Filling the Sales Pipeline for 2015: Seeing beyond stated buying criteria

Keeping your sales pipeline filled for the remainder of the year and beyond requires more than hard work and longer hours. It requires a fundamental change of approach. Your sellers must progress from servicing demand (based on what you sell) to creating demand (based on how you sell).

Sellers create demand when:

• they’re able to tie what they sell to important customer priorities
• they can generate new ideas that accelerate existing customer initiatives
• they know how to motivate change agents within the customer organization to assist them with their sales mission.

Creating demand is how sales organizations build a more robust pipeline — one that leads to bigger deals in less time.

One key difference between order takers and demand creators is the ability to see beyond what the customer believes he needs. Holden research, compiled through an assessment of more than 50,000 deals, indicates that almost 70 percent of sellers are focused only on stated buying criteria.

Demand creators are able to see well beyond expressed buying criteria, creating demand that the customer himself did not know existed. How are they able to accomplish this?

It starts with replacing tactical, short-term behavior with strategic habits — the kind of habits that add a layer of organizational selling onto the always necessary personal selling.

These habits include:

• Leveraging organizational politics — How can your sellers gain political alignment? Are they calling on the right people? Who are the change agents that can further the seller’s agenda within the customer organization?
• Delivering unexpected value — Show how your company’s offerings can accelerate already prioritized initiatives.
• Formulating a compete strategy — Demonstrate to the prospect how working with your organization addresses their own strategic imperatives.

These winning sales habits form the foundation of the Holden Adaptive Platform^TM, which helps sellers adopt and apply the behaviors that turns them into demand creators.

Want to learn more? Download “Filling the Sales Pipeline for 2015: Instilling game-changing sales habits,” our free white paper that outlines the winning habits that change the game for sellers, transforming them into demand creators who generate their own sales opportunities.