Building Relationships, Not Just Closing Deals...

Hello and welcome to Introduction to Sales, a beginner's Guide. I am your instructor, Tavish IMA Ayede. I'm a sales coach and a business growth broadcaster and a public speaker. Today we're going to continue looking at the different types of sales roles and industries and it is still a part of the module. One on sales fundamentals. The last time we looked into simple and complex sales scenarios and today we're going to examine deeper the implications for this distinction, why we make a distinction between simple sales scenarios and complex sales scenarios.

In case you haven't figured it out, if you haven't listened to the introductory episode, that's the prior one before this, you should listen to it or a whole lot of things here might not make sense. Now, when you're dealing with complex sales scenarios or complex sales context or you're trying to sell complex products, you're usually dealing with longer sales cycles. So if you're trying to sell the commodity like groundnuts or a goosey, you can close the sale very quickly in two to three minutes, maybe five.

If you're trying to sell something like a car, for instance, or a house, you should expect that the sale cycle is going to last you a couple of days, a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. A sales cycle is how long it takes a business deal to close from the moment when the customer reaches out to you to when you guys sign on the dotted line or when the customer makes a transfer for the purchase. Another implication when you're dealing with complex sales or complex products or complex scenarios is that to sell in those situations, you have to be consultative.

You can't just tell people this is the greatest, this is the best, take it or leave it. You actually have to pretend to be a doctor or an accountant. You have to be pretend to be some sort of a professional and you have to ask questions. Because before you can say that this kind of house is the best for someone or this kind of car is the best for someone, you actually have to ask questions to know what their preferences are.

You need to know, is this person a family man or a family woman? How many rooms are they looking for in the house? Do they want to buy the house so that they can live in or do they want the house to be part of their investment portfolio? These are the sorts of questions that you have to ask before you can make a recommendation for them to buy this house over another kind of house. You can see that in this case, you are being consultative.

You're not saying this is the brightest, this is the best, this is the newest, this is the cheapest buy. You have to be consultative. And it's the same when you're trying to get people to buy a car. You have to try and get under the skin of the man or the woman who is talking to you about buying the car. You want to figure out if they're looking for status or if you want to figure out if they're looking for something practical and if they're looking for economy.

Those are the things that will determine whether you present a Toyota Camry to them or a Toyota Corolla or a Mercedes-Benz or AG wagon. So you have to be consultative. You have to ask all these sorts of questions. Then another thing that you have to consider when you're dealing with complex sales is that you're going to have to gain incremental commitments. When it comes to simple sales scenarios or commodities. You can get the deal done on the spot, but for complex sales you have to think in terms of smaller commitments.

So back to the house selling example. The first commitment might be finding out if the person is interested in having a meeting where you go to the person's office or the person comes over to your own real estate firm so that you can ask them a couple of questions. That is an incremental commitment. They have committed to a meeting. After that, another commitment could be site inspections where they go and they look at houses.

Another commitment after that might be for them to make an offer on a property and you can see how things move from one small commitment to another to another. It's the same thing with a car. If somebody reaches out to you from the Instagram handle because you sell cars, the first commitment might be to try and figure out if they're interested in buying the car first of all or not. This can happen over the chat. The next commitment can be to get them to come to the lot to look at a possible number of cars.

Well, rather let me take a step back. The next commitment could be to get them in the chat to commit to certain makes or models or years of cars that they are interested in. At this stage, you guys will be sending pictures back and forth. After you have narrowed down on a couple of models that they might be interested in, then the next incremental commitment might be for them to come to the car lot, wherever your car lot is, so that they can test drive a couple of models so you can see how things are going to be moving forward in smaller increments.

If you're dealing with simple commodities like bananas, a goosey or groundnuts, you have to close the deal in one step. The chances are if the person goes away from your stand now, the person is not going to come back to want to buy your yams or your groundnuts or your egucci. But if you are selling cars or houses, it is going to be through a series of incremental commitments. It is perfectly normal for the person to show up today for you guys to have a chat and for the person to leave and then come back later or make another phone call or send an e-mail.

And then when you're dealing with complex sales, you're going to have more decision makers to consult with. If it's a simple sale like commodities that I've described, groundnuts, a goosey yams, you are typically dealing with the person who is standing directly in front of you. But for complex sales, the person might have to discuss with his husband, a wife, a lawyer, mother-in-law, father-in-law, pastor, any other kind of stakeholder or Co decision maker that the person needs.

So chances are somebody is not going to buy an expensive house without consulting with their spouse, except if they're so rich that the amount of money involved is a rounding error and is something is significant to them. But for the average customer they are going to deal with, they're not going to buy a car or a house without consulting with the spouse. The husband will want to know the wife's opinion before he buys the car.

The wife want to know the husband's opinion if they're buying it as investment property. The husband will definitely want to know the wife's opinion if he's buying the house so that they can live there and raise a family together. So there are more decision makers that you have to consult with. It is not just one person that you have to discuss with before you close the deal. So for simple sales scenarios, on the other hand, the converse is the case.

It's going to be a short sale cycle. You can agree to buy the thing today, maybe tomorrow. The negotiation taxes are going to be sharp. You tell the people to either take it or leave it, and they will decide now whether they want it or not. There's going to be very little need for multiple meetings. You show up one or two times and you buy. Decisions are most likely going to be made on the spot. There's going to be very little need for any back and forth and you probably are not going to have to consult with too many people.

So the reason why this is the key dynamic that we should be looking at when it comes to selling, are you in a simple sales scenario or a complex sales scenario is this is because this key dynamic determines how it is that you're going to sell. So it's not necessarily about what kind of role or industry that you're in, but it's about the context that you're in. So that determines whether you are going to be consultative and try and book multiple meetings and take things nice and slow and get by in, or whether you're going to go for sharp negotiation tactics and start pricing and get the person to buy it.

Now in the next episode, we're going to look at details of sales roles and industries and you're going to see the interplay of simple and complex sales scenarios. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I will catch you at the next recording.