Imagine Business Development defines selling as: the professional process that enables two or more parties to reach a mutually beneficial result. There are three key components to this definition. First, selling is a process. It is a series of actions, not just one act. Second, the process results in something that mutually benefits the parties involved. Either it is win–win or there is no deal. Third, the process is professional, meaning that it conforms to some standard. This doesn’t mean that there is no room for individuality or creativity, but rather that there is discipline to the process. It is critical that businesses have a clearly articulated decision process for salespeople and customers, with the ability to document the progress of both seller and buyer. It is in the third part of the definition that most sales forces are weakest and where the most dramatic improvements to best results can be made.
Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar (as well as other advocates of “old school” sales) talk about the seven or so steps involved in a selling process. Because most of these processes are designed from the seller’s point of view only, they do not deal effectively with the level of sophistication that exists with today’s buyers. Consequently, the value of these selling processes is limited, and, because they do not take into consideration the buyer’s concerns, they have become notorious for creating the sense of “pushing” discussed in my previous post.
As information became ubiquitous in the era that Alvin Toffler refers to as the Third Wave, the interest in many traditional selling processes diminished. New schools of selling emerged. One flipped the old school thinking on its head by advocating a buying process that aligns points of the sale with the considerations a buyer makes. Neil Rackham’s SPIN SELLING program and Michael Bosworth’s book, Solution Selling, both represent this school. While it addressed the buyer in a more structured and disciplined way, it still only looked at the sale from one party’s perspective. This approach continues to be one-sided, skewing the focus of the salesperson and leading to less than optimum results.
Effective selling today requires a process built to manage the complexity that exists in the buy/sell relationship. It must be one that transforms selling traditional position of providing information to one that creates value. And it must be a process that works in a wide variety of organizations, providing a path that is scalable. We call this process Third Wave Selling(tm). Stay tuned to this blog and learn much more about how to have more fun selling than you've ever had before while experiecing drastically improved results.
