Hope Is Not a Strategy

How Selling Has Changed

Selling is not what it used to be. The forces responsible for the increasing complexity and difficulty of making sales include:

• More products and services are becoming commodities as differentiation disappears.
• Cost-focused buyers are eliminating intermediaries.
• Internet buying, e-markets, online auctions and the like have taken any easy business away from salespeople.
• A more effective sales process is needed to utilize the information from high-tech customer relationship management systems.
• Strategic alliances and other types of partnering arrangements have created new organizational models that call for new sales models.
• Buyers demand solutions, not just products and services. The salesperson who does the best job of identifying and solving a problem gets the business.
• Competition is increasing and buyers happily play competitors against each other.
• Sales cycles are getting longer, and the more time buyers have, the more change there is. Change is always a complicating factor.
• The emphasis is increasingly on services, but because they are intangible, they can be more difficult...