Common Sense Selling® – An Overview

Sales Mastery, Sales Training
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You’re familiar with the buyer’s process and the traditional seller’s response.  The traditional feature and benefit selling approach has seen its better days and is not effective in complex sales today.  Obviously, if it’s not working it needs to be changed.  So, here’s a sales process that has been proven to work well in over 200 different industries.  Called Common Sense Selling®, it was developed specifically to deal with the buyer’s process and the inefficiencies of traditional selling, and it works!

Here are the steps:

  • Opening Meeting Agreement: Designed to accomplish several important things – set mutual expectations and agendas for the meeting, remove pressure, build trust, and put the salesperson in control of the process.
  • Investigate: Qualify the prospect in terms of their pain, resources, and decision process.
  • Closing Plan: Set expectations for the presentation; find out, before you present your solutions, what would happen if the prospect felt your solutions were a good fit.
  • Present Solutions: Show your prospect how you will eliminate the pain and get agreement to form a business relationship.
  • Implementation: Deliver your solutions as promised.
  • Monitor: Insure you are exceeding their expectations so you can increase your business with your client and get referrals.
  • Evaluate Additional Opportunities: Determine if additional opportunities are available with the client and get referrals.

Common Sense Selling® insures that the following benefits are achieved:

  • A high level of trust is developed and maintained with the buyer.
  • A thorough diagnosis is completed before solutions are presented.
  • The prospect’s buying motives are engaged at an emotional level, as opposed to an intellectual level.
  • The prospect is given freedom of choice; traditional pressure tactics are not used.

Having a good selling process has many benefits for you.  Among them are:

  • You are able to troubleshoot when things go poorly and learn from your mistakes.
  • It’s easy to stay on track and know how you are progressing.
  • You will be more comfortable and obtain better results by following a process instead of winging it.

“A good sales process can turn ordinary mortals into rock stars.”  Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling

Self-Study Assignment:  Do you have a sales process?  Can you list the steps in your process without having to think twice about it?  Does it resemble Common Sense Selling® or is it closer to the traditional Seller’s Process.  If it’s more traditional, consider the benefits of incorporating some new ideas today.