The Philosophy of Sales.
Convincing a potential customer to buy from your company is an interesting phenomenon. Especially in enterprise business to business sales. These are sales that start in the five figures and can even go into the millions.
Of course, the potential customer has a problem that they are looking to solve. Your company offers one of the potential solutions. The interesting thing to note is that the prospect does not have a choice whether to buy or not, as they need to solve the problem. The more pressing the problem, the less freedom they have.
The question is, will they buy from you?
And so, it boils down to creating the trust that you can achieve a solution to the given problem. That you have done similar work before, and that the price and what you are selling match well with the buyer’s mindset.
After that, you simply give your offer and let the arrow fly.
This is where the philosophical part of sales comes in.
You actually have no control over whether the customer will buy from your or someone else. You can give your offer and then wait, and sometimes you will win, and sometimes you will lose. No matter how hard you try to win, you will lose some bids.
And so, it is a much wiser approach to focus on the process and not the results. This is because the process is something over which you can have a lot of control in. You can create your presentation, choose which points to highlight, spend extra time consulting with the customer on their issues, and so on.
But, once the price and proposal are out, you better stop caring. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
You should be happy that you gave it your best shot and that you had the opportunity in the first place. The rest is irrelevant. That’s a great controllable internal goal in sales and a way to a satisfying career.