Our Outlook

Transformations in the ways multinational businesses, buyers, and people on the high street make buying decisions have forced a shift in how sellers must present and engage with customers and potential clients. Sales leaders have an array of tools they can use in the fight to stay responsive and fine-tune their tactics. From coverage models, enabling them to set attainable revenue goals, then achieve them with the well thought out placement of sellers in the best and most profitable locations through to revisiting compensation models. Turnkey Solutions Ltd knows nothing comes as close in importance as making sure that sales organisations are fully prepared to keep pace with or be ahead of the times.

The combined effects of the changes detailed above have increased the pressure brought to bear on sellers. To begin with, salespeople have to overcome the cynicism and false impressions that customers may have arrived at by researching online. Starting the customer engagement when the buyer already has a fixed idea in their mind of what will address their needs can make it more difficult for the seller to uncover the real challenges getting in the way of the customer’s success.

When it comes to setting an appointment with today’s buyers, salespeople have their work cut out to pin down a meeting with cynical buyers who are already pushed for time. There are often more participants involved in the buying process, and creating unanimity among them all is usually what it takes to reach a purchasing decision. In more complicated sales situations, finding that agreement may require the use of a sales team that must present a unified pitch to the buyers. Each member of the team must demonstrate value in the sales experience itself and not merely in the service or goods being sold.

Sales organisations that fail to manage these challenges adequately often find themselves falling at the finishing line. Perhaps receiving verbal agreements that never materialise into concrete signed deals.

Even though today’s buyers are more shrewd, short of time, under pressure, and less accepting of risk, along with being more demanding, they still need assistance to arrive at the correct decisions. Despite having extraordinary access to freely available information, buyers still have the task of filtering through all the possible choices to weed out misleading and irrelevant information and find the real value among the options. More information does not always mean more understanding. Buyers still need the experience and knowledge of experienced salespeople to identify their circumstances and challenges accurately and present solutions that will best serve them.

To stand out from the crowd and be genuinely effective, salespeople must emphasise the added value in the buying experience itself. Demonstrating this can only be achieved by helping customers gain a clearer understanding of the fundamental business challenge and what is the best way to address it. It is not about dominating or manipulating the customer; it is about being credible, cultivating trust, and adding value, which, in due course, will lead to more opportunities for the salesperson.

Effective sales approaches are not created by the use of a single technique or strategy. They require a comprehensive range of sales capabilities and tools that are continuously applied, improved and perfected.

To keep abreast of developments in buyer behaviour and stay ahead of their competitors, successful sellers must be agile and make every effort to continuously improve. For the largest international sales companies, maintaining the pace of improvement at scale is not a simple undertaking. Pinpointing the precise skill sets, the correct people, and the right ways to quantify progress takes expert planning.