The last sixty years of selling have been an evolving process of change and evolution of what gave you a competitive advantage. Most sales reps, without further training and coaching, stayed at the philosophy and skill level they entered selling even as markets (and competitors) continue to evolve and get stronger. How many of your senior reps’ brag about using selling styles that stopped providing any kind of edge decades ago? Are you pushing your team to master antiquated selling skills and philosophies? Join me as I review the “Last 60 years of selling” …and what you can be doing to increase their selling skills and competitive edge…so they can sell even more!
What are your salespeople doing to increase their competitive advantage? The reality of selling is for the last 60 years, about every 10 years, what it takes to gain a competitive advantage and what's utilized by the majority of sales reps has changed. The question is how current and how aware are your salespeople of these changes?
Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And there's an evolution of your competitive advantage I'd like to share. It starts in the 1960s, 60 years ago, when we watched that your competitive advantage in 1960s, I realize you weren't even born then, but the 1960s competitive advantage was based in your ability to demo a product. And the demos themselves were very biased, that was the competitive advantage. The demo actually looked a little bit better than the product would actually function. So customers wised up and realized they couldn't trust demos anymore.
The marketplace shifted in the 1970s a completely different direction and not a very positive one. This direction was the high pressure selling kicked in, all the closing techniques, all of the high pressure techniques, all based on doing a sales call, but getting it close to the end and then power closing the end to make sure that you won the business. As you can imagine, this turned off pretty much everybody. The industry really took a black eye because of it.
So the industry shifted and salespeople in the 1980s started selling based on relationships, saying, wait a moment, no more pressure, no more hassles, friends buy from friends. Let's be friends and I'll give you a bunch of free stuff. The whole idea is we just gave, just dumped all this free stuff on the customer with the idea that would give us the relationship and they'd be our friends because of all the free stuff we did for them. Customers took all the free stuff but then still put it out for a bid based on who best vendor and the relationship selling really wasn't helping as much as we all thought it would.
Then the reality is the 1990s kicked in as a different direction as well and that was because relationship selling wasn't working, friends don't buy from friends, friends buy from experts. So the idea is it was just like relationship selling where we gave a bunch of free stuff away, but now it was consulting services, it was product demos, it was all the technical things about what you did. We focused on the business side of the relationship, not the personal. But the same thing happened, the customer took all our free stuff and still put it out to bid.
So the marketplace shifted again and it became a little bit tighter in 2000, where it became something called negotiated partnerships. Where we go to a customer saying, we'll do this free stuff for you but we're going to have to charge you. If you do business with this, we'll give you a credit, so it did in fact become free, but you're going to pay for it. In case you go work with somebody else in the final decision.
Well, then 2010 hit and then the Amazon model changed everybody's lives. The idea of everybody was now focused on how we could give speeds, simplicity, and ease of use to customers in our ordering processes. It's shifted again today and now it's called virtual selling. Virtual selling is taking advantage of the electronic connectivities, texting customers, emailing customers, talking by Zoom, making sure the website is current and that orders can be placed through that, and integrating all of these electronics into the total solution, brought to the customer.
Now the reality is wherever you joined and started selling, especially if you've not had a lot of sales training, that's where your skills stick. So you'll see people that started selling in the 1980s and they still believe relationships selling is the only way to sell. Now, all of these skills are important, all of these skills contribute to a salesperson's success, but it's not the go-to solution today. We need to make sure we evolve and stay current to make sure our customers are still interested in buying from us and see that we do offer them competitively unique solutions. Where are your salespeople in this evolution? And we're doing to make sure they get as current as possible.
Would love to know how you're working with us, would love to know the impact on your team. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.