TRUST & FEAR IN B2B – 2

B2B, education, education, Fear, Marketing, Trust

In my earlier post on this topic I spoke of the challenge for a new vendor to enter into an organisation. But there’s a positive side of this story. Once you enter the organisation and do a good job and the customer starts trusting you, then you will stay in that organisation for a very long time. Decisions in organisations are rarely impulsive, therefore they will always prefer to go with the vendor who is an incumbent and whom they trust.

So how do you build trust & reduce the fear-

Ideal situation is when you have enough other customers vouching for your product or service. If they are from the same industry as the prospect you are targeting, even better.
Provide continuous education on what’s new and what they could be missing – there are three things in this sentence. First is “continuous” – you have to be reaching your prospects regularly and creating an impression in their minds, so that when the time comes and the incumbent is not in a position to provide them the service, they reach out to you. The Second item in the sentence is – “What’s new” – keep talking about the new technologies, new case studies etc. so that the customer understands that you are doing a lot of work and others are trusting you. And the last item is on “What they could be missing” – with their existing supplier – this is to create a wedge, start a cycle of dissonance with the incumbent. This could be a simple thing like talking about how at each of your other customers’ premises you provide a dedicated project manager to ensure smooth operations. Now if the incumbent is not providing this facility, then the customer will start getting a feeling of missing on a service.
Always be upfront in what you can do very well and what you can’t do. When you first get a chance – it could be a trial or a Proof of Concept, never do anything in this phase which is not your best item. Only when the prospect gets convinced at this stage, will they decide to move forward with you.

Out of the three points above, with marketing you can systematise the second point and ensure that there is constant education happening for the prospects. This background activity will slowly result in your name becoming more familiar. With familiarity, some amount of trust starts developing. As the trust starts getting built, they may start inviting you to discuss on things which they are coming up with to see if they can accommodate you.

Till next time then……

Carpe Diem!!!

How to handle – the B2B sales person’s dilemma – 3

B2B, education, education, Marketing, Sales

This is the last part of the series of posts on this topic. We started with how to identify the various stake holders and then figuring out the players who are in competition. I shared possible conversations which you can mould to your sales situation. You can read some very good books on B2B sales like The Challenger Sale, or Strategic Selling by Miller, Hiemann etc. which you can use to direct your effort better.

While these are tactics, I shared, on how to become a more mature and professional sales person, you will not adapt these till you resolve the root cause of why you are afraid to ask these questions inspite of the fact you know them. While I am preaching this too you, I too was in the same boat. I read a lot of books to figure out better methods for sales but I could not solve the core problem.2B

The root cause is the fact that you don’t have enough options in terms of prospects. Since you don’t know if you will have another prospect, if you lose this one, you are scared of losing this. Professional buyers can actually sense this. They deal with sellers all day long.

If they realise that you don’t have other prospects on whom you can bank for sales they will keep negotiating with you till “they can’t wring the towel anymore” and then still not give you the order.

If you are in a hyper competitive industry like IT , where the barriers to entry are non-existent, then I can’t blame you because the targets for you and your competitors are very high and there are only so many deals happening.

But within these industries, intelligent sales people figure out ways to prioritise the accounts where they see a better match. Whether it’s their personal branding or the way they understand their prospect’s pain better, these folks can outrun the competition. Most of the times, it’s about asking better questions to the prospect and challenging her thinking and be willing to walk out if there’s no match instead of wasting time.

As I have mentioned earlier – for the sales guy, time is her rarest asset. If she can invest that time well she can earn massive returns.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Saying goodbye to 2021

learning, Learning, mindset

It’s already 2022 in Australia. In India we have about 3.5 hours to go before we ring in the new year. I was having a few perspectives as we do the countdown.

While things started of quite well in January this year, by the time it was April we got hit with the second wave of COVID-19. It was lethal. In India, with such a huge population, the complete infrastructure of the health system was taken by surprise. The speed with which it infected people was amazing.

A lot of us, lost some near and dear ones during this phase and it was a very painful period. I am generally a very optimistic person, but if you read my posts of that time, you may see a person trying to fight the depressive times and sometimes not being optimistic.

But after June things changed almost like a V and we had a lot of positive things happening.

This year has thrown up a lot of learnings for me and my team. While we have generally been locked in for a major part of the year, we have also learnt to appreciate what we have available to us in spite of all these challenges.

We have also been working on how in the changed environment with changed dynamics of human interaction we still do business.

I think all of us will come out stronger to handle the future better.

To all the readers and followers of this blog Wish you a Healthy and Happy New Year 2022.

Look forward to being of service in the new year with some more value adds.

Carpe Diem!!!

Learning from these posts

education, experiences, learning, mindset

Joe Polish had this wonderful statement which he’s made multiple times in his podcast ilovemarketing.com. There’s 3 ways to imbibe a learning or training –

First is by taking a course, attending a seminar etc.

Second is by practicing what you read, heard etc. By actually putting your training into practice, you are able to see both the positives and negatives and also based on that you formulate your own enhancements to what you learnt

Last and most effective is when you are able to teach the same thing to someone else. That’s because then you prepare to answer questions from the people who are attending the training. But the bigger benefit comes when you get to see where the questions are coming from….something that you had not even envisaged. That firmly establishes your learning forever.

I have written more than 400 posts now which cover 3 primary areas viz. Marketing, Human Potential, Financial Independence. These posts are an outcome of what I have personally experienced and what I have learnt by spending on books and trainings.

Some of you may read these posts for intellectual entertainment, but if you want to benefit, then you will need to practice on the ideas that I list. But if you want some of them to stick then not only practice but also teach the ideas you find worthwhile.

My endeavor is to see if I can help even one person improve their life because of what I write, then this daily writing would have achieved its purpose.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!