Since I travel quite a bit, I tend to indulge in a bit of magazine reading at the airport or on the plane. Many times it’s Sports Illustrated, but lately my periodicals of choice have been business publications like Fast Company or Entrepreneur. I find it interesting that almost every month these magazines contain several articles centered around the same themes: how the world of business is changing, why “old school” ways of selling just don’t work anymore, or if you don’t fully leverage social media into your marketing plan, success will be elusive at best.
All of those articles are correct: the business world is evolving, your clients are changing, and many traditional ways of selling are bordering on extinction. What each article fails to mention is that the basic concept of a sale doesn’t change – and it hasn’t changed for centuries:
• Sales are based on a transactional exchange
• Transactional exchanges happen between a seller and a buyer
• Both sides will attempt to maximize the value of the transactional exchange
Sales is still very much based on the simple concept of exchanging value between the seller and the buyer. With the influx of technology into every facet of society – including the sales process – many are seeking to leverage that technology create a frictionless transaction. However, when looking to facilitate a transactional exchange that eliminates friction, three things must be taken into consideration:
1) Force Must Be Applied – If we recall high school science class, Newton’s First Law of Motion states that an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force. If we shift the focus to sales, this means your clients are at rest and the external force is you. This can be an internet search, Google ad, recommendation, social media post, direct mail, or even a cold call. The key takeaway is that it is your responsibility to create the force necessary to get the client moving.
2) Maintain Speed – Once the client is in motion, we need to ensure we don’t do anything on our part to create friction that will slow it down. Therefore, it’s critically important to remember that clients don’t want to be sold, but they do need to be convinced – and each client has a different purchasing journey. This means that you must continually learn and improve to see what works for different clients to eliminate friction. As the provider, it is incumbent upon you to make the purchasing journey of the client as easy as possible to preserve the velocity of the sale.
3) Resistance Points – This is what sales trainers used to call “objections” and to really become a master at sales, you had to have all manner of tricks in your bag to overcome said objections. Almost every transactional exchange will have at least one resistance point: value for the price paid, concerns about budget, viability of the product in question, etc. During a client’s purchasing journey, you have to not only understand the resistance points, but anticipate them. Embrace that it is up to you to understand sales resistance points, then find ways to either mitigate or eliminate them.
So, is it possible to truly create a frictionless transaction? I firmly believe the answer is a resounding no for the simple fact that regardless of how easy a seller attempts makes the sales process, it is impossible to anticipate and/or eliminate every potential area of friction. However, this is a good thing because it gives the seller an opportunity to prove their worth by removing friction along the purchasing journey.
A true consultative salesperson adds a tremendous amount of value to any transactional exchange by simply removing friction and accelerating the purchasing journey. I would argue that a certain amount of friction in the transactional exchange is necessary for through that friction, both sides realize the maximum value.
Bill has over 15 years working in executive leadership positions at leading promotional products distributorships. In 2014, he launched brandivate – the first executive outsourcing company solely focused on helping small and medium sized-promotional products enterprises responsibly grow their business. A featured speaker at numerous industry events, a serial creator of content marketing, vice president of the Promotional Products Association of the Mid-South (PPAMS), and PromoKitchen chef, Bill has extensive experience coaching sales teams, creating successful marketing campaigns, developing operational policies and procedures, creating and developing winning RFP responses, and presenting winning promotional products solutions to Fortune 500 clients. He can be reached at bill@brandivatemarketing.com.