You have to provoke your customer! This is what I’m learning from some interesting articles and discussing quite often with my sales colleagues. As I already mentioned in my previous articles, during this period of crisis everything became extremely difficult: from having financing and loans to setup new strategy for properly addressing the market while avoiding extra costs.
It’s a must to be more prepared than some years ago, mediocrity is not acceptable anymore. In every performed activity we must reach the excellence.
Today, as a matter of fact, it’s really hard to close deals and when you reach the goal to sell something you have to fight against poor margins and financing requests quite often impossible to satisfy. So the questions are: how should I approach my customers now? How could I convince them to buy something while they are always telling you that they don’t have money?
One solution is just what I say before: we have to provoke our customers. How? Just deeply analyzing them in order to find where they problems are and propose a proper solution. This could be related to an existing problem or a potential one that could occur if nobody takes actions. It’s not easy, I know, but in this way we can have some chances to close some deals.

A second important point that must be taken into consideration while dealing with this sales approach is related with whom we should organize meetings. If we want to be really effective, we need to involve people with top positions. In this way, we have someone who is directly affected by the problems we identified and of course can manage an extra budget.
Of course before doing this we have to prepare ourselves carefully, trying to retrieve as much as information as possible from the customer, by interviewing lower levels of the organization.

My last comment for this issue is the following: even if this sales approach is recommendable in difficult times, it’s not the only one. It depends on which market we are addressing. For the market I’m dealing with, telecoms, I’m sure it’s good together with a proper solutions portfolio. For other markets, maybe we should think more about something focused on product features and with a value for money approach.