Lately, I noticed with some salespeople the irony of, on the one hand, persuading everyday customers to change, but, on the other hand, they have difficulties themselves with making changes. Although they have seen a decline in their closing ratios, to make that deliberating change from their traditional way of selling to a modern sales approach is a challenge for many. In a way, this is strange, because every month your paycheck depends on your success in closing deals.

Making a change in how you sell is hard for everyone because you have developed ingrained habits. You believe in what you know well and not in what is new and unfamiliar. I want to help you with making it more transparent in comparing the traditional sales approach with the modern sales approach. Not in too many words – just an overview and key differences. Which one do you believe have the best chance to improve your closing ratios?

	Traditional	Modern
Your focus	pain-points and dissatisfaction	the customer’s business results
You help to see	why us?	why change?
Your questioning	try to get the buyer interested in you	becoming interested in your buyer’s challenges and how you can help
Your are competing with	your main competitors	views of other stakeholders in the customer’s organisation
You are selling	with the seller’s perspective	with the buyer’s perspective
Who is discovering?	you	your customer
Key persuading skill	sales acumen	business acumen
Relying on	magic wand and closing tricks	insights and ideas that shine a different perspective on the customer’s challenges
Selling	products and solutions	reason to explore a change
Offered value	transactional	strategic
What the buyer experiences	an expert on solutions	a value creator and a trusted advisor
At the end of the meeting	getting pushed on price	gaining commitment to involve more stakeholders
Closing ratio	20-30%	65 – 75%

Do the maths; you need to work twice as hard using the traditional sales approach. The challenge is that the modern sales approach is harder to learn. It needs your time investment. It requires reading blogs, books, listening to podcasts and doing the work going through training modules. You will have to do more research for every meeting. You cannot wing your meetings.

Above all, like you try to convince your customers to make a change, you first need to answer the Why Change? question yourself. Starting with the end in mind, which door will you choose to improve your closing ratio?

Feel free to share with your sales colleagues.