Leaders seek leverage through common goals
If your goal is to sell products or services to leaders in your market place, you need to care passionately about their goals. That means their passions must become yours.
Are you selling mobile app development services to leaders in the hospitality sector? Then find a way to understand the challenges facing leaders in the Hospitality sector. And that means coming to grips with how Hospitality’s target market is changing. It is only at this point that you can begin to enter a more interesting strategic dilaogue as a thinking partner with your target decision-maker.
Develop New Business Opportunities
Mature industries are often focussed on cost-cutting as the core strategy for improving the bottom line. And so tech innovators are often guilty of limited thinking when selling technology based solutions to decision-makers in mature organisations. Pitching cost savings as the main source of return on investment for enterprise investments in technology is quite common. But this can be a mistake.
Find the future
Chaneg is everywhere and in every industry there are sectors with opportunities for revenue growth. And there are executives responsible for uncovering those opportnuities to drive that growth. The most successful business leaders naturally orient to opportunities that help to grow market share. Spending money to save money is less rewarding long-term than spending money to grow profitable client revenues.
Co-develop the vision
Selling innovation to successful leaders requires working together to co-craft a vision and strategy for them to grow their market share. In our experience helping clients successfully sell technology based solutions, the most effective strategies begin with open dialogue and exploratory conversations with clients around the clients’ favourite subject… how they can grow their business by addressing the needs of their customers.
Listen to your clients
Most B2B service providers know how to present their products and can explain why the features they offer are ‘better’ than the competition. But very few vendors take the trouble to investigate how their prospective customers’ own target market is changing. As a result, they have very limited situational awareness of what is being said when they finally make contact with their target decision-maker. And so the opportunity to create a partner-level relationship with the prospect is missed.
What does your client care about?
Successful vendors develop partnership level relationships with their customers by first developing intimacy with the particular challenges they face. In a B2B environment, senior decision-makers are often primarily concerned with their own market position. Open a dialogue with a successful business leader on the changes taking place in his or her market and you will have gained undivided attention. Engaging with their concerns requires gaining a genuine understanding of how their target market is behaving. Only then can a vendor expect to get the prospect’s full attention.
Its OK to challenge your prospect
The most successful vendors are able to work with prospects to jointly uncover new opportunities for significant improvement to the prospects business. And this often requires a challenge to customers who may have become too comfortable with the status quo. Care is needed in such a discussion to ensure the continued relationship. A vendor who has taken the trouble to understand the market environment that the prospect is operating in, will be more sensitive to what is possible and be better equipped to engage as a valuable thinking partner to the prospective customer.
Confidential Discussion
David Orren is an experienced business growth coach. As Director of the Thames Valley Technology Business Growth Practice, David works closely with business leaders and sales/marketing teams of innovative B2B solution providers to develop practical strategies around the few things that really matter to achieving sustained improvement to business growth. For a confidential conversation on achieving sustainable revnue growth for your business, please email David at david.orren@tvba.co.uk, or call 0/+44 7914 223 691.