SALES PITCH< O
ver the next 18 months I believe there will be more business coming on stream, but getting that busi- ness is going to be a challenge for everyone.With this in mind, I firmly believe we’re going to see a number of key trends as far as business-to-business (B2B) selling prospects are concerned.
1 Increase in negotiation capabilities One of the things we’ve noticed in the sales performance improvement business is that as buyers have been developing new purchasing and procurement strategies, they’ve gone through extensive training and brought in consultants over the last 10 years to improve their negotiation capabilities. If you take a typ- ical professional buyer or procurement specialist from a medium or large-sized company they’re negotiating 40 to 60 hours a week. That’s all they do. And their bonuses are based on the dis- counts and favourable terms they’re able to get. Then take your average salesperson who has an arm’s length of
tasks and responsibilities of which negotiation is only one. Only a small portion of their time is spent on actual negotiation. Therefore, in the last 10 years, people who are selling have been at a distinct disadvantage. In many cases, they’ve ended up with very little (if any!) margin and with terms that put their company at a disadvantage. Selling companies are beginning to realise this and have start-
ed looking at their sales teams’ abilities to negotiate and are doing this in a strategic way. They’re starting to build negotiation strate- gy into the entire selling process. Salespeople are increasingly being trained to understand how to look at negotiation strategi- cally rather than tactically. They’re being trained on processes and specific skills that will enable them to at least defend themselves if not have an offensive stance against those very strong, experi- enced and determined people on the buy side. Several sales training companies are now focusing on strategic negotiations, which we believe will begin to put the sell side back on track. Now this is not brand new: companies have been doing this for
a while. But it’s a growing trend, and I think during 2011 and 2012, you are going to see sell-side companies spending more and more time and money building strategic negotiation process and training their salespeople on how to strategically negotiate.
2 Wider adoption of technology While this, again, is not a new subject, there are a couple of driv- ers for increased adoption of technology at this time. One is that there is more good technology for use by salespeople and their managers. And, people in general are becoming much more com- fortable with technology. They are getting into it through things like Facebook, Google, Twitter and so on. There’s also a rolling attri- tion and replenishment of sales organisations and younger people are much more likely to leverage and take advantage of any sales enablement and learning technologies.
Volume 5 Issue 1 2011 Marketing Age 59
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