This year my family and I took a last-minute holiday deal and went for a week to Tenerife, escaping cold Western Europe. Usually, I would take more time to research, review and plan these kinds of things but now, sitting in the sun writing this blog; I do not regret our decision.

What I do hope, though, is that you do not leave your plans for 2023 until the last minute. Have you reflected on your year’s performance already? What has been going well for you? What can you do better next year? In this blog, I would like to help you analyze where you are adapting to the new way of selling and planning for 2023.

First, I would like to share with you something that caught my eye when I was googling for sales methods. I was curious if Google had caught up with the trends around Selling. Well, no, they didn’t; their list of 8 best sales methodologies is still the same:

• SPIN selling
• SNAP selling
• Solution and value Selling
• Conceptional Selling
• Sandler system
• MEDDIC system
• GAP selling
• Challenger Selling

Uh. I invite you to look into all of them. With all my respect, most of them are outdated and are not as effective as they were in the past. The Challenger Sale is probably the closest to what I regard as the sales method that modern Buyers respond well to.

The Challenger sales model suggests that customers need an expert to challenge their thinking and authoritatively inform them about new solutions. This method, however, requires you to be professional on many levels, and certainly in the industry the customer is operating in.

The sales method, I believe, that ticks all the right boxes of modern Buyers is described in the nearly 200 thesalesadvice.com blogs: Selling with The Buyer’s Perspective. It stands out because it believes that Selling has fundamentally changed. It has transformed into a function where you help customers achieve their business objectives, without pre-assumptions, without looking for pain points, and without endless questioning leading to needs recognition that can be linked to your solution. It also believes that sales execs do not have to have consultant degrees to help customers discover a different perspective on their challenges and that things can be done differently without significant investments.

For that, you need to understand the customer’s buying process. Know what Hidden Competitors are and how to overcome these. You need to be skillful in insight selling, be a great storyteller and use your business acumen, not your sales Acumen, to influence the customer’s buying process and decision-making. Ironically, if you Google: Selling with the buyers Perspective, the sales advice blogs are coming up as nr one hit.

Loyal sales blog followers have already done the Selling with the Buyer’s Perspective test and made their plans. How about you? I challenge you to do the test.

Answer the questions as honestly as possible and with the view of your reality now, not what you would like it to be. That will help you the most. Then, access the test results blog to read how well you did.

Analyze the gaps and what you should change to bridge the gaps. That’s your plan for 2023. Then, type a keyword for each improvement in the blog search function and study the recommendations.

Write key actions down and discuss these with your manager. You would like them to observe your calls/visits and coach you to improve. A solid plan, right?

Rest me to wish you Happy Holidays and a Great start to the New Year. Thank you for the support you showed on LinkedIn. This is truly appreciated.