“If you want to adapt to a modern sales approach and sell with the buyer’s perspective, you have to let go of solution selling”.

learning new habits is hard unless you want to

No one is to blame, not you, your manager, or your organization. It is natural to see only small improvements when learning new habits. In particular when you are trying to use a new sales approach. But you may need to be constantly reminded of the new habits. Think about top athletes like Tiger Woods, who, as I understand, took time off to learn a new golf swing. What? Wasn’t he already at the top? Why would he try to learn a new swing? Well, the answer is simple…to stay at the top. He is amongst thousands of golfers, all using a very similar process of the golf swing. If everyone is trying to improve that, where will that competition end one day? Exactly, the top gets closer and closer to each other. Woods realized that to be better than the rest, you have to innovate. And he, like you, is making small improvements to get into new habits every day.

Are you moving on?

Back to Selling, we have been using a sales process that was born somewhere in the 1990s. Yup, a long time ago. Sales organizations focused for decades on training, monitoring, and coaching according to that process. We acquired excellent Sales Acumen, and these skills and mindset got us where we are now. But like Woods in golfing, challenges to stay at the top of the sales appeared and needed to be addressed. Buyers moved on, and we didn’t. Our approach bored the Customer. We were wasting their time.

A modern sales approach will make you relevant again

Selling with the Buyer’s Perspective is a different modern sales approach. New skills like:

• Understanding the Customer’s buying process
• Identify and overcome Hidden Competitors
• Insight selling
• Storytelling
• Business Acumen
• Influencing the Customer’s buying process

gives you the opportunity to align and be relevant again in Customer meetings.

Letting go

But using these new skills requires letting go of old habits. Letting go of Solution Selling. Reflect for a moment on how you prepare for your Customer meetings: Do you have a solution in mind and steer the conversation around that? Are you, the moment the Customer raises a dissatisfaction, jumping on that with your solution? Is your focus during the Customer meeting on differentiators versus your competition?

From a customer’s perspective

Here is the thing: if your mindset and attitude are still like that, what will that tell your Customer? They have heard it all before. Leading Customer meetings with your products and solutions is not helping your Customer. These discussions bore them if you haven’t had a business discussion before that about why they should consider a change. In addition to them, your solution probably looks very similar to that of the incumbent competitor. You may differentiate on one aspect, but will that be the trigger for the Customer to change? Probably not. Have you heard about the expression ” tomatoes – tomaatos?’ That’s what many Customers think when you talk about your solution without helping them first to think strategically differently about their situation and the challenges as a business.

So, seek small improvements every day using your new skills and turn these into new habits. Have you moved on from Solution selling? and making Selling with the Buyer’s Perspective your new habit?