If you’ve followed my work for a while, you’ll know there are a few things I believe signal the greatest shift in selling in the last 20 years …
- The move away from pressure-based selling to presence-based selling,
- The move away from the “value stack” of bonuses, added to try and seal the deal, instead offering profound value that is so deep and intimately on point that it hits the prospect in ways they didn’t see coming,
- The rejection of manipulation-based sales techniques, replacing them with creating absolute buyer safety – meaning that the prospect feels safer with you than they do without you, at each step of your sales process,
- Replacing language only sales conversations with visual models, that allow the most complex concepts to be explained with such practical simplicity, that the genius of these concepts is incontestable, and maybe the biggest shift of all
- Refusing to fall into the commoditised commentary of thought leadership, where people proclaim themselves thought leaders to try and gain position in the marketplace – instead replacing that with a sales approach that elevates the customer to be the hero in their own story, where we sell to their sense of identity, rather than our own ego and identity.
As the world has evolved, with all that is going on, selling today MUST be the MOST noble thing you do in business.
However, don’t for one moment think that means we don’t have a focus on driving sales and revenue – quite the opposite.
If your business is a real contributor to the needs of your clients and you bring an uncommon wisdom to the marketplace, you deserve absolute business certainty. That certainty allows you to keep on serving.
The one place that certainty comes from in business is sales. Revenue generated through sales is the certainty metric in business. If you have enough revenue coming in, you can solve most other problems you might have.
Selling MUST be a superpower in your enterprise. It’s just that how we do it today has changed in response to what customers expect and demand from companies.
If you know that the way you sell can be taken up a few levels and you resonate with some of the big shifts in selling I’ve outlined above, then you’ll likely find that using powerful visual models to sell will create that sales improvement you’re looking for.