MARKET REPORT Sales Techniques
“Without any doubt the customer is more tech savvy these days and in a lot of cases they have an idea of what
they want, even if they do not fully understand the full technicalities.” Justin Blaine, Sales Manager, NTA
potential approach methods.
Cold calling and social media
outreach are the logical ones,
but the smartest are using the
available technology to hunt
the opportunity.
For example, Arti cial
Intelligence and Machine
Learning represent a huge
opportunity for marketing and
Andy Horn, CEO of IntraLAN
sales teams, from cold calling to
order ful llment.
By using AI and language
analysis, a company can
gain signi cant insight into
the buyer’s personality and
preferences. is enables a
more targeted sales campaign
and provides a signi cant
competitive advantage.”
ED SAYS…
Has selling really changed? I think it has in
some very subtle ways over the years. Now is
the time to look at what your salespeople are
doing, their approach, and how they are likely
to take to your new products and services as
they come to market.
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Marcus Cauchi – “Buyers buy for their reasons not your reasons. So,
pitching a lease line or new bit of kit which they don’t want, don’t need
or don’t understand the value of always has been, is and always will be
a waste of everybody’s time. I blame the leadership and management of
sales organisations for not asking the right questions.”
• Why is it prospects don’t buy?
• What are we doing that reduces their appetite to buy from us?
• Why do they buy from our competitors and not from us?
• What do our salespeople do that they should stop doing?
• Why do we do things in the order we do them?
• What are the problems our customers need to fi x?
• What problems do our customers have that they don’t know they
have and helping them identify them would genuinely help them?
making and post sales account
development. In the past,
the focus has been on the
hunter ‘making the deal’
and converting the cost of
opportunity creation into
contracted pro t. With the
emergence of freemium
products to start a relationship,
true cloud deployments on
short contracts and the rapid
changes that bring almost
constant service upgrading,
the hunter is no longer the key
player. A professional who can
help the customer through
the initial learning process
related to a technology change,
using product knowledge and
questioning skill, remains
important, but perhaps
the rewards should now be
more evenly shared with the
marketeers and the account
managers.”
Cauchi said “Hunters are
always going to have a place in
sales. But the indiscriminate
drive-by-shootings traditional
sellers perform on their
prospects have to stop. ey
are spam. And the price of bad
prospecting is all the people
who will never do business with
you. rowing mud at the wall
is a fool’s game.
Remuneration based
on performance is still an
important part of salespeople’s
compensation but I would
suggest it can be better used
to drive the right kind of
behaviours including the
elimination of premature and
unnecessary discounting, to
improve prospecting quality
and develop excellence in good
sales habits.”
Hawkins commented, “ ere
will always be a need, and
space, for both the hunter and
farmer type of salesperson.
Some scenarios and product
o erings will naturally favour
the hunter over the farmer,
too. In essence, it’s just a case
of understanding what your
proposition is and how best to
sell it. In some cases, closing
deals ‘fast’ is more favourable
and might suit ‘hunters’.
Whereas in other situations,
developing lasting relationships
that encourage longer-term
growth is more favourable.
Today’s cloud-led environment
and recurring sales models
encourage relationship
building ‘farmers’ to succeed.
However, the industry will
always need a combination -
and the two groups probably
have a lot to learn from each
other.”
Andy Horn commented, “It’s
just the hunter needs to adapt
to the latest market trends
and approaches to potential
customers, in the same way a
hunter needs to blend in with
their surroundings.
A single cold call to a
single point of contact may
sometimes work, but it takes
a much broader approach
today, with many potential
spheres of in uence within a
business to target, and multiple
32 | Comms Business Magazine | January 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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