Increasing Complexity

Sales can be described as a change process. During the selling interaction, a prospect with a problem becomes a customer who has purchased a solution.

Successful selling is about influencing people.

Throughout the world new knowledge continues to be created and new technologies continue to be developed. This makes our lives and the lives of our customers increasingly complex.

Customer needs have also become more complex and can change more frequently than they used to. In response, many companies have developed more technically advanced or knowledge-led products and services to satisfy customer needs.

However, in order for companies to reap the full financial return from their investment in developing these new knowledge-led products, they need to be able to sell such products effectively.

Furthermore companies need to be able to sell knowledge-led products at a price premium to competitor products that are less well-specified, in order to recoup their investments and costs.

To capture this price premium, it is vital that the sales skills of the company’s sales teams are sufficiently developed.

However, improving selling skills will require more than just improving product knowledge for these more complex products and services. Effective business to business selling in the 21^st century requires an ability to understand customer needs at a deep level and to employ creative problem solving techniques to develop customer solutions.

Introducing Creative Selling

We call this style of selling, which is more evolved for business to business selling in the 21^st century, Creative Selling.

Creative Selling training can improve sales performance in any market.

However, it is particularly suited to markets where there is a strong technical, scientific or knowledge component to the products or services.

What is Creative Selling?

Creative Selling Training improves sales in two ways:-

1.       Creative Selling - helping the prospect make sense of their organisational context.

In a knowledge-led environment, potential customers are often confused.

However, a confused prospect represents an opportunity for the creative salesperson.  One of the key steps in Creative Selling is helping your potential customer to understand their problem better.

A key opportunity for Creative Selling arises because knowledge-led solutions cannot always be introduced into the client’s organisation easily. In fact, it may be that in order for the potential customer to be able to purchase your product, there may need to be some type of organisational change.

When it becomes clear that a purchase may have a major impact on the organisation, it is likely that the potential customer will themselves have to ‘sell’ the idea of the new product or service, along with the change initiative into their organisations.

Creative selling helps the salesperson prepare their prospect for such a selling task.

It is the creative salesperson’s role to help the potential customer to identify what needs to change in their organisation, and whether there is any appetite for that change, in order for the potential customer to be able to buy the product or service.   

2.       Creative Selling – Selling ‘competences’ of the organisation.

In a selling encounter, after a salesperson and client have a shared understand of the client’s situation, the salesperson needs to know which of the products and services that their company offers will satisfy the customer’s needs.

However, sometimes, it may be that the salesperson realises that none of their company’s current portfolio of products or services is suitable for their customer. In these circumstances, the remaining opportunity for the sales person lies in leveraging other resources within their organisation in order to still make a sale.

It may be that their company can customise a product or service for the customer. An alternative might be for the company to design something specifically for the customer.

In such cases the sales person’s role has changed from selling specific products or services to selling the resources of their organisation. Creative Selling techniques can also help here.

In order to succeed, the salesperson needs to feel confident about designing solutions. He also needs to be able to think creatively about how, along with his colleagues, he can draw on the competences and capabilities of their organisation to create a solution to fully satisfy the customer’s needs.

Business Benefits Of Creative Selling

• Gets a better solution for the client, meets more of their needs
• Enables your organisation to maximise the return on the investment you have made on the technological/engineering/other specialist skills your organisation has invested in.
• Positions your organisation as a trusted and knowledgeable partner to your customers – enhances your chance of repeat business.
• By sharing knowledge and demonstrating expertise to your customer you can lock your competitors out from the client organisation.

Why Choose Anatellô To Help You Improve Sales?

Creative Selling Training.

Custom designed to suit your sector and your organisational context this course includes a range of modules including:-

• Understanding your client’s organisational context
• Identifying organisational barriers to selling
• Overcoming organisational barriers to selling
• Designing client solutions
• Selling your organisation’s competences

Anatellô‘s Creative Selling Training provides the help to address the complex challenges that sales teams face in the 21^st century. Equipping your sales team with Creative Selling techniques will help you to shorten the sales process and also help you achieve the premium prices that your premium products can justify.

Sales Team Profiling

• Discover if your sales teams are suited to Creative Selling?

• Develop your recruitment strategy for your sales team to include more ‘creative sellers’