“A truly successful sales professional is likely to be characterized by integrity, diligence, persistence, and humility.  He knows firsthand that nobody is perfect every day but they always show up the next morning.  His peers know that he is not just lucky.”

Classroom training is always important.  Knowing the selling process is very important.  But an academic approach alone is not necessarily “do-able” in the field.  INDUSTRIAL SELLING SKILLS workshops are based on real field sales experience by salespeople who have actually made sales calls in industry. 

“What works well, what works sometimes, and what tends not to work at all, can only be confirmed as effective in the field by making sales calls”. 

In professional football, every play looks great on paper.  Every play is designed to score a touchdown.  But competition, field conditions, weather, and even stadium noise has a way of compromising the effectiveness of the perfect play.  The play is no less perfectly designed.  The expectation that a touchdown will be scored on every play or that you can run the same play on every down is unrealistic.  This is our perspective when we train.  We focus on fundamental execution of selling.  We hold to the fundamental truths of selling and the selling process.  Then we train on how to be effective in the face of a competitive market.

How does this related to industrial selling?  Here are a couple of examples:

It is academic to say, “you need to build relationships with your customers”.  It is also true.  But how do I build them?  It’s harder and harder to get past the guard shack let alone in the front door.  Customer’s today do not have time to waste and they are not interested in being manipulated.  People do business with people.  People can sense a phony.  Customer’s want someone they can count on.  They need suppliers that are sensitive to their time and to the pressure they are under to produce more with less.

It is academic to say “you have to get all the necessary information!”  But it’s not always that easy.  My application data is two pages long!  My customer doesn’t want to tell me everything about my competition!  He’s trying to beat down my price and get me out of the office quickly!  This is my first call on this account.  They seem more interested in getting me out the door or getting a price from me that they can use as leverage over their other supplier than they do in actually considering buying from me.