GlobalBX

As all businesses prepare for a downturn in demand, the corresponding upturn needed in activity and proactive sales action are often difficult to create. Managers and staff are of course capable of lifting their efforts, but people find it difficult to do more work if they are less than confident at ‘creating demand’. A clue to how this problem can be solved is found in a simple question: ‘if staff were asked to deliver gifts of value to customers and prospects, for good reasons…would they move forward with this initiative with enthusiasm and effort?’ If the answer is yes then the solution to the proactive sales problem is to transform your sales propositions into the equivalent of ‘gifts’! If you can answer the following imaginary but incisive questions from customers and prospects, you will have created the platform for selling the equivalent of gifts. Here are the questions:

• Are you selling a form of interference or improvement for my business, and if it is an improvement will it be a worthy ‘net gain’?
• Do you have evidence of having created serious, net gain improvements for businesses like mine?
• Do you have a definite and creative ‘test plan’ to ensure that my business achieves the serious improvement in results…so that my current buying arrangements with other suppliers are still intact for the time being at least?
• Is your test plan uncomplicated and inexpensive for me to run with?
• Will you take an active part in helping to implement the plan, throughout each of the steps…to the point of mutual success?

The nature of your propositions might involve less or more questions, but the essence of what is needed by the market is represented in the five questions listed. The challenges then are to put in the effort to answer the questions, and to design sales behaviour to ensure that the performance-enhancing proposition is presented and managed professionally by your sales team.

When sales people are armed with propositions that meet the higher, unexpressed performance needs of the market, they will immediately make the decision to move forward with gusto…for the simple but compelling reason that they will feel as though they are the bearers of good tidings for customers and prospects. There is not, and never has been, a substitute for such a feeling in selling…and so it is a form of crime for management to push staff to sell more when they do not have more to give in what they sell!

There is one other quite simple challenge to face when creating new and powerful propositions, and that is to brand them as a special form of service…so that your unique offering is seen as being yours and yours alone. As an example, I am spending two days at a conference with the Rheem company this week, and we are launching a very dynamic sales proposition that is designed to win much new business…by offering new and valuable opportunities to their customers and prospects. It has taken only a few hours for two senior managers and I to design the new sales story, which was helped by brief conversations between me and a key Rheem distributor and the customer of a distributor, and so the company is poised to win more business with an exciting new service. At the other end of the scale I recently worked with a business coaching client, a mortgage broker, to create new, quality leads at a time when that market is suffering in various and serious ways…and because we answered the five questions with nerve and verve, he is now busy and happy in a hapless market.

Finally, the markets you serve might also be facing potentially difficult times…and so they will be actively looking for ways to improve results in the immediate future. To do this they usually put price pressure on suppliers, and to avoid this fate it is vital to sell much better results. The key question then in hard times is this: is your company prepared to be a gifted competitor?