Today's Sales Challenges

Add-value or perish

After years of re-engineering and cost-cutting, many business leaders realise that higher profits can now most readily be achieved by increasing sales and winning new accounts. Most are also keen to avoid the errors of the late 1990s ‘dot.com’ era. Procurement processes have created a more robust business environment where, ‘if it can be commoditized, it will be.’ Therefore, selling operations need to raise their standards in order to maintain (or improve) levels of sales growth and profitability.

As supply chains integrate within companies and across entire industry sectors, businesses can see the need to tighten the buyer-supplier relationship in favour of a stronger, longer-term partnership. This means that sales people must be more adept at selling business value and be much more than information-providers. The traditional information-providing role of the sales person is diminishing in direct proportion to the increasing power of the web.

The bottom line principle is that most businesses are facing a much better informed customer and must raise their game to meet the challenge and add the necessary value.

If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door

In the B2B space slick product-centric sales pitches and hackneyed closing techniques, for some time, have not been the most effective way of winning new business or protecting and / or penetrating existing customers.

Global competition in often overcrowded markets generates confusion and restricts customers’ air-time. Amongst the biggest challenges for corporate sales organisations today is to stand out with maximum clarity on business positioning, product and service differentiation and, above all, the value these deliver for the customer.

With the above in mind, the onus is now very much on the selling party to sell added-value through dialogue with all parts of the decision-making process to progress the business relationship from ‘supplier’ to ‘partner’ status.

Tougher business conditions are demanding improvements at all stages of the sales process to maximise the chances of success.