“Yes, there’s a lot involved, but that’s the way sales is going, that salespeople are going to have to be more accomplished, they’re going to have to tap into more resources to be able to stay relevant and to future proof themselves. That’s why hybrid selling is so important.” – Fred Copestake in today’s Tip 1097
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Fred Copestake. Over the last 22 years, Fred has traveled around the world 14 times visiting 36 countries and worked with over 10,000 salespeople. He has taken some of the things that really make a difference in modern selling and put these in his brand new book: Hybrid Selling. Here he is:
Fred Copestake: Hybrid selling. What is it? Well, hybrid selling is an approach that salespeople can adopt to make sure they are relevant now and in the future. It involves bringing together a number of different elements and using them for the benefit of themselves and of course, the customer. It involves using the essentials of selling as a foundation to win business. It involves applying virtual selling techniques. It involves managing sales opportunities to focus on delivering outcomes for the customer. It involves embracing the idea of leading customers, of guiding them, and helping them. It involves recognizing what value really is and creating that with and for customers. And it involves expanding meaningful business relationships.
Have a think about those in a little bit more detail. When we think about the essentials, this is about understanding the evolution of sales, looking at the things that have been useful in the past and are still relevant today and using them. It’s also about being selective and making sure the things that don’t work or could indeed do damage are ditched involves taking a more collaborative approach, thinking of the customer more as a partner, and being able to work with them to create those mutually beneficial outcomes.
When we think about virtual selling, we can think about online meetings, but we can also think about sending video to talking about synchronous and asynchronous communication. We can think about social selling. We can think about using the platforms like LinkedIn to be able to share information, share content, build a presence, establish a personal brand. We can think about the number of tools that we’ve now got, a lot of using machine learning and artificial intelligence that could do a lot of heavy lifting to make our lives easier in certain areas, so we can concentrate on the more human elements of selling. We can think about opportunity management. So this is all about information, knowing what we know and knowing what we don’t know. The no knowns, the no no knowns, and it’s putting together a plan to be able to use that information or indeed obtain it.
Lots of this information is going to be around the decision-making unit. It’s going to be to do with the people, the stakeholders, the influencers, who’ve got something to say about the sale. Working out who they are, what we need to do to make sure that they’re satisfied. We can use this information to build mutual action plans. Some people call these outcome enablement plans, things that you’re going to show how we can work together to deliver the results that the customer is looking for. When we think about leading, this is more about being a servant leader. Service as a way of selling. So helping people to achieve what it is they’re looking to do. More of a guide so this could be recognized in their buying process. Do they understand it? How can we align to it? Or if they don’t understand buying process, how can we help them to navigate that? How can we help them deal with change? We challenge status quo with salespeople. So how can we help them to understand it? How can we help them deal with VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity? This is the world we live in now. It’s confusing. How can we help them to understand that and to be able to deal with that? Lots of potentials to add value in those interactions as a professional salesperson.
Value, we need to sell value. But what is value? Well, as a colleague of mine says, it’s a mystery. We don’t know what value is. We’ve got to work with the customer to understand what they think it is. How we can then combine to build and deliver on that. A lot of this is through providing insight, through generating different perspectives, sharing information, coming out with ideas that we can put together to work towards a common goal. And then expanding relationships, this is using account management techniques to build on the relationship, but also customer success management. I think this is an interesting area for all salespeople to at least understand. Customer success management talks about outcomes. It’s about how we can deliver on the promises we make. Let’s look at what’s happening in that order, bring some of the practices into the way that we operate.
And last but not least, self-management. Think about how we can be the best version of ourselves. So this is about looking after ourselves mentally, physically, and thinking, how can we do the things that are really going to make a difference to ourselves, for our customers? These are some of the elements of hybrid selling. Yes, there’s a lot involved, but that’s the way sales is going, that salespeople are going to have to be more accomplished, they’re going to have to tap into more resources to be able to stay relevant and to future proof themselves. That’s why hybrid selling is so important.
Scott Ingram: Hopefully you’re listening to these tips the day they come out, because both today and tomorrow you can pick up a copy of Fred’s new Hybrid Selling book on Amazon for just 99 cents. We’ll have links for you as always at DailySales.Tips/1097.
Once you’ve grabbed your copy, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!