For becoming better at selling, experience buying first! #sales

It’s always nice when the tables turn in your favor. Remember how you felt when you were the interviewer rather than an interviewee. I am in the business of selling cutting edge communication technologies and all these years in my professional life, my mentors and seniors have stressed on the importance of understanding a buyer’s needs, understanding the buyer personal win etc. I have always questioned myself on what goes behind the psyche of a buyer:

• What factors influences his buying decision?
• What makes him/her tilt towards one vendor over another?
• What happens in a complex sale where multiple decision makers are involved?
• How does a buyer perceive value?
• How big a role does a personal win play?
  • What about wins of his team? His organization overall?
• When does the buyer start trusting a sales person? And then the organization?
• How does a buyer narrow down his options?
  • Is it purely objective? If not, what are the subjective parameters that come in to play?

Recently, out of pure chance, I got involved in a buying decision for my organization. I didn’t realize it till today that while I am going through this process, I am understanding more and more about selling too although I am a buyer!

The basic tenets of a buying process, the fundamentals, generally remain the same (expectedly there are variations too but let’s keep it simple for the moment). What I learned was:

• The buyer has some “key” fundamental objectives or requirements that are a “must have” and cannot be compromised. No matter how good your product or solution is on the “rest” of the parameters, unless you satisfy the “must haves”, you will not go anywhere.
• The importance of understanding the competition cannot be ignored. In one of my interactions I asked the vendor what made their product better than xyz vendor? We had given our “must haves” before this question and instead of focusing on these must haves, the response was pretty much generic on parameters which were of lower importance to us. It later turned out that the xyz vendor did not satisfy one of our must have criteria and I was wondering had this vendor been more prepared, we would not have even evaluated xyz vendor.
• Technical or product support: How well you answer questions related to your product, solution or technology matters. Getting experts from your organization at the forefront to answer customer queries and giving the customer confidence that you know your “stuff” matters. This is the point where the first brush with “trust” comes in and the “tilt” happens.
• The buyer is always juggling personal wins and the wins of the organization. Both are important and a buyer would generally make adjustments on one front or the other. It is important to understand how you can satisfy the maximum aspects of these wins.
• Understanding what role each buyer plays in a complex sale enables you to talk their language. This is the point where the customer starts believing that you know what he is looking for and narrows down his options.
• Value is both objective and subjective. Perceptions matter a lot and not matter how many objective matrices an evaluator has put in for assessing various vendors, there is always a subjective bias. This could be the ease of dealing or talking to a vendor, quickness of response, or just plain empathy or the lack of it in your interactions.
• I have seen more and more of this of late, but people are generally willing to be a little flexible in price provided they see “value” (see point above).

I have gained a lot of experience in understanding more on how sales work in the past few weeks and I continue to learn. We have not yet made a decision.

In short, if you want to be good at selling- seek opportunities in your organization to experience a buying process!

Note: views are personal.