That’s right, not what do you want but what does your client want from your salespeople?

It matters because the most important factor in business to business sales is not price. It’s not (six sigma or whatever else) quality. It isn’t innovative features. It’s not the ability to deliver total solutions. It’s you – the salesperson. 

The salesperson is the most important factor in business customer purchasing decisions.

Most salespeople think they know what the customer wants. Some actually do know because they have taken the trouble to find out. A couple of times I’ve seen books that are based on substantive research (rather than anecdote or individual experience) and which give a helping hand to the process.

One such is Howard Stevens’ book: ‘Achieve Sales Excellence.’ It is touted as the biggest research effort into sales since the work that led to the SPIN Selling ® methodology (also one of the few I like).

He starts with three questions:

What qualities define sales excellence?
What capabilities define the highly effective sales professional?
What are the characteristics of a world-class sales force?

He concludes with seven ‘rules’ for sales excellence based on what customers actually said during 80,000 interviews with business to business customers.

You must be personally accountable for our desired results
You must understand our business
You must be on our side

These are the big ones. But there have to be seven and so here are the other four:

You must bring us applications (i.e. deliver real value in the specific context)
You must be easily accessible
You must solve our problems
You must be innovative in responding to our needs.

I won’t try to compress the whole book into this entry or (on this occasion) expand the above points - but suffice to say that it is an exceptional book that points to actual customer demands that have been correlated with buying behaviour.

Oh yes, and he goes on to outline the eight questions for identifying world-class sales organisations. I’ll return to that one.