My friend, Bob Bly, sent me an article that talked about the seven sales traits that customers say will make them buy (The Selling Advantage). He had a quote from Peter Drucker from The Practice of Management that I think is worth repeating: What a customer thinks he is buying, what he considers value, is decisiveit determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.
We stress (harp) on this all the time in our training. Your value is nothing unless it is valuable to your prospect. And its only valuable to your prospect if its:
a) solving a problem that he currently has,
b) avoiding a problem that could strike him in the future or
c) exploiting some type of dream or possibility in his life.I believe this is even more important in business-to-business selling, because in most businesses the souls been sucked out of the business and all thats left is managing, management by objectives and boring, mundane, intellectual gobbledygook.
So, if you can re-frame your value in a way that helps a buyer (purchasing agents, CFO, whomever youre calling on) see that they have problems they didnt know they had or see that the dreams they had for that fleeting second are actually within their reach, then you will be bringing enormous value. (And you will be inspired).
Consequently, that means you have to have a process/system/philosophy/method that actually supports that goal of you bringing value to the customer. Its what we talk about in most of our posts, but I thought the Drucker quote was interesting enough to bring to your attention.
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