Fundamentally, there are two different kinds of sales situations: Simple and Complex. Some refer to these as “transactional sales” (Simple) and “solution or consultative sales” (Complex). Simple Sales involve the selling most of us are familiar with when purchasing as a consumer, like when we go to a store to buy electronics, appliances, clothes, food, and restaurant meals. As such, we refer to this kind of selling as Business to Consumer or B2C. In these situations, the connection between a product’s features and the buyer’s benefits is pretty obvious, so they don’t need much explaining.
A Complex Sale is the opposite, where the connection between the product features and buyer benefits is not always obvious, even after much explaining. In addition, there are often many people and steps involved in the buying decision. When you are selling a product or service to a company, Business to Business, or B2B selling, you are almost always operating in a Complex Sale situation.
What’s important to note is that the selling process and success factors are different for each kind of sale, and if you want to succeed as a B2B salesperson, you need to know the differences. A customer at a restaurant generally doesn’t need anything more than a suggestion to help them decide what to order, while a business often needs more in-depth information about how a product will solve their problems if they are even aware they have a problem.
Understanding the difference between a Simple Sale and a Complex Sale greatly improves your chances of success. And if you are in a Business-to-Business deal, not knowing the distinction could break you.
The Simple Sale Process
In a Simple Sale, the selling process is as follows:
- Give information
- Ask for the order or the logical next step
If you don’t get the order, you ask what additional information the prospect needs, then repeat the two steps above until you either get a NO or the order. Even if you get another NO, you can still go back and ask if they need more information before making a final decision. We see this kind of sales process plays out every day:
- “We have a sale on fries today. Would you like me to include some with your order?”
- “We won’t be able to keep this item in stock for very long. Would you like to place an order for it today?”
- “I’m guessing you don’t want the risk of being without this policy. Should I start on the paperwork for you?”
I call this way of selling “Clerking,” as it’s what most sellers do in retail, or B2C, sales environment. And to be clear, Clerking can work as a viable selling process in certain situations, such as when:
- Your product or service is very simple
- Your product or service is obviously differentiated—e.g., a very low price
- You have a lot of sales opportunities, many more than you can handle
- There aren’t, or the prospect isn’t aware of, any real alternative options
- The buyer already knows what they want and is already sold
But if you are in B2B sales, you know this isn’t your reality. Yet, in my experience, many B2B sellers act as if they are dealing with a Simple Sale. They give information and then ask for the order. And in fact, my guess is that Clerking wins as much as 20 percent or more of B2B sales. The problem is that there is a high probability of losing the other 80 percent by selling this way.
Complex Sales Start With Creating Awareness
Selling or influencing potential customers in a Complex Sale is all about creating awareness. The idea is this: if you want to get someone to change, you need to increase their awareness of the current state. And selling, at its core, is all about influencing someone to change—change their thinking or change their situation.
You’re probably wondering: in what areas are we trying to increase awareness? There are many: awareness of a particular problem or opportunity, awareness of the importance of addressing a problem, awareness of how one product or company is superior to another, or awareness of the best approach toward making a buying decision.
There are two ways you can try to create awareness: the easy and less effective way, or the harder but considerably more powerful way. The easy way is to simply “tell.” Here are some typical examples of what a seller might say:
- “It’s important for you to consider that a panel of industry experts selected our product as the most innovative offering.”
- “You’ll be interested to learn more about our services because I’ll bet your company is trying to save money this year.”
- “When you make your buying decision, be sure to select a vendor with stability.”
Telling is a salesperson’s “go-to” behavior because it’s easy to do, it’s fast, and we all know how to do it. We see it every day, and because everyone does it, we think it works. It does—in Simple Sales. In a Complex Sale, giving information, or “telling,” is surprisingly a lot less effective at creating awareness. In fact, buyers can perceive it as downright obnoxious.
You Need to Sell Differently
So what is the harder but more powerful way to sell? Asking questions. Telling doesn’t engage the mind as effectively as asking good questions does. Research has shown that people are not good at doing or thinking about more than one thing at a time. Instead, what appears to be multitasking is actually switching back and forth between many tasks or thoughts very quickly. And when people do that, they tend not to be very good at processing either.
We’re often selling to busy executives with lots on their minds, so it’s challenging to get them to focus on our ramblings (a.k.a. “telling”). This means that your exec will likely understand less than half of what you say unless you can somehow get them to focus their attention exclusively on you. And you do that by asking thought-provoking questions instead of just telling them what you think.
Because we’re so often exposed to Clerking as a consumer, we naturally—but mistakenly—assume it’s the way to sell as a B2B sales professional. Instead, to win more predictably and consistently in a Complex Sale, you need to sell differently.
So, if you are ever in doubt whether you are dealing with a Simple Sale or a Complex Sale, ALWAYS start by assuming it’s a Complex Sale. You use a Simple Sale selling process for a Complex B2B Sale at your peril!
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For more advice on effective B2B sales strategies, look for “P3 Selling” on Amazon and other leading online bookstores. https://amzn.to/3wf9KLM Greg Nutter is a management consultant with over thirty-five years of experience and the author of the Amazon Best-Selling Book, “P3 Selling: The Essentials of B2B Sales Success”. He has coached and trained over 1,000 sales professionals and worked with a wide range of companies to develop strategies, programs, processes, and tools to grow revenues, enter new markets, increase sales consistency, maximize selling investments, and develop skilled sales, channel, and management personnel. Learn more at www.P3Selling.com.
By Greg Nutter, Author “P3 Selling”
