success is to sell as a single team with one voice and one message. Do you and your fellow sales pros work as a team? The reality is…most sales team’s don’t.

Want to test to see how independent the members of your team really are? Individually ask several team members how they’d answer a prospect asking them “Why, based on all the competitive alternatives available to me do I want to buy from you?” If your team is similar to most you’ll discover that each rep will have their own completely different answers to this question.

And it’s not just your fellow sales reps we need to worry about. How many different people from your company will communicate with a prospect or customer before they say yes and sign an agreement? Most companies have several people talking to their customers including service and technical people, management, credit and your administrative team.

With all the different players from your company communicating…and hopefully persuading your customers…it’s critical you have a single, simple and focused uniqueness message that’s discussed and confirmed by all members of your team.

Decide to meet with your entire sales team to begin defining why someone would want to buy from you and your company…and then work to train and coach anyone who is communicating…and persuading your prospects and customers to want to buy from you.

Strategic Selling Incorporates The Four “Core Values” Selling Language Into Every Sales Call

Strengthening your philosophical or strategic selling language is also based on your understanding of the core values or driving philosophies of why buyers buy. These terms are referred to as the core values of buying because they’re the central themes, philosophies or driving justification of why a buyer likes you over all other alternatives.

Whether you’re buying for your personal consumption or buying for your company….There’s only four reasons…or core values as to why you’d select a specific vendor from a field of competitors.

Why’d you choose that vendor? I chose them because…#1 – they did more than anyone else to lower my risk. Or #2 – I chose them because they did more than anyone else to make my life or work easier. I chose them because #3 they did more than anyone else to either lower my total costs or to increase my profitability…and the fourth and final core value…I chose them because they did more than anyone else to increase my competitive advantage.

That’s it! Those are the four overall reasons…or core values why all buying decisions are made. All other buying reasons from customers fit into or will be a sub-set of these four core drivers of buying behavior.

These core values are such powerful selling terms because they parallel the thinking and reasoning of your buyers. And…these four core values are just not terms utilized by most sales people. How exciting is it to have selling language that’s both customer focused and not being used by your competitors!?

Set a goal next week of finding excuses to drop at least one of these four terms into your conversation with every customer to see if you notice any difference in your buyer’s responses or questions.

Final Comments

So how strong are your Strategic selling skills? And what can you now do to increase your…and your entire sales team’s ability to sell as a single team with one voice and one message? And what can you now do to increase your ability to effectively communicate your uniqueness, to focus more on your customers than on your self and your products, to stay focused on the “Big Picture” philosophy of why your buyers want to buy from you…and to incorporate the four “Core values” selling language into every sales call you make.

We know you’re good…now the question is….are you good enough…and committed enough to increase your strategic selling skills and to communicate a simple, brief and effective strategic message of competitive uniqueness on every call….so you can accelerate your competitive advantage and selling success?

Jim Pancero
		About the author:
		Jim Pancero has been directly involved in "business-to-business" selling for over 35 years. Six of those years were spent successfully selling the largest computer systems for the Data Processing Division of the IBM Corporation. During Jim's prestigious IBM career he earned several awards including the coveted "Golden Circle" designation annually awarded to the top 5% of their international sales force. In 1982, Jim founded his advanced sales training and consulting company. Since then, Jim has conducted over 2,500 presentations or consulting days for 500 companies providing a career average of five events per client. Over 90% of Jim's clients utilize his services more than once. www.pancero.com
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