Part 1 of our Making Yourself Indispensable blog series focused on building an understanding of
Strategic Business Selling is defined as the capability of leveraging business acumen into the sales process so that you are seen by your customer as more than “just a salesperson”; you are a trusted strategic advisor, and you are offering a full value proposition.
Know your Customers
The most important thing that you can do to make yourself indispensable from a selling perspective is to invest the time in knowing your customers. Here are a few basic questions you can consider to answer as you go about the process of doing everything possible to know your customers. The answers to these questions are the essential “tickets to the party” and give you the basics to be an effective partner:
Know Your Own Solutions and How They Help Your Customers
Understanding your own products and services is the foundation to effectively helping your customers. If you don’t fully understand what your own products do and how they help your customers, you are dispensable. This takes work and dedication to keep up with your own solution portfolio but it is worth the effort.
Know The Business Impact Of Your Customer Not Solving Challenges Or Taking Advantage Of Opportunities
The next step of the process is to understand the business impacts of what happens to your customers if they don’t solve their challenges or if they don’t take advantage of their business and market opportunities. This capability is the essential foundation of Strategic Business Selling. This is what separates organizations that just make products from organizations that add real business value to their customers.
Again, this takes work and commitment to think about these things, and the further away from direct customer contact you are, the harder it is. However, no matter what function you are in, you should think about and know the answers to the questions as they will help drive your daily work.
Build And Nurture Relationships
Relationships are at the heart of the bond between customer and vendor. No matter what your function, you should always:
Build Your Brands
There are two different types of brands you want to build; the brand of your company and the brand of you.
From the customer perspective, there are a lot of different factors that go into the perception of the brand of your company including but not limited to:
The more that you can build the brand of your company (and the more the people you work with see that) the more indispensable you will become.
In terms of the brand of you, there are several things to focus on including:
In summary, the future of your company is going to depend on the way you market, sell, and grow your customers. Everyone in your organization sells, and the more you can support the sales process, the more indispensable you become.