Adapting your style for the new way of selling

2020 has been a difficult year for business. From having to pivot your offering overnight to thinking of new ways to live and work. Taking stock for just a few minutes of what has been achieved; we see some pretty amazing stories to celebrate. However, not everyone has been as successful through the summer as they would like to be and thanks to the lockdown, we’re all back to being virtual sellers.

Across the country, many businesses have had little choice but to adapt their products and the way they work, whether it be Zoom meetings with clients or staff, or in my case, delivering training and development programmes remotely. While this has undoubtedly caused all kinds of unknown problems for businesses who relied on face-to-face meetings to sell their products and services, many are starting to see benefits. Some people have adapted well, and others are still finding it hard to move to a new way of working. Building virtual relationships is an efficient, scalable and effective way to continue to grow your business.

We have been speaking to as many businesses as we can to look at their new ways of selling. We don’t just talk about how to sell virtually; mostly we talk about how we like to buy. Taking time to understand you customers, what has changed for them and how they would like to be sold to is key to being successful. Some of things that we found easy in face-to-face meetings are no longer available to us. Such as the way we build rapport and understand body language. Now more than ever it is important to understand the customers natural characteristics and be able to adapt your style to suit their needs.

Your customers deserve much more than a one size fits all approach, there is no way of knowing what excellent sales and service is because every customer is unique. You may think you know what makes your customers happy but if you were to dig a little deeper you might just find that the way they like to be sold to isn’t quite hitting the mark in the way that you like to sell.

This is why we developed Pitch.Community. Pitch has been designed to support small businesses, independent sole traders and creatives. The programme is for those that do not fall into a full-time salesperson role but are rather the subject matter experts; the creatives that deliver amazing business to business projects for their clients. The consultants that support businesses, and brokers that get amazing deals in place for clients. The community is for those that may not have had formal sales training but would like to up-skill in this area and generate more business, closing more deals and delighting more clients with the work they do.

The programme consists of six, 3-hour Sales Training workshops. After these the Pitch Community will meet once per month. There will be the opportunity to learn tried and tested techniques to enhance your selling skills and then go put them in to practice. You will network with like-minded group members and hold each other to account to implement the learning, and generate more business moving forward.

In the first workshop on the Pitch Community Foundation in Selling Programme, we help individuals understand themselves and their customers, helping them build more successful relationships. We do this using Insights Discovery, an innovative psychometric tool that’s helps individuals understand their own personal preferences and communication style, and how this might be perceived by their customers and colleagues. It is this that supports not only selling to customers face-to-face but also how to sell and be confident in a virtual environment.

If you are Fiery Red, who likes a fast-paced action-oriented meeting, and you are dealing with Earth Green, who likes a calm meeting where they have some time to think, this could mean that these two styles may clash. It is here that as the person leading the meeting you get the opportunity to adjust your style to the needs of your customer and build a better, stronger relationship.

Virtual selling is here to stay and is an effective way to sell – providing you work at the skills required. Seven months ago, having your video on when you’re on a call would have been odd, yet now my phone is redundant, and I seem to be a Zoom expert. Before the lockdown, most people would have their video off, but now most are happy to show themselves on screen. This makes it a lot easier to build rapport and also easier to get more than one stakeholder into a discussion. This makes your conversations more productive.

Finally, and I don’t know about you, but I’m also finding people are more open about their situations at the moment. So, if you are ready to talk about your selling skills and want to grow your business, get in touch and we can have a chat about how best we can support you.

www.pitch.community
www.learningcog.com
hello@pitch.community