END OF DAYS! No More Joke-Telling, Back-Slapping, Beer-Buying, Manipulating Mispeceptors in Sales?

Geoffrey James, award-winning journalist and the author of How to Say It: Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies from the World’s Top Sales Expert, talks with us about the type of personality, skills and abilities you need to be successful in the Complex B2B Sale.

Steve Kayser: There’s a lot of sales books out there right now. Why did you write this book, and why is it different?

Geoffrey James: The reason that I wrote the book was because there really wasn’t a book that specifically addressed the novices’ concern on how to get into business to business (B2B) part of the selling profession. Most sales training courses and most opening sales positions have traditionally been in business to consumer. And that’s actually quite a different environment, has a different set of rules, and the sales cycle is a lot shorter.

Steve Kayser: Could you talk about the difference between B2B and B2c?

Geoffrey James: With business to business, you have a more complex sale. There are more people involved, it’s harder to find opportunities, and there are a different sets of rules. While there are plenty of books on selling these complex sales, there are very few that were designed just for people who are just getting into it .

I went out and talked to the top experts in the field and extracted the best techniques from all of them and presented that in a very simple form, so you can go step-by-step from creating your first sales message, to making a cold call, to getting a referral, to developing a opportunity and then finally being able to hone your sales process so that it becomes easier to sell overtime.

Steve Kayser: There’s been a long-time pervasive perception about sales. It’s that you have to be a connected, jovial, joke-telling, back-slapping, beer- buying, face-to-face manipulating misperceptor (if that’s a word) to be successful in sales. True?

Geoffrey James: No. In fact  face-to-face selling is far less common these days. It’s not a growth part of the sales profession. Growth is flat in face-to-face sales. Even traditional “road warriors,” the stereotypical salesman who goes from place-to-place, are now conducting  around 50% of their business on the telephone or through the internet.

The part of sales that is growing and on the upswing, even more during this recession, is primarily inside sales. That’s where people do most of their communication using email, the telephone and increasingly things like web conferencing and webinars.

So it’s really not the backslapping and “hail fellow and well met” kind of selling, anymore. Sure, there’s some of it still out there, but frankly it’s not  ffective. It was never that effective anyway. It was just the way people did things.

The concept of the sales person as this sort of sleazy guy who tries to manipulate people into making a sale is a popular notion. It turns up in popular culture. But the reality is that a business-to-business salesperson is more like an outsource manager who is handling a critical part of a customer’s business and making sure that that part runs smoothly.

Think about it – a business has a choice.

Whenever they are need a critical product or service, they decide whether they are going to buy or build it themselves.  When they make that decision not to do it internally – because that’s not their core competency – they rely upon a professional, high-skilled salesperson to make sure that critical part of their business works correctly. That their deliveries are made on time, that the things that are delivered are up to quality spec. So it’s really a matter of building these relationships in complex supply chains and that’s what business to business selling is about. It’s not about trying to close a deal and get a guy in a car. It’s a different environment. B2B selling is much different, much more highly-skilled and complex.