SBWA — Selling By Wandering Around

I thought it time to resurface a variant of that theme: SBWA, Selling By Wandering Around. I’m constantly amazed by how little sales professionals to this.

Too many sales people call on the same people, asking the same question, “Can I sell you anything today?” The more solutions oriented sales people will question needs and priorities, but make the same mistake of calling on the same people in the same accounts.

It’s time for sales people to start wandering around in their accounts. I often tell people, if you normally turn right when you walk in the front door, next time turn left. You will discover entirely new things about your account and their needs.

Recently, I wrote about the “Big Idea.” The example I cited there was an example of how a client discovered entirely new needs and applications for their products by talking to different people in the organization.

We decided to ignore this and went to talk to manufacturing people to learn what they did. Making a long story short, this client ultimately found their biggest market opportunity was not in engineering, but in manufacturing, helping to test products in the production process and at the end of the line. Unless we, and a few brave sales people, hadn’t turned left instead of normally turning right, we never would have discovered this opportunity.