The Personal Selling Process
We now turn from designing and managing a sales force to the personal selling process. The selling process consists of several steps that salespeople must master. These steps focus on the goal of getting new customers and obtaining orders from them. However, most salespeople spend much of their time maintaining existing accounts and building long-term customer relationships. We will discuss the relationship aspect of the personal selling process in a later section.
Steps in the Selling Process
As shown in
Figure 16.3, the selling process consists of seven steps: prospecting and qualifying, preapproach, approach, presentation and demonstration, handling objections, closing, and follow-up.
Figure 16.3
Steps in the Selling Process
Prospecting and Qualifying
The first step in the selling process is prospecting—identifying qualified potential customers. Approaching the right customers is crucial to selling success. Salespeople don’t want to call on just any potential customers. They want to call on those who are most likely to appreciate and respond to the company’s value proposition—those the company can serve well and profitably.
A salesperson must often approach many prospects to get only a few sales. Although the company supplies some leads, salespeople need skill in finding their own. The best source is referrals. Salespeople can ask current customers for referrals and cultivate other referral sources, such as suppliers, dealers, noncompeting salespeople, and online or social media contacts. They can also search for prospects in directories or on the internet and track down leads using the telephone, email, and social media. Or, as a last resort, they can drop in unannounced on various offices (a practice known as cold calling).
Salespeople also need to know how to qualify leads—that is, how to identify the good ones and screen out the poor ones. Prospects can be qualified by looking at their financial ability, volume of business, special needs, location, and possibilities for growth.
Preapproach
Before calling on a prospect, the salesperson should learn as much as possible about the organization (what it needs, who is involved in the buying) and its buyers (their characteristics and buying styles). This step is known as preapproach. A successful sale begins long before the salesperson makes initial contact with a prospect. Preapproach begins with good research and preparation. The salesperson can consult standard industry and online sources, acquaintances, and others to learn about the company. He or she can scour the prospect’s web and social media sites for information about its products, buyers, and buying processes. Then the salesperson must apply the research gathered to develop a customer strategy.
The salesperson should set call objectives, which may be to qualify the prospect, gather information, or make an immediate sale. Another task is to determine the best approach, which might be a personal visit, a phone call, an email, or a text or tweet. The ideal timing should be considered carefully because many prospects are busiest at certain times of the day or week. Finally, the salesperson should give thought to an overall sales strategy for the account.
Approach
During the approach step, the salesperson should know how to meet and greet the buyer and get the relationship off to a good start. The approach might take place offline or online, in-person or via digital conferencing or social media. This step involves the salesperson’s appearance, opening lines, and follow-up remarks. The opening lines should be positive to build goodwill from the outset. This opening might be followed by some key questions to learn more about the customer’s needs or by showing a display or sample to attract the buyer’s attention and curiosity. As in all stages of the selling process, listening to the customer is crucial.
Presentation and Demonstration
During the presentation step of the selling process, the salesperson tells the “value story” to the buyer, showing how the company’s offer solves the customer’s problems. The customer-solution approach fits better with today’s relationship marketing focus than does a hard sell or glad-handing approach.
The goal should be to show how the company’s products and services fit the customer’s needs. Buyers today want insights and solutions, not smiles; results, not razzle-dazzle. Moreover, buyers don’t want just products; they want to know how those products will add value to their businesses. They want salespeople who listen to their concerns, understand their needs, and respond with the right products and services.
Great salespeople know how to sell, but more important, they know how to listen and build strong customer relationships.
Tony Garcia/Getty Images
But before salespeople can present customer solutions, they must develop solutions to present. The solutions approach calls for good listening and problem-solving skills. The qualities that buyers dislike most in salespeople include being pushy, late, deceitful, unprepared, disorganized, or overly talkative. The qualities they value most include good listening, empathy, honesty, dependability, thoroughness, and follow-through.
Great salespeople know how to sell, but more important, they know how to listen and build strong customer relationships. According to an old sales adage, “You have two ears and one mouth. Use them proportionally.” A classic ad from office products maker Boise Cascade makes the listening point. It shows a Boise salesperson with huge ears drawn on. “With Boise, you’ll notice a difference right away, especially with our sales force,” says the ad. “At Boise. . . our account representatives have the unique ability to listen to your needs.”
Finally, salespeople must also plan their presentation methods. Good interpersonal communication skills count when it comes to engaging customers and making effective sales presentations. However, the current media-rich and cluttered communications environment presents many new challenges for sales presenters. Today’s information-overloaded customers demand richer presentation experiences. For their part, presenters now face multiple distractions during presentations from mobile phones, text messages, and other digital competition. As a result, salespeople must deliver their messages in more engaging and compelling ways.
Thus, today’s salespeople are employing advanced presentation technologies that allow for full multimedia presentations to only one or a few people. The venerable old sales presentation flip chart has been replaced with tablets, sophisticated presentation software, online presentation technologies, interactive whiteboards, and digital projectors.
Handling Objections
Customers almost always have objections during the presentation or when asked to place an order. The objections can be either logical or psychological, and they are often unspoken. In handling objections, the salesperson should use a positive approach, seek out hidden objections, ask the buyer to clarify any objections, take objections as opportunities to provide more information, and turn the objections into reasons for buying. Every salesperson needs training in the skills of handling objections.
Closing
After handling the prospect’s objections, the salesperson next tries to close the sale. However, some salespeople do not get around to closing or don’t handle it well. They may lack confidence, feel guilty about asking for the order, or fail to recognize the right moment to close the sale. Salespeople should know how to recognize closing signals from the buyer, including physical actions, comments, and questions. For example, the customer might sit forward and nod approvingly or ask about prices and credit terms.
Salespeople can use any of several closing techniques. They can ask for the order, review points of agreement, offer to help write up the order, ask whether the buyer wants this model or that one, or note that the buyer will lose out if the order is not placed now. The salesperson may offer the buyer special reasons to close, such as a lower price, an extra quantity at no charge, or additional services.
Follow-Up
The last step in the selling process—follow-up—is necessary if the salesperson wants to ensure customer satisfaction and repeat business. Right after closing, the salesperson should complete any details on delivery time, purchase terms, and other matters. The salesperson then should schedule a follow-up call after the buyer receives the initial order to make sure proper installation, instruction, and servicing occur. This visit would reveal any problems, assure the buyer of the salesperson’s interest, and reduce any buyer concerns that might have arisen since the sale.
Personal Selling and Managing Customer Relationships
The steps in the just-described selling process are transaction oriented—their aim is to help salespeople close a specific sale with a customer. But in most cases, the company is not simply seeking a sale. Rather, it wants to engage the customer over the long haul in a mutually profitable relationship. The sales force usually plays an important role in customer relationship building. Thus, as shown in Figure 16.3, the selling process must be understood in the context of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships. Moreover, as discussed in a previous section, today’s buyers are increasingly moving through the early stages of the buying process themselves, before ever engaging sellers. Salespeople must adapt their selling process to match the new buying process. That means discovering and engaging customers on a relationship basis rather than a transaction basis.
Successful sales organizations recognize that winning and keeping accounts requires more than making good products and directing the sales force to close lots of sales. If the company wishes only to close sales and capture short-term business, it can do this by simply slashing its prices to meet or beat those of competitors. Instead, most companies want their salespeople to practice value selling—demonstrating and delivering superior customer value and capturing a return on that value that is fair for both the customer and the company.
Value selling: Sales management’s challenge is to transform salespeople from customer advocates for price cuts into company advocates for value.
© almagami/123rf.com
Unfortunately, in the heat of closing sales, salespeople too often take the easy way out by cutting prices rather than selling value.
Sales management’s challenge is to transform salespeople from customer advocates for price cuts into company advocates for value. Here’s how Rockwell Automation sells value and relationships rather than price:20
Under pressure from Walmart to lower its prices, a condiment producer asked several competing supplier representatives—including Rockwell Automation sales rep Jeff Policicchio—to help it find ways to reduce its operating costs. After spending a day in the customer’s plant, Policicchio quickly put his finger on the major problem: Production was suffering because of downtime due to poorly performing pumps on the customer’s 32 large condiment tanks. Quickly gathering cost and usage data, Policicchio used his Rockwell Automation laptop value-assessment tool to develop an effective solution for the customer’s pump problem.
The next day, as he and competing reps presented their cost-reduction proposals to plant management, Policicchio offered the following value proposition: “With this Rockwell Automation pump solution, through less downtime, reduced administrative costs in procurement, and lower spending on repair parts, your company will save at least $16,268 per pump—on up to 32 pumps—relative to our best competitor’s solution.” Compared with competitors’ proposals, Policicchio’s solution carried a higher initial price. However, no competing rep offered more than fuzzy promises about possible cost savings. Most simply lowered their prices.
Impressed by Policicchio’s value proposition—despite its higher initial price—the plant managers opted to buy and try one Rockwell Automation pump. When the pump performed even better than predicted, the customer ordered all of the remaining pumps. By demonstrating tangible value rather than simply selling on price, Policicchio not only landed the initial sale but also earned a loyal future customer.
Thus, value selling requires listening to customers, understanding their needs, and carefully coordinating the whole company’s efforts to create lasting relationships based on customer value.