If you sell mostly to businesses, you need specialised tools, quite different to ordinary retail.

You must correctly target decision makers within companies; deal with multiple decision makers and extended processes; provide supporting information and details and often make presentations.

Often you'll be dealing with a restricted client pool, maintaining relationships over an extended period of time.

Making a sale can be as much about establishing your credibility as about selling a specific product.

Glide has the tools you need:

• Market databasing and programmed promotions including e-newsletters, newsletters.
• Building a profile for your business that establishes credibility through white papers, articles and media.
• Developing effective high-value presentations.
• Researching potential customer needs now and in the future.

Constant contact

It's usually easier to determine who your potential business buyers are. Typically there are not that many of them compared with retail. This makes the relationship you have with each of them much more important.

With low numbers and high relationship value, it can make sense to database all prospects and program regular contact with them via e-newsletters, newsletters, white papers and the like.

Use information downloads and e-newsletter responses as indicators of approaching sales readiness, to trigger person-to-person contact.

You can use constant contact tools as part of a program to build your credibility with potential customers.

Discovering needs

Usually with business you don't have to dance around the introductions so much: most managers adopt a business-like approach to evaluating prospective suppliers.

Going to businesses telling them about yourself is essential, but you can significantly boost your chances by asking instead of telling: ask what they want, what they think they will need in the future, what's missing from current supplies. It's always so much easier to sell something the prospect not only want, but helped design!

Ask especially about their view of the future. Our OpenViewpoint™ tool is ideally suited to this task. It can lead to you getting a real jump on your competitors, because most businesses will prefer a supplier they have a path forward with ahead of even a cheaper, short-term focused supplier.

You can do this with your existing clients to renew and strengthen your relationship with them; call it a service review.

Move the interface inside

Look closely at the interface between you and your customer, how they actually receive and mesh with your product or service. Then look a little beyond, to how they process the transaction internally.

Could you move the interface a little inside their organisation? For example, perhaps they have to assign internal codes to your paperwork, or break up your delivery into components. Could you assign the codes, break up the order?

If you can achieve this, so that you are integrated inside your client organisation, well – you are no longer a supplier, you are a partner. And you are going to be hard to shift, because none of you client's staff will want to go back to the bad old days when they had to do the work.

Presentations

Another big difference with business clients is the formal presentation, when you get to meet with the decision makers and you have their attention. The presentation is a key component of the structured decision making sophisticated organisations prefer.

A lot rides on a presentation: 30 minutes or so that could pay off in your sales figures every month for years, that could help you break through to other new customers.

Think about how many presentations you get to make; how much goes into them, what each of them represents as a share of your new business for the year, how much rides on them. There's no wonder in industries which cost presentations (like advertising agencies) typical costs can be more than $50,000.

At Glide, we are expert in high-value presentations, including planning, pre-meet material, audio-visual presentations, leave-behind documentation and follow up.

Read more about our high value presentations services.

The underlying similarity

So in what critical way are business and retail clients the same?

They all make the final choice based primarily on emotion.

Sure, businesses want more documentation, more evidence, mire analysis. But when it's done and they are down to the final two or three who all measure up on paper, it matters what how they feel about you, whether they trust you – and whether you have given them a vision of future growth or immediate gain, whatever it is. In other words, the final decision is emotion based.