Provocative Selling

provocative selling is all about making a customer realize that they have a problem that they may have not thought that that he had and in a down Market it's even more important for a sales professional to learn how to use this technique in an upmarket when there is plenty of money available it's very easy for organizations to make those choices they're able to set their priorities and criteria very easily but in a down Market those choices are much tougher so we can no longer use transactional selling consultative selling or solution selling in order to stand

out we really have to use provocative selling which surprisingly is all four of them combined there's going to be techniques that you will use throughout all of the skills that you've developed no one technique will work better than all of them in combination here's where you can start to get started the first one is understanding the why from the customer's perspective what else is important to unpack well the other thing to consider is how do you build your provocative point of view and there's a number of different layers to this we need to think about

the macro environment these are the high level political demographic changes that are clearly happening around the world then we think to the next layer which is how does that affect their industry what does it mean for their industry then we think down one more layer as to how is that impacting their organization and get very specific about the implications two more layers we think about what does it mean for their role so how is it going to affect their role and then finally what does it mean for the individual by taking together all of these

Dynamic points of view you can start coming up with messaging that will resonate with the particular person that you're speaking with what they care about is what will make them look good in front of their team in front of their boss and by helping them craft a why now mentality especially if purse strings are a little bit tighter will help them look good instead of just asking for money that is really tight to spend is there anything else that you would share as a tip on how people can create their own point of view I

think what's important is that you embed the macro level in clear points that are very difficult to argue these are things like climate change demographic change or political change that are clearly present each time you bring it down a layer you need to bring with it credit ability so third party research and what it means for the industry clear discussion and Clarity and what it means for the organization and as you go down each level you need to just make the right adjustments to understand how it affects different parts of the organization and the individuals

within the role through that we're able to build consensus around our provocative point of view old school selling was the sales professional's responsibility to share information modern selling technique is you are helping your customer achieve impact and by taking into account many complex issues in the expertise that you have in a very particular issue that they're helping solve you don't need to master everything in their business what your responsibility is is to provide expertise to a particular thing that will help their business be more successful