Let's move away from "Fast Show" selling

I am sure you remember the Fast Show sketch when the character (Jesse) came out from his shed and said "This week I'ave been mostly wearing Dolce & Gabbana". It is strange to think that he has been the inspiration for many "sales campaigns" that I have come across of late. "This month I am mostly selling......"

Why do we think that customers will positively react to a sales approach that says, whatever your problem is the answer will always be X! Imagine how you would feel if you went into a shoe shop wanting a pair of walking boots to climb Kilimanjaro and the sales assistant patiently listened to your requirements and came back with a pair of football boots because they were having a promotion on football boots, how would you react. Badly I assume. So why do we ask our sales people to "pitch" solutions regardless of the customer need.

I fully appreciate that there are challenges about having excess stock of specific products and that we all need to focus our sales people on selling higher margin offerings, but when did we become so inwardly focussed as opposed to customer focussed.

Success for sales only comes by linking identified customer need to our offerings. Without this linkage there is no benefit to the customer in buying from us. The shoe shop maybe offering the best football boots in the world, at the cheapest possible price, but unless I play football (and want to replace my boots) I will not buy!

Now I am sure some of you are thinking "but this does not happen in professional business to business sales". But I am afraid you are wrong, let me give you two examples.

1. An account director from a global ICT solutions provider has been asked to arrange a workshop with their client to fully understand the strategic and operational business issues facing that client so they could jointly build a roadmap to addressing those needs. The account director sells the concept to the client, and is mildly surprised at how happy the client is to have the opportunity to discuss his business challenges, as opposed to discussing technology. Now hear comes the surprise - The account director rings me up (I am facilitating the workshop) and says "I am concerned that I will not be able to present our Unified Communications solutions at this meeting, I do not want to come away without a clear opportunity to sell UC as this is my quarter's focus".
Now here is a clear case of Fast Show mentality - whatever the customer says I want the answer to be UC.
2. A second example is of a manufacturer telling its sales team that the aim for the month was to have a focussed call out promoting a specific model, at a slightly reduced rate and that they were expected to offer this model to everyone as the first offer. Now this confused the sales team who immediately went into "pitch" mode, classic Fast Show selling resulting in telling not listening in there interaction with prospects, and they wondered why they were making no progress!

So what is the answer?

Let's put the customer back at the centre of our approach:

• By asking good questions at the facilitated workshop we will be able to identify the clients key challenges and if UC is relevant we will be able to introduce it. If it is not relevant we will be able to identify other opportunities, and the client will see we are listening to them, focussing on their priorities, and identifying how we can help them
• For the Manufacturer - Use of "broad" Reason to Call programmes which are based on the issues customers are trying to address and once a conversation has started, where appropriate, they can mention the offer, but only where appropriate.

You would think that this is all obvious, and I have never said that I do anything difficult, but go back and look at what many of your sales and marketing people are doing, and I guarantee you will find similar examples within your own company.

So if you want to do Fast Show selling make it "today I will be mostly discussing the customer's issues and identify how I can help"