5 Sales Styles for the Modern Era

Modern-Day Sales: A Value-Based Approach

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In the last 10 years, business has changed a lot. Even many companies and industries have come as we have fundamentally changed the way we sell products or services, interact with customers, and deliver value. Having said that we still use legacy cells approaches which do not work or produce suboptimal results. In this article we are going to examine the modern day, value based selling approach.

Introduction

In today’s world, buyer have a multitude of choices and plethora of information about products, services and brands starting the sales cycle even before you have engaged with them. At times, the information overload is confusing and noisy while other times it provides the confidence and head start to see data points and make decisions. They need people to share ideas, help them think and see through problems or solutions; yet, many companies and sales functions have struggled to adapt to the new age of selling through value and insights — select few are getting this right and winning business.

Insights

Customers want salespeople to partner with them through the sales cycle through education, collaboration, and commitment before they commence persuasion. Long gone are the days when sales held the benefit from the information arbitrage and held the keys through knowledge of markets, products, or services.

In addition, oceans of undifferentiated information, biased push of value propositions and short spans of executive attention has propelled a need for shorter length of sales materials — what used to be 50 plus slides in a pitch now needs to make a point in 10 slides to accommodate people’s time to focus, else you lose them quickly.

Selling through insights not only demonstrates your knowledge but can also unlock pathways to unarticulated needs from your prospective clients. If traditional sales make the highest impact by positioning their services against articulated needs in served clients (to a degree in unserved clients), insight based selling can unlock one of the largest value creation zone by opening up channels into unarticulated needs in served clients and even unserved clients.