The easy-going sales rep – Sales without obstacles
23 September 2011
Nothing on Earth is alien to sales reps. For example, I consider most sales reps to be easy-going. Don’t get me wrong: many sales reps are fairly ambitious. But, at the same time, they try to achieve their goals by means of the path of least resistance. And I don’t blame them’: the sale of capital goods, for example, demands a major effort – particularly given the current economic conditions. Consequently, if the sales rep can easily avoid obstacles, then that seems to be a sensible choice.
Sales knowledge
But what if the obstacle turns out to be your sales rep’s lack of knowledge? This can result in a situation such as the sales rep preferring to offer product A over product B, because he is familiar with product A, while product B is a better solution for his customer. Avoiding the obstacle, therefore, is disadvantageous to your customer and over time is also a disadvantage to your company.
Sales result
During the development of Sofon Guided Selling, we based our assumptions on the sales rep who, on the one hand, has the ambition to score quickly, but on the other hand attempts to achieve this with minimum effort. We did this firstly by developing software that a sales rep likes to work with: a tool that helps him to achieve his goals, without it involving an excessive amount of administration for management reporting. Secondly we did this by ensuring that the sales rep has knowledge at his disposal with which he can select the best possible solution for his customer. All of this with less effort than was previously the case and advantageous to his customer, himself and your company.
Guided Selling
We made the choice of the term Guided Selling to underscore the role of the software, which is to be a reliable guide that helps the sales rep to quickly and accurately offer the solution to every problem. Maybe Sofon will make sales rep even lazier. But, is it really so wrong when he is also able to achieve his ambitions – and, in turn, those of your company?
Marijn Schouten is Director Business Development at Sofon - supplier of sales support software. As Marijn has a lot of contact with clients, he has a clear insight into how companies that deliver customer-specific products and services can realize improvements within their sales and quotation process.
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