.....Principles of Partnership Selling

1. Partnering

• Distinguish between peddler and partnership approaches
• Define benefits for partnering
• Apply skills and tools to facilitate long-term partnerships
• Provide value over and above product.
• See the sales process from the customer’s point of view.
• Identify four personality styles and how to work best with each.
• Identify five buyer roles.
• Create rapport with customers through “mirroring” techniques

2. Value Profiling

• Understand why customers buy and what customers value.
• Develop questions for your value profile to address the needs and values of customers.
• Apply the value profile to match your own products and services to customer-defined value.
• Develop and “up-front close” to ensure that both your time and your customer’s time is well spent.
• Focus your presentation to say, “Here’s what you said you wanted.”

3. Developing Benefits

• Know the difference between facts, features, benefits, and “partners benefits”.
• Tailor benefits to specific customers.
• Identify benefits for your own products or services.
• Use a formula for developing and presenting benefits.
• Present a product in terms of benefits that answer the buyer question, “What’s in it for me?”

4. Presenting Solutions

• Construct partnership presentations that involve your customers.
• Identify and evaluate the elements of an effective presentation.
• Plan for the logistics of a presentation.
• Conduct a presentation with appropriate benefit statements to meet the prospect’s needs.
• Understand obtaining and using proofs and other materials to back up your presentation.
• Design and practice the presentation using literature, visual aids, and support material.
• Make a confident and persuasive presentation that will close the sale.

5. Handling Objections

• Recognizing objections by type.
• Determine which objections are productive to answer and which are not.
• Form appropriate responses to objections using a four-step procedure.
• Handle objections positively.
• Be confident in handling objections.
• Use objections to move the sale along.

6. Closing

• Understand what closing is and what it is not.
• Gauge how well you have carried out the whole process by your customer’s readiness to close.
• Recognize when the customer is ready to make a decision.
• Use trial closes to define closing opportunities.
• Develop closing objectives that meet both the needs of your customer and your need to make the sale.
• Develop a variety of approaches that facilitate customer decisions.

7. Putting It All Together

• Apply the core skills that you have been learning throughout the program.
• Practice your own Action Plan for your CSO through role playing.
• Act as a key decision-maker for one of your task force member’s role-play.
• Work in a team to aid, observe, and critique.