Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Your B2B Client Knows More About Your Products Than Your Salesperson Does. What Now?

How To Sell To B2B Clients Who Know More Than You Do.

"The New B2B Buyer," a post by Geoffrey James on the BNet Sales Machine blog, makes some savvy observations about why selling B2B is harder today than ever before. Here are some of the reasons that James cites about today's business buyer, who is often someone who:

  • Knows more about a product or category than your sales reps do.

  • Can more easily make product and price comparisons.

  • Is limited by a buying process that is more complicated than ever before. A purchase from you today may need to be approved by a company attorney, HR office, or other entities that were never consulted in years past.

Those trends could prove worrisome if your company sells B2B. Yet here are solutions I would suggest:

  • Identify the most common objections that you are hearing from customers, and know how to answer them. If you often hear that your services are too expensive, for example, prepare materials that show how much money customers can save by doing business with you.

  • Understand the buying challenges that different kinds of clients are facing. James points out, for example, that larger companies can be more willing to buy today because they have access to credit. Smaller companies, in contrast, are generally more reluctant to take on additional debt. The lesson? If you can create profiles of the companies that are most likely to buy from you, you can deploy your marketing and selling resources more strategically and increase your return.

Thanks to Diana Pohly / Step By Step Marketing - A Division Of The Pohly Company
http://www.stepbystepmarketing.com/daily/consumer_marketing_trends/your-b2b-client-knows-more-about-your-products-than-your-salesperson-does-what-now/

 

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