Creating Demand for your Products
Your prospect has a problem. You may have a solution. You may not, but believe there is one. It is essential to adopt the right sales behaviours to help you win the business.
There is More to Selling than Selling
When you are creating demand for your products or services you are working in the top half of our Selling Styles Model. You are selling to unrecognised needs. The buyer can’t see a need. He or she may not even recognise that they have a problem or opportunity for improvement. You may or may not have a solution, but you can see the buyer’s problem.
One of two selling styles will apply – Consultative Selling or Application Replication.
Consultative Selling
You are opening up a new market where you do not have references. You are looking for someone who has a problem but does not really know what the solution is. In this environment, you set up joint studies, workshops and other similar activities. This process is classic consultative selling – a phrase often used as a panacea for all selling. It is not.
Consultative selling has a very specific place in the sphere of sales skills. The style should be used when there is a business issue that needs to be resolved, but neither the buyer nor the seller can see the full solution. There is a good relationship between the buyer and the seller, and a willingness on the buyer's part to work together to find a solution.
The buyer active helps the seller create demand for his or her products!
Application Replication
If you have had great success selling into a particular niche market, you are then in the business of application replication. You have excellent reference stories, demonstrations and presentations that confirm how good your solution is, but must shock a prospect into realising that he or she needs to change - and needs your help.
Pointing out to people what their competitors are doing can be a great motivator for change. There must be a TPTP to get the sale moving - a Thought Provoking Talking Point.
You have a solution looking for a problem, and need the buyer's help to uncover it!
Demand Creators
We call them unrecognised needs salespeople – or deal makers. They create demand.
They have to be good at:
- Opening doors, particularly at senior level
- Using reference stories to open the prospects eyes to possibilities
- Uncovering needs, both business and personal, at all levels in an organisation
- Structuring those needs into a customer agreed timetable so that a decision will actually be made
- Dealing with more senior executives to talk policy changes
- Financial justification and preparing business cases to raise budgets
- The politics of getting several people in the prospect’s world all marching in the same direction
- Getting their organisation’s strengths written into the specification of what is to be purchased.
Recruitment Issues
The skills of the deal makers, who work with unrecognised needs and create demand, are very different from the skills of the deal responders, who fulfil recognised needs.
Of course, once the deal is made, it then becomes a recognised need. So the deal maker has to be good at both sets of skills, unless the sale can be handed over to a product specialist who is adept in responding. Then the deal maker is freed up to set about creating more demand for product elsewhere.
Some salespeople are very good at dealing with recognised needs. They generate a lot of business. If they are pushed into an unrecognised need/demand creation environment they can become very uncomfortable and fail.
Other salespeople get bored to death with recognised needs. They love the entrepreneurial cut and thrust of demand creation, deal making, working with unrecognised needs.
If you want to create demand for your products you need deal makers who excel in the required selling styles.
So, the selling styles issue is a major factor in recruitment and redeployment.
And it is certainly a training issue.
Warning
Adopting the wrong selling styles can seriously damage your business.
Our complete Selling Styles Model is described on its own web page.
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If demand creation is a big challenge for your organisation and you want our help to develop the appropriate selling skills and styles within your salesforce:
Call us on 0845 125 9098