SOCIAL STYLE is known for working “well with others.” The SOCIAL STYLE approach to building communication and relationship skills provides complimentary learning and skills to a range of training initiatives, including other programs that support leaderships development, engagement building, sales process and many more. Our SOCIAL STYLE Connections whitepaper series addresses these advantages to help L&D and HR leaders build a comprehensive curriculum of programs. Selling Beyond the Product is a model that enhances sales success by providing strategies to become credible advisors to their customers. SOCIAL STYLE® enhances the effectiveness of the process by highlighting the importance of customers’ and salespeople’s unique work Styles.
SOCIAL STYLE and Versatility Enhance Selling Beyond the Product
Selling Beyond the Product works because it adds value to the sales equation; salespeople become transformative consultants who partner with customers to not only solve problems but to help them see issues in a new way. The critical first phase to this process is Engaging: Salespeople need to be seen as credible and trustworthy. However, customers of different SOCIAL STYLEs have different criteria for determining whether someone is credible and trustworthy. Therefore it is critical that salespeople use Versatility to tailor their approaches to customers’ Styles.
Six-Stage Process
Selling Beyond the Product utilizes a six-stage process of Engaging, Listen and Learn Discovery, Guided Discovery, Confirming, Recommending and Committing.
- Engaging: The purpose of Engaging is to build credibility and trust in you and your ability to rapidly add value to the customer and their challenges.
- Discovery (Listen and Learn, Guided): Discovery encompasses two elements: Listen and Learn Discovery, and Guided Discovery. The purpose is to thoroughly understand the customer’s situation and needs from his or her perspective.
- Confirming: The purpose of Confirming is to ensure that you and the customer have a shared understanding of the customer’s situation and needs before you propose a solution, to tell the customer’s story from their perspective, and to lay the foundation for your recommendation.
- Recommendation: Here, as a salesperson, you would describe your solution within the customer’s context and show the customer a clear path to solving their problem and achieving their expected results.
- Committing: The purpose of Committing is to ensure a comfortable and efficient transition from the customer’s consideration of your recommendation to a commitment to take action and move onto implementation.
Summary
This whitepaper examines how the Selling Beyond the Product model can be enhanced by SOCIAL STYLE and Versatility to create a successful customer-seller relationship. It does this by focusing on customer needs. SOCIAL STYLE is a powerful interpersonal skills model that recognizes and appreciates the differences in people’s work Styles, and Versatility helps salespeople to improve their customer relationships and create demand for their products and services. It also looks at how the model can be applied to popular workplace programs such as SPIN Selling, Emotional Intelligence, and Crucial Conversations. The whitepaper concludes that combining the Selling Beyond the Product model with SOCIAL STYLE and Versatility can help salespeople to become more successful by building meaningful, trusted advisor-type relationships with their customers.
Next read this blog on Selling Beyond the Product.