Improve Your Inside and Outside Selling Skills
MoneyMoz.com presents you “Improve Your Inside and Outside Selling Skills”, an article written by Mark Smock. We hope you’ll find a lot useful information in here.
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One of the greatest joys of the selling profession is the
extraordinary responsibility one takes on as THE company
representative to the “outside world”. More often than not the
company sales representative IS the company to so many people
they interact with on a daily basis.
To many customers the vendor’s sales representative is the
relationship and the continued justification that drives the
business commerce between the parties. No one knows, or should
know, the customer’s product or service requirements better than
the sales representative. No one should know the customer’s
business challenges, decision makers, financial status and
history of use of the company’s product or services better than
the sales rep.
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Often an effective sales representative can make or break a
critical business conflict resolution among the customer and his
company. A strategic company will always leverage the developed
relationship between their representative and the customer to
maintain the business. If the company cannot utilize their
representative in this capacity, they have the wrong person on
the account!
The Inside and Outside Selling Functions
A sales person is ultimately responsible for retaining and
ideally increasing, sales revenues from his or her existing
customers. They are also charged with finding, qualifying or
disqualifying and eventually securing new business from
alternative revenue sources. This is called “outside” selling.
A sales representative is also required to represent his or her
customer to or within his company for the betterment of the
customer/ company relationship. Betterment of the customer/
company relationship equates to more sales from that customer.
This is called “inside” selling.
For a professional sales representative to maximize their sales
revenues he or she must constantly strive to improve both their
outside and inside selling skills. Hundreds of books have been
written about how to improve one’s outside selling skills, but
little has been written about the inside selling skills concept.
Depending on the sales representative employer’s propensities or
resource levels to “service” their customers – the sales reps
inside selling skills must be better honed than their outside
selling skills.
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Customers consistently demand more value from their vendors for
product or services provided. Competition among suppliers of
same products and services has traditionally increased along
with an unsettling trend of reduced customer purchase loyalty
due their cost reduction priorities, often driven by their own
competitive market environment.
When there are finite resources within the sales
representative’s employer or limited customer service focus
coming from senior management, all intensified with competing
demands for same resources and attention among other company
sales representatives, an inside sale success can make or break
the outside selling success for any given account.
Fundamental Inside Selling Tactics
Given the above circumstances of a sales representative needing
to grow his or her outside business via successful persuasion of
inside the company decision makers, one should focus on the
following tactics to improve their odds of overall selling
success:
1) Strive to get your company management to interact with
your customer’s management, professionally or socially
2) Eliminate any propensity on your part to totally control
the customer yourself, the more people who have
relationships with your customer from your company the
greater the probability business will increase over time
3) Hold people within your company accountable for their
actions or in-actions relative to your customer – you are
the voice of the customer – never forget this!
4) Be fair and honest at all times – representing both your
customer to your employer and vice versa. There is no
exception to this rule!
5) Whenever prudent, document successes to both the customer
and to your company. Copy everybody on the success in both
directions and give credit to BOTH parties for the
success. In many cases, the written document is the ONLY
means an executive from either your customer or employer
has to appreciate the relationship in hand.
6) Effectively and continuously enhance the mutual perception
that both parties have of each other to maximize their own
profitability
In conclusion, there effectively is nowhere for a sales
representative to hide if a customer decides to take their
business elsewhere. The sale representative ultimately is
responsible for either mismanaging his company’s resources and
support of the customer or not effectively communicating or
exhibiting the value of his product or services to the customer.
Hopefully this article gives another perspective as to how to
balance outside and inside selling skills for maximum sales
success.
About the Author:
Mark Smock is 30+ year veteran of business leadership and is
President of http://www.business-buyer-directory.com, the FIRST
International business buyer directory of its kind. Business
Buyer Directory provides a non-traditional means for proactive
business buyers to locate businesses for sale worldwide that
meet their exact registered purchase criteria.
Keywords assigned to this article by MoneyMoz: selling, sales, training, improve, techniques, marketing, management, representative
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