Everyone knows we live in a post-trust era.  The days when people trusted others until they gave them a reason not to are gone.  These days, trust has to be earned.

But trust is what advances the sales opportunity.  So how does today’s sales rep build the trust needed to succeed with customers?

Value = Trust:  the 21^st century sales equation

Today’s customers demand value at every step of the relationship.  No value = no trust.  No trust = no sale.  The 21^st century sales rep, who demonstrates value from the beginning of the relationship, builds trust. 

What your reps do after the first meeting with a customer has the power to advance the sales opportunity or cause the customer to slam on the brakes.  What they do here can either build trust or break it.

A rep’s behavior following sales meetings will either:

Renowned sales expert Neil Rackham wrote what many still consider to be the definitive guide to sales, SPIN Selling.  First published in 1988, this book was the "sales bible" for two decades.

But the author now acknowledges that the original edition of the book is out of date.  Many of the techniques it taught no longer work today!  Instead, Rackham now says that sales people must become value creators.

What is value?  Value is the information, insights, and actions a sales rep brings to the customer/prospect that they can’t find or achieve on their own.  The 21st century customer demands value at every step of the relationship. 

All sales strategies and processes should be targeted to this fundamental change.

Between 2010 and 2013, the greatest emphasis of sales force change was in the area of compensation and quota setting.  That’s according to Mark Donnolo, founder of The SalesGlobe, a sales consulting group in Atlanta.  During those two years, in over 100 large companies that participated in his research, almost every vice president of sales was focused on addressing the issues of compensation and quota setting for the next year.

Quotas and compensation plans are great drivers of change.  A good compensation plan can change the behavior of an entire sales force.  But in most cases, compensation plans and the quotas on which they are based are designed with one purpose in mind - to make the supplier/vendor more profitable. 

As I wrote in my last post, Zig Ziglar famously said that if you help enough other people get what they want, you will get what you want.  If you help the customer meet his or her needs, you have a much better chance of having your own needs met.  Therefore, making your customer’s bottom line your goal is the key to closing sales.

That leads us to the problem with many sales quotas:  they’re set for the wrong reasons by the wrong people

We’ve all heard the Golden Rule of Business: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”  That’s especially true in sales!  Your customers have the gold you’re after, so you must play by their rules.

To do so, you must also apply the Platinum Rule: “Do unto others as they would have you do to them, not as you would have them do unto you.”  There are lots of rules for successful selling, but they all boil down to this one rule.

The Platinum Rule of Sales

 Translated into the world of sales, The Rule means:

In this post, we discussed how to identify the different types of buyers in a complex sale, and how to use the questions they ask to pinpoint what their buying concerns are.  Understanding each type of buyer’s decision criteria is key to winning the business.  

This can be challenging, even if everyone involved is a relatively easy-going person.  But sometimes, there are personality factors that can make this process a bit more complicated.  That’s what happens when one of your buyers is a power broker or an antagonist. 

Complex sales where there are numerous decision-makers can be difficult to navigate.  Closing such a deal requires an understanding of the different types of buyers, what their concerns are, and what influences their desires.  It also requires the ability to anticipate, identify, and address the factors each individual cares about.

There are three players in a complex sale: influencer/user, technical, and financial buyer.  In smaller companies, one person can serve in all three roles, but with larger organizations, there are typically two or three people fulfilling them.  

After you’ve completed your sales presentation or product demo, the buyer enters the evaluation phase of the buying process, and a scary monster frequently rears its ugly head: risk.  Risk can kill a deal, and its threat can increase as your prospect evaluates your offering.

What is the opportunity cost of going with this solution or vendor?
What will happen if I commit and spend this money?
Will I truly get the value I need?
What if I’m missing something?

You’ve just made a great sales presentation for a great prospect.  The whole sales process has gone smoothly from the beginning.  You like your buyers, and they like you and your offering.  They definitely want to do business with you!  If only you can agree on a price.

It’s easy and natural to get a little discouraged when a buyer asks you to lower your fee.  But don’t assume they’ve applied the brakes just yet.  Price is only 18% of the buying decision.  The competence of the sales rep, however, is 39% of the buying decision.  You may feel uncomfortable, but your customer has just offered you an excellent opportunity to demonstrate a high degree of competence by handling his request correctly.

The Internet.  That – in one word – is why cold calling is dead, even for B2B sales. 

In his book, Achieve Sales Excellence, author Howard Stevens set forth “The Seven Rules of the Customer.”  These seven rules emerged from comments recorded in over 80,000 interviews his company conducted as part of a fourteen-year study of 7,500 sales reps from 2,500 companies.   One of the things study participants - all of whom were business customers - were asked to share was  what qualities they believed a world-class sales organization must possess.

The participants were asked to list and weight the main criteria they use when making a buying decision and selecting a vendor.  Overwhelmingly, customers reported the same four factors and assigned similar levels of importance to them related to how much of the buying decision rests on each: