How to Sell More: Tools and Techniques from Harvard Business Review

Make the Most of Your Sales Call

By Lynette Ryals

Lynette Ryals is professor of strategic sales and account management at Cranfield University School of Management.

Over the last decade, the world of business-to-business selling has changed beyond recognition. Face-to-face, transactional selling is dead; when customers want to do transactional business, it is far more effective for both buyer and seller to use the Internet or telephone. Increasingly, customers resent having to spend time in sales calls purely to make standard transactions, and some customers are even beginning to measure the cost of spending their time in this way. From the supplier side, sending a salesperson or a team of people is simply too expensive unless they can ...