It is about understanding the customers experience, the so-called purchase complexity. What do your customers want to win or avoid thanks to what you have to offer. The process differs depending on the product or service, just think how different the process looks for a customer who goes to buy milk compared to someone who is going to buy a home.
For the customer, it is about different levels of risk and change. Risk in terms of how much time, money and resources the customer can lose if something goes wrong, change in terms of how the customer must adapt their situation to take part in your offer. If i, as a seller, only look at my offer and do not understand the customer’s perspective, i will be out competed by other selling parties who do better.
The degree of complexity gives answers to many questions about how to build your sales strategy. If you buy something simple, you want the price to be low. But the more complexity, the more it will be about trust do you feel trust in the company and that it keeps what it promises. For that trust, one is prepared to pay more. Very many selling organizations miss precisely the purchasing complexity.
When the purchase logic analysis is complete, you can start building the sales strategy based on it. It can consist of several different sales orientations depending on what the analysis shows based on customer behavior and purchase complexity, for example different types of sellers and distribution channels. From the point of view of the sales strategy, it is about identifying which skills and driving forces are needed, how to attract and recruit them, and in the next step how to develop but at the same time retain them.
A common problem is that many sales managers are trained in the traditional buying and selling logic. Hello, i have an item, do you want to buy. Then it is easy to manage based on that mindset. But if you have a more complex purchase logic than that, which many have today, it is completely devastating. And this is where hr comes into the picture, it is important that they are on the track so that they can recruit the right type of salesperson.
Something that almost all companies have a challenge with is that the sales department and the other departments do not cooperate well enough, especially when it comes to sales and the operation and delivery part. There should not be any adversarial relationships, but a collaboration. You simply have to deal with each other.
