Smarter Selling: Next generation sales strategies to meet your buyer’s needs – every time

4. Understanding and adapting to buyers

‘Be not disturbed at being misunderstood; be disturbed rather at not being understanding.’

—(Chinese proverb)

Organisational pressures to standardise approaches mean that buyers are sometimes treated as a homogenous group. Worse still, we have seen situations where marketing functions, far removed from the sales front-line, develop sophisticated (and costly) presentations that showcase the seller’s offering and pass these to the sales team for implementation. The sales team are given little choice but to use these presentations in their sales calls despite knowing that such a ‘one size fits all’ approach is unlikely to succeed.

Others will pay more consideration to their buyers, but will make assumptions ...