Selling today, in the last few years, has dramatically changed. Have you?
Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. The reality is, over the last five years, there's been a profound, cultural shift in how buyers want to be sold and the entire communication process between buyer and seller.
The reality of this process is, the majority of these changes is driven because we've gone through a generational shift of leadership. Today, millennials are in charge of the process. They're the mid-range managers dealing with salespeople and making buying decisions. And the challenge is, they have now implemented their interests and their needs, and what they want. And with a lot of them, they don't want to talk to you on the telephone anymore. But look how many sales reps, the telephone is still their first line of defense. If they have to talk to a customer, their first assumption is, let's go call them.
This is a great time for your sales team to be going to each of your customers and just asking the customer, how do you most want us to communicate with you? There's just a lot of customers today that don't want to talk by phone. They see it as very inefficient. They would much rather deal by texting. So look what happens and how ineffective the sales rep's going to be, if a customer keeps texting questions, and the sales rep keeps answering by trying to call them back on the telephone.
The second thing we're seeing is buyers today want immediate answers. It used to be that they could call their sales rep and wait three hours for the sales rep to call them back to answer a question, and that was still considered good service. That's not the case today. The reality is, if a customer calls their sales rep to get an answer and they get voicemail, they're likely to hang up the phone and then call the office, because they want an answer from somebody.
So now, what are you doing to make sure that all members of your team are up to date and up to speed, knowing what the issues are with a customer, knowing the open problems that are being worked on? So if a customer does reach one of them, they're still going to get an effective answer because everybody in your team knows what's going on. It's not just a lone ranger, sales rep selling an account and dealing with all the pro problems anymore. We need to approach this as a team because of this imediacy that customers are demanding and expecting.
And the final thing is, the reality is even more than in the past, buyers don't want to be sold this high pressure of the old days is just going to fall on deaf ears and probably turn customers off. Customers don't want to be sold. They want be bought. They want to help buy.
And as part of that buying process, the more you bring them solutions, the more you can answer their questions and the more you can support them in the decisions they made, the more persuasive and effective you're going to be.
These are major changes that have happened in selling and things aren't going back to the old way. This is a natural evolution in how selling works and because of the current buyers', generational philosophies now impacting how they buy and most important, how we sell.
What are you doing to make sure that your people are aligned to the latest philosophies and approaches of what your customers want? So they see you as being leading edge. They see you as being effective and they see you as being persuasive. This is something we need to work on because this is a profound change that's happened just in the last few years. If we don't adjust, we're probably going to lose our competitive advantage.
We'd love to know what you're doing about this. We'd love to know how you've adjusted the processes of selling for 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.