I’ve never sold a computer or licensed software in my career. I’ve never sold consulting services in my career. Frankly, it’s really difficult selling those things.
Take licensed or even SaaS software products. You have to know about things like GUI’s, software architectures, installation, coding, memory utilization, caching, pipelining, and all sorts of little details. You have to be able to discuss each transaction and how each operation works, and why you chose to implement things the way you have—and why it’s superior to other approaches. To be effective, you have to know your competition’s products as well. You have to understand the challenges of your customer’s attempts to develop a software program itself. To sell it, you have to be prepared to work with your customer’s programmer’s and developers discussing things at a detailed level that is beyond my capabilities—or at least my interests.
While, I’ve never sold a computer, licensed software or even consulting services in my career, I or the teams I’ve managed have accepted orders and shipped $ billions of those products.
Instead of selling those products, we focused on creating a vision and selling the vision to the customer.
Selling a vision is very different than selling a product, actually I find it’s much easier.
A vision is all about a customer. The customer sees themselves at the center of each vision. They see what they could be achieving through the vision you create.
A vision starts with the challenges or problems in the customer’s current business. It’s about opportunities they may be missing. It moves on to what they could be achieving and what that means to them. It focuses on the impact it has on them and their business. It focuses on their dreams and what they want to achieve–both personally and with their organizations.
A vision engages the customer, they own it for themselves.
You’re probably thinking, “That vision stuff is all great, but my quota is on products!”
Here’s where the magic comes in, your products and services are the vehicle through which they achieve their vision. It’s through buying your computer, software, consulting services, or what ever it is you sell that they can implement and execute their plan.
Yes, they’ll want to learn about the product, but the context is very different. It’s never about the features, functions, feeds and speeds, what your competitors have that yours doesn’t. The context through which they understand your product is in how it helps them achieve their vision.
Yes, they’ll look at competition, they’re obligated to do this. But your competitors are competing on their product features, functions, feeds, and speed. They haven’t created and helped the customer own the vision.
The customer wants to buy the vision. They can only buy the vision from you, because you are the only one that has the road map for achieving it.
The customer buys the vision, you ship the product and services that enable them to achieve it.
It’s so much easier selling the vision, why waste your time on the product?
Great article! I realized when reading that I do much of this unconsciously.
After 35 years in sales I still find myself slipping into the ‘features” part of the sale and spending too much time there. This helped remind me that as professional salespeople, we need to understand their vision and show them our services / products will make that vision a reality.
Thanks again, Dave!
Tim: We all tend to slip. Thanks for the honesty! Regards, Dave
Thanks for the article. At Leads Indeed we try to employ the ideas that are mentioned here. We feel it helps us to really connect with our clients. Once you do that, I feel it truly helps to figure out what will work best for them.
Richard Benchimol
Thanks Richard!
Hi David! Such an insightful article. I think that the principle of selling a vision to customers makes a lot of sense, pretty much similar to defining the benefits they can achieve in getting your products and services than focusing on the details the products have above the rest.
At Tenfold, we also apply these action points to establish a strong connection with our customers, and lead them to do the same to their own sets of clients. 🙂
Thanks for joining the discussion Brooke, great points!