In the modern Sales environment, competition has grown in numbers and is more aggressive, the differentiated products and services of yesterday are the commodities of today and price issues are a constant problem.  Moreover, according to recent studies, 83% of B2B buyers say that it is very important to interact with a salesperson who has intimate knowledge of their company’s products/services and 79% of them claim that the interaction with a sales rep who is a trusted advisor that adds value to their business is highly desirable.

Also in today’s world, words and phrases like long-term partnership, strategic alliance, business values and ethics are used more and more to describe the desired relationship between buyers and sellers.  From the above it becomes evident that as sales professionals we need to adopt new attitudes and approaches and learn new skills in order to be successful in this new era.

Primarily, we need to understand that Sales is something that we do with the customer and not to the customer and that it is a mutual win situation, which provides increased security and risk minimisation for both parties.  The only way that this can be achieved is through meaningful collaboration with the customers, who must feel not just included in the sales process, but that the whole process is about them and their organisation.     

If the salespeople and their prospects communicate well, with information flowing from both sides, then the sale is a just a matter of when, not if and will come as a logical conclusion to an on-going communication and problem-solving process.  From personal experience, I can tell you that this kind of selling process may take longer, but I can also confidently state that is the foundation of long-term and mutually fruitful partnerships.

As far as collaboration is concerned, it doesn’t have to do only with the way that as salespeople we interact with our clients, but also with how we interact and collaborate with our colleagues outside sales, but within our organisation.  As today’s customers are way more knowledgeable than before about our products and services, the more the sales process is going forward, the more information is required by them.  In order to meet their expectations, companies cannot rely only in their salespeople, so the role of non-salespeople from our organisations as value creators is becoming more and more important.  Therefore, a genuine collaborative effort is required between multiple parties from the same organisation, all working toward the same goal, which is to sell.

As we said earlier, it is difficult, nowadays, for companies to differentiate on products/services.  Nevertheless, I truly believe that if we approach the whole sales procedure as a collaboration process not only externally (with the customer), but also internally (with our non-sales colleagues), then as sales organisations we can achieve a significant advantage that can differentiate us from the competition.