WHY COLLABORATIVE SELLING WORKS

Buyers and sellers often approach a sales situation as if they are on opposing sides of the table—or opposite sides of a negotiation. That’s what you saw in the first scenario.

Collaborative selling is about being on the same side, working side-by-side with your buyer to achieve something you both want. They want a solution; you want a sale. That’s what you saw in the second scenario.

How then do you achieve what you both want? By focusing on the buyer.

When you focus on helping your buyer solve a problem, capture an opportunity, or get what they want or need, you give them greater value, build a trusting relationship, earn their loyalty, and end up with more sales. That’s a situation where you both achieve what you want or need—short term and long term.

To help you remember the importance of focusing on your buyer throughout the selling process, I’ve developed an acronym—WiifT, pronounced “whiff-it”—which stands for “What’s in it for Them?” Them is your buyer. It’s spelled with a capital T because the focus is on Them.

The way you focus on the buyer is to make their problems, opportunities, wants, and needs the focus of your conversations and the reason for your solution. This leads us to another important acronym—POWNs, pronounced with the sound of the first o in opportunity. POWNs stands for problems, opportunities, wants, and needs—the items you work with your buyer to address or achieve. (I promise there are only three acronyms in this book for you to remember.)

Usually sellers are taught to find the buyer’s want or need, and that is a great place to start. Yet when you look beyond the obvious want or need and help your buyer capture opportunities and solve problems, you gain their respect, earn their trust, give greater value, and create a stronger sense of urgency for adopting your solution.

These desired or not-yet-capitalized-upon opportunities and known and unknown problems are often the areas where you can provide the most value. In consumer sales, these may be life changers. Your solution may lead to less stress, healthier relationships, an improved quality of life, a more organized lifestyle or home, or a better work-life balance.

In corporate sales, they may be more complex, involve other departments, and help the company’s customers or benefit the overall organization. Your solution might help them avoid future replacement costs or reduce maintenance expenses. You might help them realize a high-level benefit, such as eliminating redundancy with another department or improving the company’s reputation. These are things your buyer may not have thought about, and yet addressing them benefits the buyer’s company and puts the buyer in a favorable light within their own company.

When you think beyond immediate wants and needs, you make a huge difference to your buyer. The impact makes you more valuable than someone who just provides a product or service.

There are some misunderstandings about what collaboration is. There is a perception that collaboration is an arduous process, involving large teams of people and long timelines. Yet collaborative selling can be as simple as a single conversation, or a string of conversations, between a buyer and a seller—two-way conversations where the discovery and dialogue are part of the value the buyer receives.

In a nutshell, collaborative selling involves a buyer and seller, working together, conversation by conversation, to address the buyer’s POWNs, with the outcome being that they both achieve something of value. The approach works whether your conversations take place face-to-face, over the phone, or through email.