The other day I was being interviewed by a journalist friend of mine, discussing some questions about the commercial world, and in one of the topics we discussed she asked me what I thought were the main changes that had taken place in sales techniques in recent years.
The truth is that I found the question very interesting and in everyday life I had not stopped to think about it. I will tell you my vision.
First of all, what remains unchanged; selling is still a process of persuasion. It is curious how the breakdown of the commercial or marketing process into the famous acronym AIDA, for attention, interest, desire and action, invented by the publicist Elmo Lewis in 1898 more than 120 years ago, is still more alive than ever and there is no marketing or sales funnel that does not include these phases with similar names. What’s more, if Mr. Lewis were to raise his head, he would see that his persuasion process has become more sophisticated and the management kpis are carefully measured at each of its stages.
The second, which changes a lot; it changes even the very essence of the purpose of commercial management, of the activities that are developed in sales, and therefore, the techniques to be used in each of these tasks.
5 key trends for a salesperson in sales techniques
Without wishing to be exhaustive, some of the changes we see most clearly in terms of sales techniques are:
1- Incorporation of Customer Experience techniques focusing on the customer’s decision-making process (neuroselling, behavioural economics, …). Before, the basis of sales techniques was the understanding of the sales process and the application of commercial techniques such as questions, objection handling or closing techniques. I remember that Neil Rackham‘s famous SPIN technique of developing needs was the basis of most courses in the 2000s. Today, on the other hand, we dedicate most of our sales training to understanding our potential and/or real customers, to trying to understand their expectations, their pain points, to analysing how they buy, why they buy, how they make decisions, what their cognitive biases are, in other words, to finding out what thinking errors they may make and how to help them make better decisions.
There are two complementary trends here. On the one hand, Daniel Kahnemann, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who warns us that customer decision-making is not only purely rational, but also unconscious and intuitive, so we are not entirely free and there are a lot of biases/effects that trap us, such as the herd effect, the affinity bias, the status quo bias, etc… On the other hand, the neuroscience or study of the brain, complementary, where three brains act, not just one making decisions, the famous Triune Brain Concept of Paul Mclean (reptilian brain, limbic and neocortex) and how for a salesperson it is key to understand how this trilogy works to, for example, unnecessarily stress a client with an overly aggressive approach, make them produce cortisol (the stress hormone) and, therefore, see how they run away from our approach in any sales room. 2 – Consolidation of Consultative Selling Techniques. The evolution of the salesperson’s role means that sales techniques must evolve. In the past, the salesperson was the owner of the relationship with his customer, in a way he was the only channel and if the customer wanted to buy, he had to do it through him. Today, the customer is free and can buy through the different channels that companies make available to them. In this new equation, the salesperson competes with other more efficient channels and has to provide differential value, normally through consultative sales processes.
Marketplaces, websites that allow purchase and self-management are transactional management channels and the seller, if he wants to contribute something more, must focus on advising his customer using consultative selling techniques. They must perfectly understand their customer’s needs and challenges, know their business and reality, propose solutions, not products, and even train their customer in new uses and ways of doing things with respect to the industry they are selling.
3 – Incorporation of Digital Sales techniques that favour a relationship of maximum convenience with the customer, avoiding transactional (of low value for the customer) and irritating (normally synchronous) contacts. The asynchronous paradigm is imposed. We will only chat asynchronously if I, the customer, ask you to do so, if we have planned it in advance, or if it has real value for both of us. Therefore, not only is it key to know how to interview remotely or use the telephone with quality and convenience, but the ability to write concretely, briefly and resonantly is becoming as important as language in high school. Many companies are now defining the new Omnichannel Relationship Models, as well as the Moments of Truth that, if or if not, have to be produced with outstanding quality in the new business relationship. 4 – In this line of digitalisation, a final line of action is the increasing application of algorithms/intelligence to the sales process. Specifically, this involves providing existing information, already in the organisation in its simple form or artificial intelligence algorithms, to guide the salesperson in the sales process. According to a recent Gartner survey of 250 sales leaders in the US, the use of algorithms in sales appeared as one of the most promising of the 47 other technologies asked about.
Before, in order to cross-sell, that is, to sell more products to the same customer, a salesperson would do simple searches to see which products they consumed or which ones they were missing, and would take advantage of any opportunity to try to sell more based on this basic information or their personal judgement. Now, that same salesperson will recommend a product that will appear in the customer’s file based not on a simple query of the product they do not have, but on the product that this type of customer has bought the most in the last 3 months, for example. In other words, like Amazon’s simple and successful algorithm that recommends cross-shopping once you have completed the purchase of a product on their website.
Facilitating all this assisted management involves a strong investment in technology, integrating information from different sources in complex Datalakes, designing Costumer Journeys for to understand our customers’ purchasing journeys, incorporating processes for tracing interactions with registrations in our databases, digital fingerprinting of web queries, forms for capturing relevant information and development of Business Intelligence models that make projections of purchase intent based on their categorisation as a customer and the interactions they are having with us (scoring).
5 – Finally, the soft acquisition of new customers. Attracting customers has always been difficult, certainly the most difficult thing, but possibly years ago there was not so much competition, customers were more dependent on the information in the hands of salespeople and there was less advertising and mailing saturation.
For this reason, one of the great commercial techniques to be promoted is to balance outbound management, which is annoying, with low conversion and from another era, in favour of Inbound Sales Models (in B2B markets) or Inbound Marketing (in B2C markets) in which the salesperson appears in a consultative way in the processes of customer consideration of a problem or need. Therefore, it is essential to work on improving the notoriety of our sales forces, on the need to share relevant, valuable content with their customers, and on working on their personal brand (whether digital or analogue) to make them a benchmark in their industry or geographical area of activity, even if conversions are still low.Obviously, these Inbound Sales strategies, of pull, must be complemented with well-focused Outbound Sales models, of push, with a less telephonic approach, based on prior analysis through online listening of the interests of our potential customers and with new tools such as promotional videos, success stories, studies of sector trends, which make us more attractive in supply markets such as the ones we live in. I am sure that many others are missing, but this is a good example of some of the changes that are taking place in the world of sales techniques. We are in a mess so that the sales function continues to be one of the most challenging and beautiful jobs in the world…
