How should I sell?

Sales methodologies and how to understand the sales activities

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

In the past years, I have been reading a lot of books and articles about sales and I participated in sales training and I tried to adopt my learnings into my daily business. Overall this is what I learned from my experiences:

The first rule is, to know about and to always be up to date about any existing and new sales methodologies and then choose the one that fits the best to your business.

A very common and fatal mistake of a salesperson or a sales team is to place their need to sell above anything else and making it at the center of the sales process, forgetting that the focus of a sales activity is to support the prospect in his purchase decision.

Adopting a sales methodology, the customer will be placed at the center of the sales process in a simple and natural way.

Let’s dive into some of the sales methodologies mostly used:

1. Product selling
2. Solution selling
3. A.I.D.I.n.c. selling
4. Inbound selling

Product selling:

It is all about price and only price

• The customer has a specific interest and trust in the product or service
• The product should fit 100% of the requirements and it is simple to replace
• Seller doesn’t bring extra value to the product
• The customer has the focus on negotiating the price
• The sales process is easy to manage end-to-end
• Short-term focus

Solution selling :

Seller brings his experience and this is what matter most

• Customer needs to solve a problem
• Customer needs suggestions to define clearly the problem and the value-added by the solution provided by the Seller
• Relationship between Customer and Seller is made during the groundwork process
• The negotiation phase is usually complex, due to the fact of having everything variable