The 3 Traps Of Selling Conventionally In Complex B2B Sales

In a increasingly complex sales environment, conventional sales processes no longer offer the certainty of a positive outcome — and may even widen the gap between sales professionals and customers.

- Jeff Thull

Prospect, qualify, present and close. These are the basic elements of the conventional sales process that most sales organisations and sales people still follow today. The conventional sales process is the most widely used selling paradigm for good reason: it works. That is, it works if you have a simple sale.

Problem is, the world in which we sell has changed.

We must deal with complex problems and correspondingly complex solutions that involve multiple decisions and multiple decision-makers — most of whom are having an increasingly hard time understanding their own problems and the solutions that will best resolve them.

When you follow the conventional sales process in a complex sale, you run head first into a series of traps that grow progressively more difficult to avoid and that make a positive outcome for the sale ever less likely. They are as follows:

1 THE ASSUMPTION TRAP

How many times have you heard or perhaps said yourself: ‘My customers just don’t get it?’ The reality behind that statement of frustration is not too difficult to figure out: Customers don’t ‘get it’ for one of two reasons:

a. Either you are overestimating the value your solutions bring to the customer

b. Or you are overestimating the customer’s ability to comprehend that value.