A little bit about Solution Selling – Peer-level Relationship

Today I spent time with my team, watching Linkedin Learning on “Solution Selling” together. My teammates are quite young, some of them are first timer in sales.

In #solutionselling , we focus on customer’s objectives and goals. This is the most important thing in solution selling – understand our customer’s objectives and goals, and help provide the solution. We do not sell based on features or price.

How to do this? By having conversations with the client, and ask questions to focus the conversation. 

After each segment of videos, we discuss what do we understand from the video, and also share about related areas.

One of the things we learned is about peer-level relationship. When we discuss with our clients, we need to establish peer-level relationship, which means we are at the same level with them. We cannot put ourselves as too big compared to them, or too small. This is so that the discussion on both sides can flow better, and we do not tend to just agree to everything the customer said just to gain the sales.

As a young sales team members, my teammates often feels small when they enter a room with a big organization to discuss how OfficeCentral can help them. So, we discuss why this happen and how to improve them.

Picture: Sometimes we feel so small, like the cat ^_^

Why? Some of the items that my teammates shared include:
– Low confidence
– Feel not on the same level (usually the bosses are the ones who join the meeting)
– Feel not enough knowledge

Next, we discuss how to overcome these.

Some of the brainstorm ideas we got included the following:

Mindset. First and foremost, we need to correct our mindset. Sometimes we probably meet the prospect with a wrong mindset – we want to sell them something. When we meet with a prospect, we are actually bringing value to them. We want to help them possibly identify their known or even unknown problems, and help to provide solution to them. We have something that they want – value.

Grooming. The way we present ourselves will give impression to our clients. And also to our own confidence. By ensuring that we groom ourselves to the higher level, it will help to boost confidence, and give good impression to our prospect. One of the easiest way to do this is by wearing blazer when attending meeting with prospects.

Knowledge development. Apart from the trainings provided by the company, the sales team should regularly explore the system to increase their product knowledge, read, and keep their knowledge up to date by reading the market trend. Even if some people don’t like to read, they can still watch thousands of videos available online. Time investment is required. Money investment? Not so much. But if you would like to invest your money for knowledge – that’s great! At Authentic Venture Sdn Bhd, we even provide mini library full of books that will help the team increase knowledge. So they should take advantage of that.

Preparation. Preparation before the meeting such as looking up about the organization, understand their business, prepare the questions we would like to ask during the meeting, all of these will help us to feel more confident when entering a meeting with a prospect.

All of the above may sound simple, you likely know about those too. So, now you already know about it, you need to do it.

Do you have ideas to overcome these issues? Share with us by commenting below!

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