The other week I came across this video interview with Neil Rackham, founder of Huthwaite and creator of SPIN Selling.
Rackham argues that the Internet has fundamentally changed how salespeople need to sell. He says that whereas a salesperson used to be able to sell products or services by simply rattling off their features – what he calls being a "talking brochure" – that will no longer do because prospects can now find all this information on the Internet. In today's world, Rackham advocates, "The new selling is about creating value for customers... and that value isn't just the product or service. It's your skills, your creativity, your problem solving. So successful salespeople today are creative problem solvers, not persuaders, and it's a very big shift."
I have to say, this interview really shocked us. Not that Rackham is wrong, because he's hit the nail on the head. In order to succeed in sales, you must sell value. What really threw us for a loop is that Rackham has apparently just figured this out!
The Internet has nothing to do with this. Nothing. Before the Internet, the most successful salespeople were the ones who knew how to create and sell value. With the Internet today, the same holds true. Perhaps the need for value selling has been magnified, so Rackham and others are more open to embracing the concept, but at the core of this matter, there has been no "very big shift". Maybe it’s the semantics but fundamentally nothing has changed in respect of the need to sell value.
For over 20 years, Steve Brown has been espousing what he calls intelligent persistence, which has similar threads to the more widely-recognised concept of consultative selling. Intelligent persistence says: Don't simply be persistent, as too many salespeople are berated to be. Instead, listen, learn from and understand the prospect, work with them to identify the real (business) problem (often quite different to what they initially think) and then develop a solution that you can provide in terms of the value it will create. It's never been about simply making a sale by rattling off features; it's always been about establishing trust, and creating a relationship. Frankly, if you were to repeat a thousand times 'selling is about establishing relationships of trust and confidence' you would not be over-emphasising its importance!
Whether you're selling to consumers or businesses, the bottom line is you must create and sell value to be successful. This was as true 20 years ago as it is today.