Strategic Selling
Strategic Selling is one of the most complex proactive sales approaches and requires skills more akin to those of a business analyst than those of classic salesmanship. It is defined as: the ability to proactively identify and position, for the customer, a way forward to a current or imminent business problem, where the customer has yet to identify how to resolve this business problem.
This involves sophisticated research and analysis of the dynamics in the customer’s marketplace, together with the current customer situation, to uncover and understand significant market drivers requiring a key business response.
with the aims of:
1) Alerting the customer to challenges over the horizon
2) Defining with the customer the potential business impacts of those challenges
3) Crafting joint options and solutions that can be implemented successfully to obviate these defined problems. This will involve your company’s capabilities/offerings and may also require integration of third party components to achieve a complete solution.
Candidates for Strategic Sales roles require a range of capabilities to perform this role including the ability to:
- Research and analyze the customer’s marketplace and customer situation
- Identify current and impending customer business problems from the market data
- Select capabilities required to address identified business problem(s) with the widest possible scope
- Propose to the customer executive team a solution package that not only addresses the current or impending business problem, but also creates competitive advantage for the customer's business
- Engage others outside of direct responsibility, such as partners, in the development of the proposition so that it increases real and perceived value delivered
- Develop and track a set of metrics (probably financial) to demonstrate sustained success over time
- Create a relationship with the customer whereby future business is assured and current successes can be fully leveraged in attracting other customers
- Capitalize the business value created for maximum mutual long-term business benefit
