Changing B2B Marketplace Calls for New Sales Skills

Author: Richard Adhikari / Source: E-Commerce Times

There are three key moments when salespeople can maximize the value in a customer relationship instead of allowing it to leak out, according to Corporate Visions, which announced a new sales skills program on Thursday.

Those three turning points occur during deal negotiations, when securing customer renewals, and introducing strategic price increases, the company said.

“Traditional negotiations training programs have focused heavily on deal negotiations,” said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and research officer at Corporate Visions, “so they’ve covered the first of the three areas.”

Sales Process Evolution

Certain egregious sales behaviors — including indiscriminate discounting to secure a deal — have led both companies that bought training and those that offered it to believe focusing on negotiations was sufficient, “with documented payback in reduced discounting and increased deal profitability,” Riesterer told CRM Buyer.

With the sales, purchase and usage process evolving into more of a Products as a Service experience, he said, “the pressures and the opportunity have shifted to the other two areas — renewals and price increases.”

Training vendors by and large have not updated their intellectual property or programs to reflect this trend, and enterprises “have been slow to realize the need and potential crated by these situations,” Riesterer pointed out.

“Neither have done the research to realize the psychology of those moments requires new skills and competencies to be effective,” he maintained.

Many of the training programs available in the market focus on general sales strategies or negotiation techniques, noted Cindy Zhou, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Corporate Visions’ Course

For deal negotiations, Corporate Visions’ Capture Value skills program will teach salespeople how to accomplish the following:

• Creatively manage negotiations from a low-power position to create pricing uncertainty in commoditized markets;
• Expand deal size by…

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