Marc Luber: Hey everyone welcome to Careers Out There. I'm your host Marc Luber and we're
helping you find a career that fits you. Today we're looking at business to business sales
and the importance of applying sales techniques that make your sales process a consultative
one regardless of what product you're selling. Our guest has a lot of great experience successfully
selling high-end technology products. He's a commercial sales manager at a major global
solar energy company. Here we go!
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Marc Luber: OK, I want to go back to when you were talking about sales and how it’s
a consultative process, it’s not shoving anything down anyone’s throat, it’s not
meeting with the wrong person and getting in their face. I was in sales for years, either
in technology or as a recruiter. Recruiting is a 2-way sales process. People often don’t
understand sales. And it is a listening process and a consulting process. You’re there to
help the other person, isn’t that right?
Erik Bakke: Absolutely right. If you don’t learn right from the beginning, that you need
to shut up and listen, ask open-ended questions, get people talking, encourage them to tell
you more about their issues, their problems, and what’s exciting, what they’re measured
on, who is in their organization. You need to learn so many things about, especially
in business-to-business sales, you need to learn so many things about the decision-making
process in that organization before you can even begin to have a strategy or a tactic
that will make any sense to get you the order. Otherwise, you’re just getting lucky if
you’re making sales. You really are, just getting lucky otherwise. You need to find
ways to help that individual who is either evaluating your product and will consult the
decision maker within their organization or you need to get to the decision maker to help
them decide quickly that you are the right choice. And that there’s a win in it for
them not only as an organization but usually you have to find out what it is personally
for that individual or group of individuals. What is it that will propel them in there
– either their own self esteem or their personal goals - within that organization
will help them to rise or gain stature. So it really is about so much more than just
the great features that your product has and slapping them up on a power point and showing
oh, this is why, these are all the great things, and these are the bad things that my competitor
does. That’s a start, and you know, you need to have some of that, but you should
have that in a flier that you could leave behind. You should spend more time listening,
understanding what’s important to that particular individual and his boss.
Marc Luber. Very good advice. All right, you guys can see Erik talk more about sales, solar
energy and the different career opportunities in solar by going to Careers Out There dot
com. Thanks again for watching. I'm Marc Luber. I look forward to seeing you at the site.
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