The Point

Last week I attended a webinar run by the TAS Group called ‘Enabling Social Enterprise Through Sales’. The focus of the event was to look at how much time sales professionals are spending on various social media sites and what kinds of activities they are engaged in.  If you are interested in experiencing the content for yourself, you can view the webinar on demand (registration required) or view the slides on slideshare (no registration).

One of my favorite sales blogs is, ‘The Sales Blog’ written by S. Anthony Iannarino. He is a sales executive and coach that believes in the value sales people can add during the buying process.  Since we are mentioning him this week on the Flip Side, I’d also like to extend our congratulations to him on recently hitting a milestone 1,000 posts.

As a buyer, have you ever noticed how much effort sales teams put into the training, strategy, and education of their people? If you type "sales training" into Google, you get well over FOUR MILLION hits. In order to put that figure into perspective, typing "procurement training" into the same search engine pulls only 235,000 results.

This week’s Flip Side post takes us to a sales article on ‘Selling to the Four Temperament Styles’ by John Boe.

This week on The Flip Side, we look at a blog post from SalesTrainingAdvice.com on The Most Underutilized Strategic Advantage. With such a promising title, the answer to the question must be something big – huge even to be THE MOST underutilized strategic advantage.

As the economy starts to rebound and leverage positions change, becoming a ‘customer of choice’ is being discussed in many procurement conference rooms. You would think that us sitting around discussing how to be the most fabulous customers possible would be music to a sales person’s ears!

Last week, I attended a ValueSelling Associates webinar called ‘Closing the Gap: Your Sales Process and their Buying Process.” In this event, VSA looked at the differences in timing and expectations between the supplier and buyer sides of the procurement process. Two types of value come from this kind of event.

• We get a window into Sales’ perception of procurement professionals and our process, and
• We learn how to improve our performance by hearing which parts of our process may be preventing us from accessing potential value or innovation.

In this week’s Flip Side coverage, I want to take you through a sales-oriented post from a blog called The Pipeline on ‘Selling to Procurement’. The Pipeline is written by Tibor Shanto, Founder and President of Renbor Sales Solutions Inc., and creator of Objective Based Selling.

As this week’s guest sound bite in our PI Window on Business Blog Talk Radio update, we heard from S. Anthony Iannarino, author of The Sales Blog, talking about what sales people need to do in order to create recognizable value for their clients.

People do business with people they like. We have all heard that phrase before and know it holds a great deal of weight. In this economic climate, the financials have to be the key driver in decision making. However, with that being comparable, the strength of the relationship will seal the deal.

The process is basic and simple but since not everyone does this, it can be quite a differentiator. This has a lot to do with procurement since you have internal customers and also constantly working with suppliers and salesmen.  

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
― John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (1834 - 1913)

This week's trip to the Flip Side is a humorous - and visual - look at the many perceptions of sales people. We came across an image last week that represents how sales people are perceived by their friends, customers, and society as a whole as well as the way they see themselves versus what their job is really like. We also had our undercover sales advisor, “The Sales Guy” interpret the reality of the situation. Visuals are a great way to communicate subtle differences, and this will allow you to laugh as well as to gain some additional insight into the complex, multi-faceted world of being a sales account rep.

Without further ado, here is the picture:

This week’s Flip Slide notes are from ValueSelling Associates, a sales training and professional skills development organization. The audio from the webinar as well as the slides are available on their website.

As with the other content we cover on The Flip Side, the message of this sales training session is absolutely applicable to a procurement audience. In fact, if once I’ve shared the list of the ‘5 Keys’ with you, it doesn’t even really look like advice for sales.

Last week, MyPurchasingCenter hosted a webinar called, ‘Innovating With Suppliers To Cut Costs, Support Growth, And Navigate An Uncertain Economy’. The main speaker was from Vantage Partners, a Boston-based management consulting firm specializing in negotiation skills development. We don’t usually cover events presented to a buy-side audience on The Flip Side, but this particular event shared a significant amount of supplier perspective on innovation between buyer and supplier.

You can view/listen to the event on demand on MyPurchasingCenter's site.

As part of Buyers Meeting Point's ‘Flip Side’ resource, we often read sales blogs and attend sales webinars to take the trends we see and apply them for the benefit of supply management and procurement professionals. A recent post by S. Anthony Iannarino, author of ‘The Sales Blog’ covered the foundational and secondary skill sets possessed by most successful sales people, then went on to describe the additional competencies that will be required for ‘The New Consultative Salesperson’.

In the Flip Side, Buyers Meeting Point takes knowledge from sales training, webinars, blogs, and whitepapers and flips them so supply management professionals can apply the information to their own challenges. Negotiation is one of those areas where this concept works particularly well. After all, negotiating is negotiating, regardless of which side of the table you are on. This week we will hear from ‘The Accidental Negotiator,’ Dr. Jim Anderson about negotiation.

On January 31st “The Sales Guy”, BMP’s undercover sales advisor, was the featured speaker on the Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Group Call. We recommend that you become a member of the SS&P Group if you aren’t already.

If you are interested in learning more about The Sales Guy and the insights he has offered through Buyers Meeting Point, you can read our Posts from the Flip Side or submit a question to him to be answered in our blog. You can also listen to the call recording on demand.

Do you have a question you'd like to ask The Sales Guy? Submit it here and we'll track him down and get an answer. All answers will be shared anonymously on 'The Point' blog so we can all join in the conversation.

In our past conversations with The Sales Guy, he reminded us of the important role the calendar plays in a supplier’s sales strategy and execution. So as we start a new calendar year, we caught up with TSG to see what we should expect our sales counterparts to be focused on right now…

Last week I attended a webinar called “Negotiating To Win: Strategies And Tactics For Sales Professionals”, presented by ValueSelling Associates. Even though the intended audience was sales professionals, negotiating is negotiating, regardless of which side of the table you are sitting on. As a reminder, if you like the “Flip Side” perspective, check out our sales blog and resource directory for our favorite sources of sales information.

This week’s trip to The Flip Side is brought to us through a webinar held last week by the TAS Group, a sales methodology and training company. The event was called “Maximizing Renewal Revenue – Continuing to Deliver Value to Earn the Renewal”. Just so we’re all on the same page, Renewal revenue is sales speak for what we consider awarding business to an incumbent supplier.