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Team VODIUMMay 9, 2023 12:37:15 PM7 min read

5 Sales Approaches You Can Use To Supercharge Your Strategy

Let's be honest, sales are the backbone of your company, and providing a concrete strategy for your salesforce to follow can be the difference between a banner year and winding up in the red.

Sales strategies provide your sales staff with explicit directions to use in different circumstances to sell your product. By giving your sales teams the strategies to improve, you’re facilitating sales enablement.

We're going to take a look at five of those sales strategies today, and explain how you could use them in your own business to help bring your sales force up to the next level!

Sales approaches that’ll help you boost sales revenue

The solution-selling approach

Find a need and fill it. This is one of the most important adages of the sales process.

This is what the solution-selling strategy is all about. It’s a tactic that relies on knowing about your potential customer and how your product can solve problems for them. What are their pain points, their needs that are going unmet and unfilled? And how can your product or company fill those needs?

It's less about extolling all the virtues of your product than it is pointing out those specific places where your product can fill a specific need your customer has.

To use this approach effectively, however, you need to have the groundwork, getting to know your prospective client and their business. You can't sell them a solution to a problem if you don't know what problems they have. The research can be put into a sales script that’s easy to follow and land points.

Once your sales reps have taken the time to understand and evaluate their prospects, they need to find and understand the pain points. How do they waste time in their processes? What parts of their business are inefficient? Do they lack the tools needed for their business, or are they using tools that aren’t suited for it? Any pain point is an avenue to showcase how your product can help them in that specific area.

After that comes building trust. If a prospect views your company as a source of authority and competence, it will go a long way toward making the sale.

You may decide to offer advice free of charge to build a rapport or offer resources towards one of their pain points. This reinforces your company as a trusted source of information and solutions rather than someone trying to make a buck off of them. Once that trust is established, you can have your sales force work on selling solutions to those pain points and build a strong relationship with the client.

The consultative selling approach

Consultative selling, also called “needs-based selling,” is similar to solution selling in that your sales force needs to establish a rapport with the potential client for it to function as intended.

Where consultative selling differs is it’s focused more on creating that relationship between yourself and the client, using it to establish a strong, long-term business relationship. It’s making your company a valued associate, someone your client can come to for advice and solutions.

The key difference from solution selling, according to sales coach Anthony Garcia, is in the approach.

Where solution selling identifies specific points of pain and focuses almost exclusively on selling products designed to ease them, consultative selling will instead ask questions designed to understand a prospective client's needs and work to best meet those needs overall. It's the difference between focused problem-solving and long-term needs-meeting.

Some of the methods used in consultative selling include:

  • Asking discovery questions. Seek to find out about the client and what their goals, fears, and desires are. The more you know, the more you will be able to understand how your products or services may be useful to them.
  • Collaborate with the client. Consultative selling relies on building a relationship with your potential client, and that means getting into the weeds with them as a consultant or advisor on various matters.
  • Recommending products or services based on the client's needs.

This approach is especially effective for loyal client relationships or B2B clients who may need your services long-term.

The challenger approach

According to Indeed, this approach is less focused on the relationship with the customer and more focused on presenting unique solutions and “challenging” the customer's way of thinking to inform them about solutions they may not have considered.

It’s about presenting your salesperson as an authority in the field and demonstrating they have expertise that makes them worth listening to, despite not having a deep relationship.

There are three main components to the challenger approach.

The first step is teaching. The challenger will by necessity seek to present the customer with new and valuable information about the challenges they face and how the product or services on offer would help to overcome those challenges. It’s not about teaching the client about their own industry but shifting their viewpoint to consider new information.

Next is tailoring. Once new information has been presented, it’s your time to highlight how that information relates to your product. Remember, the challenger approach is not about offering the same solutions as other companies; it’s about showing the customer a new way to do things that they may not have considered before, which then means you “tailor” your services or products to meet those needs from the new perspective.

Lastly, we come to taking control. Sales reps are encouraged to challenge any objections or resistance offered by the prospective client as they move toward the sale. Rather than treating the customer's objection as a legitimate concern, the challenger method suggests instead that the sales representative push back on the concerns with a firm but authentic challenge.

The challenger method is a unique sales approach that requires a lot of skill and courage to handle effectively, but in the right hands it can revitalize your sales strategy

The question approach

The Question approach is all about guiding your customer into realizing your product is the right one for them by asking questions that lead them to that conclusion. Author and sales mentor Greg Woodley suggest that question-based selling is based on the theory that what a salesperson asks and how they ask it is more important than what they say.

Your salesperson takes the role of confidant, helping the customer to identify for themselves their problems, needs, and solutions. This in turn creates a feeling of trust and camaraderie. This is all framed through questions rather than statements, taking a passive approach to selling.

Rather than coming in saying “I can help you,” it’s in essence helping the client to help themselves and guiding them to see that your products and services may be part of the solutions they are seeking. This approach is highly personal, and the way your sales rep goes about it may vary from customer to customer. Nonetheless, the foundation is simple: ask questions to lead the client toward their own answers.

The product offer approach

The product offer approach is the tried-and-true “try before you buy” sales tactic.

In essence, you provide the prospective client with a free sample, demo, or trial of your product for them to better understand what they'd be purchasing, much in the same way that VODIUM offers a free trial of its own software for the user’s benefit. This serves to alleviate any potential buyer's remorse or pushback further down the line.

Depending on the type of business you run, this approach may also take the form of a product demonstration rather than a free trial. Infomercials, for example, rely heavily on this type of sales approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of various products so potential customers understand what they’ll be purchasing before they commit.

This sales technique can be especially useful if you are introducing a new product type into the market that may cause objections. By offering a demo or trial up front, you can head off those objections at the pass and demonstrate how your product can help the client by offering them a sample of it free of charge.

Need help with your sales approach? Try out VODIUM

Sales approaches are great ways to standardize your sales process, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always go as planned. To make sure that reps can approach each virtual sales call with confidence, try out a teleprompter app like VODIUM!

VODIUM works with video-call programs like Zoom or Microsoft Teams and can help your sales force stay on-point and relaxed during their sales meetings, knowing that the knowledge they need is right in front of their eyes, regardless of what sales approach they take.

Stop by our website and start your free trial today and see how VODIUM can benefit your company!

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