Friday, April 23rd, 2021
B2B BUYERS PREPARED TO SPEND $1M+ ONLINE
DESPITE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM THAT BIG-TICKET SALES REQUIRE…
Tuesday, May 26th, 2020
Decision contentment or buyer’s remorse?
Identifying a B2B buyer’s post-decision “cognitive states” – consonance and dissonance – and how to accommodate them. Cognitive dissonance is experienced when a person suffers from the unpleasant and conflicted state of being “in two minds about something” – in other words, concurrently holding two or more contradictory cognitions (ie, perceptions, attitudes or beliefs). The concept became popularised among marketers…
Tuesday, September 10th, 2019
Growing together (part 2)
Following up on our previous article in last issue of IJST, we continue the discussion on how to best work with your strategic customers to help create joint solutions for growth. What do the best do differently to create joint solutions? Leading companies that excel at collaboratively creating value with their customers are not trying to do a thousand things…
Tuesday, June 25th, 2019
Growing together
How to work with strategic customers to create joint solutions for growth. Article summary Persistent, disruptive forces impacting profitable growth are intensifying, and as a result, companies in many industries face slower growth and accelerating commoditization of product and service margins. Given marketplace complexity and dynamic shifts in how customers buy, traditional business models are threatened and new strategies and…
Tuesday, June 25th, 2019
Selling in a sea of sameness
When your competitors are floating in a sea of sameness you need to make sure you are waving not drowning. In the second of a series of articles in which Dr Simon Kelly and Dr Paul Johnston explore customer value and differentiation, they are joined by co-author Stacey Danheiser to ask: are you selling in a sea of sameness? In…
Wednesday, December 19th, 2018
Understanding procurement and negotiation
How should KAM teams create impact and…
Monday, September 24th, 2018
Do we understand what buyers want?
How customer-centric are our salespeople? Numerous authors down the years have drawn attention to the fact that only a small percentage of salespeople exceed customer expectations. Is this because salespeople tend not to have the competencies that customers are looking for or are buyer expectations unreasonably high? Here we look at the actual data: three studies that have charted buyers’…
Friday, September 21st, 2018
Salespeople increasingly time poor as they seek to satisfy buyers
Salespeople are having to work even harder to satisfy buyers across a whole range of metrics. The third edition of the State of Sales report from Salesforce.com’s research arm found that 72% of buyers expect vendors to personalise engagement to their needs, while 79% say It’s easier than ever to take their business elsewhere. Today, customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the…
Thursday, May 17th, 2018
Good deals for IT buyers?
A poll of 200 IT buyers and 74 suppliers from IT marketplace Probrand.co.uk has found that as many as 1 in 3 think they are getting good deals when it comes to buying IT. Indeed, the survey found that 85% of IT buyers believe that they don’t overpay for IT equipment. Yet additional research conducted using IT benchmarking application, KnowledgeBus…
Friday, September 22nd, 2017
Perfectionists versus pragmatists
Most learning models that encourage salespeople to adapt their selling styles to meet the needs of different buyer “types” don’t easily translate across to B2B selling scenarios. The author proposes a new model based on personal experience. The new model being proposed here provides a more practical learning tool, at least for those salespeople for whom it has been designed…
Sunday, April 23rd, 2017
Understanding the buying mind-set
Three easy-to-remember quotes from buyers will help get you on their wavelength. Let’s be honest: nobody likes being “sold to”. We like to think that we are controlling the buying cycle, whether it’s a personal purchase or a corporate procurement. If we experience “blatant” or “clumsy” sales tactics, then we react badly; but, if we feel the salesperson is contributing…
Saturday, January 28th, 2017
Dealing with the ever-growing buying decision group
Bob Apollo on Building Scalable Businesses Long ago and far away, there was a time when “selling to the C-level” was a credible and often effective strategy. Dozens – maybe hundreds – of sales books were written on the subject. If you could successfully sell to the top, so the authors claimed, sales success would surely follow. Now, there’s no…
Thursday, January 28th, 2016
B2B must deliver seamless, holistic buying experience across human and digital assets
Research organization Forrester forecasts that 12% of all B2B sales in the United States will take place online by 2020. Last year, the company caused a few ripples when it predicted that the number of B2B salespeople in the United States would contract by one million over the next five years. In a recent report in the series, The B2B…
Saturday, October 31st, 2015
Salespeople fail to research customers’ needs confirms international buyers survey
There are significant opportunities for salespeople to chase as the market opens up and customers search for increased value and innovation from suppliers, not just lower prices. That’s one of the principal findings from a global survey of buyers launched at the UK’s National Sales Conference in Coventry on 8 October. Introduced at the event by managing director Sam North,…
Saturday, July 4th, 2015
TACK International buyer survey
Development specialist TACK International is set to unveil the findings from the 7th edition of its “Buyers’ Views of Salespeople” study at the National Sales Conference on 8 October. Previous research identified that price is not always a key purchase motivator. A quarter of respondents indicated that a number of factors were ahead of price in determining their buying decisions:…
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
Buyers are growing up too
While most areas of business have changed in recent years, none has seen as dramatic a revolution as procurement and supply chain management, argues David Noble, CEO at CIPS. Speaking exclusively to the International Journal of Sales Transformation, Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply chief executive officer David Noble explains that the profession has had to change dramatically to keep…