While solid product knowledge and advanced consultative selling skills can deliver increased revenue, they will not deliver industry leading sales results. Industry leadership comes when real business acumen is added to the mix and you become a trusted advisor as opposed to merely acting as one.
For your company to maintain or achieve industry leadership your sales force must be fluent in three areas:
1. Product/Service Expertise
2. Consultative Selling Skills
3. Business Acumen
We call these three areas the Sales Skill Progression.
Over the last few years we have seen a marked shift in the way companies sell their products and services.
It used to be that, armed with good products and services and a market for them, all a company needed to sell successfully was a sales force that understood product features and benefits. Now, as companies face more and more pressure from competitors with similar products and services, they have shifted from a product sale to a solution sale - one that better concentrates on customer’s needs.
This concentration on solution selling or consultative selling is the ability to work with a customer to understand their goals, the problems they are having in achieving those goals and the needs that arise from those problems.
Consultative selling has transformed the way organizations sell their products and services from an internally focused product approach to a more effective externally focused customer approach where the sales person acts as a trusted advisor.
Where Consultative Selling Falls Short
Though this shift has helped to close more sales to multiple customers, it falls short in helping to close larger sales to existing customers. Sales organizations that have both product and service expertise and consultative selling skills can be successful; however those two skill sets alone will not deliver industry leadership. Industry leadership and true differentiation requires all three skill sets, (1) Product and service knowledge, (2) Consultative selling skills, and (3) Applied business acumen to sell enterprise wide solutions to global customers, helping them address not just current technical needs but strategic business needs--the critical needs that keep executives awake at night.
The Need for Business Acumen
The third critical piece in this puzzle is business acumen. In general business acumen is defined as an understanding of a business’ economic forces, the market dynamics surrounding it, and the unique set of needs that arise from the combination of the two. However for effective enterprise sales people a mere understanding of a customer’s critical needs is not enough. To become a true trusted advisor and achieve real business acumen you must be able to combine that understanding with the ability to both articulate and link practical sales strategies and tactics that drive revenue growth, increase margin, and decrease costs. The articulation of the link between the business’ strategic business needs and your solution is the key to influencing executive leaders.
When you have a sales force that has solid product and service expertise, that is known as a trusted advisor by their customers and has the ability to consistently articulate the link between their solution and the critical business needs of the customer you are positioned to be a leader in your industry.
Customers will turn to you first before they look to the competition because you are focused on their core business issues.
