Three principles for selling in a recession...

Ted Higgins, Vice President, The Forum Corporation has posted a terrific white paper on the web on selling in a "tough economy." I'd like to share his advice now that we are selling in a recession.�

Here are the three principles he advises to be true to for success:

1. Be a true business consultant for your customer. Talk
business strategy with your customers. Show how your
offering advances their strategy. Create solutions that solve your customers problems. Customers expect solutions that support and drive their central business strategies. Talk results with customers. Show how your offering can positively affect customers key performance metrics. Identify the appropriate metrics and create a compelling case for your solution. Be innovative. Increase credibility as a trusted adviser by bringing to the table innovative, highly differentiated solutions that respond to customers unique business challenges. Customers value new ideas and insights from your experience with issues like theirs.

2. Do your homework. Know more, be more connected than your customerand turn that knowledge into value. More than ever before, customers want insight. Salespeople must invest time and energy in researching their customers own customers, markets, competitors, employees, and challenges. Go beyond asking good questions about the customers situation. In a recession, when competition is at its fiercest, salespeople need to know much more before the call, so they can prepare insights to share with the customer during the callinsights that turn into meaningful actions after the call. Before getting in front of the customer, salespeople must know the answers to questions (or at least have formed opinions) about the customer's vision, own customers, competitors, strengths, and weaknesses.
So much information is available in the public domain that asking the customer to explain it to you is a waste of his or her time.

3. Focus on results and relationship. In these tough
economic times your customer is focused on results. You
and your organization are focused on results. It is important to enhance both the customer relationship and results. Beating your customer in the short term may provide short-term results, but it is destructive in the client retention and growth game. Losing to your customer is one of the quickest ways to get sales managements attention. Those that balance beating and losing do so by persisting in seeking a solution that involves their customer in a search for innovative answers to tough questions, converting opposition to mutual understanding, andin extremely tough situationsasserting their own needs and encouraging the customer to do the same.

Download the entire white paper

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