Dynamic selling is about aligning your selling plan to the customer’s buying process. Every customer (or group of customers when you’re selling into a business) has a different decision-making and purchasing process, which is why the selling process should be flexible enough to meet their individual needs. It requires developing relationships and making the effort to understand how your customer makes decisions, what needs to happen, and when it needs to happen.
There’s no set, one-size-fits-all process you apply each time. But the great advantage is that tasks like diagnosing issues, efficiently scaling your team, and forecasting your own future needs become easier and more accurate. There’s no set, one-size-fits-all process, so here are 7 tips for success through a dynamic approach to sales.
1. Understand How Buyers Find Suppliers in Today’s World
The sun is setting on the order-takers of the world. Today’s buyer looks for an expert who offers valuable information and important insights about typical challenges or business problems. The primary way they do this? By searching online—so it’s important that you’re online, but that’s just the first step.
Buyers select the provider that educates with practical information, insights, ideas, and new perspectives. Be that provider by making your information fresh, original, and readily available and you’ll set the dynamic selling process in motion.
2. Never Mind What You Want—It’s All About the Customer
Focusing on the needs and wants of the customer requires scaling one-on-one marketing efforts so that each sales team member can offer tailored content for each buyer encounter. This requires thinking about what’s in it for the customer and what the customer gains because of your product or service. Your broad, generic content might work when someone first hears about your company, but when it’s time for the salesperson to step in, it’s no longer gonna fly.
Dynamic sales also requires measuring what works. Whether it’s through collecting data related to content, processes, or customer satisfaction, solid data analytics helps your team practice dynamic selling.
Discover the 7 Sales Content Metrics You Need to Track
3. Let Your Sales Process Mirror Prospects’ Decision-Making Process
Dynamic selling mirrors prospects’ buying practices. Over time, team members become more adept at knowing what they need to know, accomplish, and share at each stage of the buying journey in order to answer customer needs appropriately. Salespeople and marketers alike, however, know that customer needs aren’t static, which can be as volatile as markets and rapidly evolving technologies. With that in mind, today’s salespeople need to be flexible and their approach requires listening to customers, paying attention, and developing the capacity to detect trends in the buying process so they’re not caught off guard.
4. Adopt Tools for Mobility and Collaboration
Being connected and capable of collaborating is essential. When you can use technology to allow customers to understand your processes––involving sales, marketing, operations, and service––you demonstrate that you’re working for them at every step. Today you can’t afford to tell a prospect to wait until you get back to the office so you can email them information. Mobile technology allows you to carry every last bit of information with you, and with sales enablement, you can show prospects tailored solutions on the spot.
5. Redefine What “Closing” Means
The phrase “always be closing” doesn’t mean what it did a generation ago. While, yes, you should always be moving forward, you shouldn’t always be focusing solely on getting that signature on a contract. Closing can be thought of in stages. For example, you successfully “close” your introduction to a prospect. Later you “close” a meeting with them successfully. This attitude forces you to pay attention at every step, so you can stay more closely in step with your buyers.
6. Master Follow-Through
Did you know that nearly half of sales professionals give up after a single follow-up? Or that the average sales representative only makes two attempts to reach a prospect? How do you think that works out for those salespeople? The fact is, completing sales requires a great follow-through game along with outstanding responsiveness when a prospect has a question. Following up new leads quickly increases your chances of putting the rest of the dynamic selling process to work, and follow-through at every step heightens your likelihood of success.
7. Develop a Dynamic “Playbook” for Each Potential Deal
In today’s selling environment, creating a fixed sales “playbook” to use with every potential customer won’t get results—at least not the ones you want. Fortunately, technology makes it easy enough to create a dynamic playbook for each prospective deal. When you have the mobility and tools on hand to present the right sales content and to record results at each step of the sales process, you can tailor information to the customer’s buying cycle and decision-making process. If you’re just starting on the path to the dynamic selling, that could mean cutting down a slide deck to the ones most relevant to your prospect. If your company is more advanced, it’s using interactive content like calculators, guided selling and live analytics you can share with the customer.
Dynamic selling isn’t without challenges, but information, technology, insights, and experience allow today’s sales team member to quickly put together the right data to deliver insights to customers on demand. Ultimately, dynamic selling better meets the needs of customers and sales professionals, as well as content-creating marketers, by cutting out wasted effort and focusing attention on real customer needs and how best to address them.
Click through to Carson Conant’s SlideShare below for a step-by-step guide on making dynamic selling a reality at your company.
