Problem-Solving Sales in B2B Environments
Thursday, 03 November 2011 13:33
By Mark Pageau
Recently, I was reading an article about how sometimes the best selling is not about relationships. Especially in today’s B2B marketing environment where we talk so much about “consultative sales,” I found this idea to be intriguing.
The article talked about how, regardless of vertical market, sales styles can be categorized into different buckets. Two I found particular interesting were the relationship-builder and the challenger. The relationship-builder sells based — appropriately — on building relationships. But the challenger works to solve specific problems within the client’s business. The article pointed out that, in B2B environments, the challenger is more effective. If fact, more than half —53%—of those polled or interviewed bought from their reps because they brought in new ideas or solved problems for them.
I started thinking about that approach as it relates to Darwill. Do you see us doing these things? I hope so. I can think of two examples of this off the top of my head.
One of our clients is a large hardware chain that uses a lot of bin labels (those cards you see in front of the product bins with pictures and product numbers—say, when you are looking for a certain faucet or plumbing fixture). They had been printing those cards in a gang run sheetfed environment, which can be highly inefficient. Our rep went in and suggested that we create a database of art files, product and card details, and build an automated ordering environment in which they could simply tell us the number of cards they needed and the order would be sent to one of our digital presses.
They loved the idea. We implemented it, and the workflow created tremendous savings. The way the old printer was doing it, the client was forced to order 700 of each these 75 bin cards at a time. Now they simply say, “I want 150 of those, 300 those, and 200 of these.” Any time they need to update a photo or other product information, it goes into the database and everything is automatically re-populated. No more keystroking. (Needless to say, errors are minimized.)
It was a home run. It’s turned into huge savings for the client in proofing time, time to market, cost savings from inventory reduction, error reduction, things like that.
We had another rep involved with a travel company. The customer sent out a 100+ page, perfect-bound catalog to everyone in their database. We talk to them about narrowing who they mail to and creating a custom, 32-page catalog based on buying history. They did and saw about 30% lift in response. Deliverability cost also went down. Postage cost went down. It’s a higher unit cost, but the client is so happy with the results that they are going back and doing more.
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