María Fernanda Santillán Cueva PGE2 UB02

E-LEARNING 1 SALES AND RELATIONS

STRATEGIES
PART 1 (TEXT): THE NEW SALES IMPERATIVE
- What are the 5 ideas you want to retain from the article? Why?
The first idea is related to the negative impact that an excess of information
can have on customers when making decisions on purchase process. It’s
curious because it’s supposed that more information might result useful for
customers when choosing the supplier from, they want to buy the products.
They would have the opportunity to have more data to contrast and compare,
and thus carry out a successful and purchase. In fact, this thinking is present in
most B2B sellers, and this is what actually seems to be a problem.

So, it’s important to consider that more information begets more questions,
becoming the purchase process more complex and stressful for customers. It
must be on mid of every supplier that more isn’t always better. The excess of
options also affects customer post-purchase feeling, which is important when
measuring his satisfaction. The consumer may feel round so many alternatives
that he might feel insecure about if he has chosen the correct one. If it’s not
considered this idea about the excess of information and its consequences, the
purchase will become and awful, painful, frustrating and minefield process for
the customer.

The second one is about two selling tactics and their impact on the purchase
process. On one hand, the responsive approach consists of satisfying every
customer’s request for information and support, thinking that this would ease
the purchase decisions. On the other hand, the proactive and prescriptive
approach goes beyond and tries to help and guide customers through decision
making, providing recommendations sustained on specified and solid
justifications and evidence about the offers, a vision of capabilities and some
complex aspects of the purchase process.

Thus, as a supplier that wants to get success in the purchase process, it’s
essential to know that it would be more convenient to apply a proactive,
prescriptive approach as it increases the likeliness of purchase ease and
decrease the likeliness of purchase regret. This would imply, moving away
from normalize and wrongly belief that the right way to ease the purchase
process and allow suppliers to be more customer- centric is using a responsive
approach, which in reality has the opposite effect decreasing the likeliness of
purchase ease and increasing the likeliness of purchase regret. By this way,
with the proactive, prospective approach, the supplier would be considered as
someone who reduce obstacles in purchase process getting the trust of
customers and thus having more probabilities to win a high-quality sale.

The third one is related with the importance of prescription and the practices it
involves. Once we have identified the proactive approach as the key to
facilitate purchase process and high-quality sales, it’s important for any
supplier to understand what prescription involves and how to develop a
prescriptive sale organization. Prescription employs four practices: map the
journey, identify barriers, design prescriptions and track customer progress.
All these practices try to empathize with customer along at each stage of the
purchase process, understanding his situation, helping to overcome
challenges, and following his progress to guarantee the success of the process.

The fourth one is connected with the first step of prescription, mapping
customers’ buying journeys. Here, it’s fundamental that prescriptive efforts
adopt a global perspective rather than a specific or concentrated one as well as
awareness, consideration, preference and purchase as main principles. The
sellers or suppliers have to situate the customer within a purchase process
where he faces some obstacles that not necessarily are related with
themselves, but with other ones. So, the authentic objective of the supplier
should be identifying the problems that customers would have with any
supplier. The elaboration of mapping must focus not on sales of one supplier’s
solution, but rather on sales of all supplier’s solution of market. By this way,
the supplier is concentrated on how customers face problems and take
decisions.

The fifth and last idea is in relation with the third step of prescription (“design
of prescriptions”). Any supplier should take into account the three
requirements that prescriptive efforts must meet if they want to guarantee and
convince customers to be the unique to provide a solution in the purchase
process. The first requirement is that these efforts must be unbiased and
credible. They must be based on evidence and avoid promotional characters
that might create suspicious among customers. The second requirement
consists of reducing indecision and compel action. The prescriptive efforts
must reduce indecision and compel the action, so that these efforts lead
customers to consider the supplier option as a solution through
recommendations and evidence. The last requisite consists of driving the
progress of the customer purchase process to a solution that the supplier is the
unique able to provide it.

This is important to consider when studying the purchase process carried out
by customer as it can represent a way to create confidence on the supplier
between customers that would lead to the recognition of the supplier as the
unique one able to provide a solution to customers’ needs, problems and
exigences.
PART 2 (PODCAST): EMPATHY, COLD CALLING AND
OBJECTIONS HANDLING

- What are the 5 ideas you want to retain from the podcast? Why?

The first idea to be mentioned is about the importance of empathy when

establishing sales relations. Empathy also must be differentiated from
sympathy. While empathy consists of understanding the situation, the current
status and the state of mind of other people; sympathy consists of feeling pity
for someone, but you are not feeling the feeling of others. Someone that
practices empathy can still maintain its autonomy, he/she is going to do things
by the way they want to do. However, a sympathy person gives the impression
to be someone that is trying to fix the other people giving some advice or
telling what they have to do. I think it’s important to have clear these two
concepts as they can have different effects on people feelings: empathy allows
people frustrated to feel better as they are feeling understood, heard, and
supported; but feeling sympathy for the frustration of other people can even
make them feel worst. So, it would be a good idea to remember the
importance of empathy because we can see that high empathy leads to better
relationships, while lack of empathy can represent one of the most
misunderstood aspects in selling.

The second idea I would like to retain from the podcast is the fact that
expectations not always become true as it can be observed in Sarah’s life. This
idea is applicable to any aspect of life and labour. It’s important to be aware
that trajectory of any event in your professional and personal life cand change
a lot and suddenly, so the unique way to continue is adapting to that new
change and trying to take advantage of the opportunities it involves and
learning about the challenges or inconvenient that can be appeared.

The third idea to mention is about the origin of empathy development. In a

part of the interview Sarah affirms that empathy doesn’t form part of training
for salespeople. So, it’s expected people to know what empathy is and how to
practice it. This situation is really surprising because, as it’s already mention,
empathy is the key to sales; if you want to sell your product you have to put in
the shoes of your customers and think, how would you like to be treated by
the seller? or how would you like the negotiation conditions to be? So, the
question is how the salespeople could develop their empathy? The answer is
that probably each person might live different situations that forced him to
develop unconsciously the empathy.

For example: if a teenager see that her mother is crying, he probably tries to
understand her feelings and try to support her, as he would put in the shoes of
her mother. So, by this idea, it can get the conclusion that the origin of
empathy comes more from personal experience than professional.
The fourth idea is about how to deal with a cold calling. It can be interesting
not only for salespeople but also as a useful skill to practice and develop as it
doesn’t know when it can be necessary. During this type of callings, the
speaker must avoid professional and technical language and instead use a
more natural and closer language maintaining the respectful and polite
character. By this way, the person who is called would get a good impression
of the seller as well as a good receptiveness to his proposals or offers. It’s
important to consider that a cold calling with a grotesque, abusive or very
technical tone can confuse the customer making him to lose the interest on the
offer. So, this idea can represent a useful skill and technique about how to deal
with people by phone calling, learning the impact of the tones, attitudes, and
the formalism that you use.

The fifth and last idea relates to the curious studio of finding the most efficient
and useful starter opener for conversations. This represents a really interest
and helpful tool to carry out a successful sale. From my point of view, the
starter opener for conversations constitutes some decisive seconds to
determine the start or the end of a sales process. A good starter opener for
conversations would get the customer attention, obtaining the opportunity to
present the product and its benefits. Even if the sale is not produced by calling
customers, if they have been able to hear you during all the call, then the
salesperson would get to familiarize the customer with the firm, leaving the
name of the firm on their minds. So, it’s essential to take into account this idea
as each salesperson must be aware that is conditioned by few determinant
seconds that must be approached by a clear, objective and direct way in order
to get success in sales.