Selling With Insights Differentiates Top Sellers

What is Insight Selling?

Insight selling is an advanced-level skill where sales professionals connect their capabilities to a customer’s business issues by identifying blind spots in the customer’s strategy to create added value.

How Selling With Insights Differentiates Sales Professionals

The strategic use of insights at the right time in the right way can truly help sales professionals differentiate themselves.

Learn more about the importance of selling with insights in the following  video

For more information contact us or download the White Paper: Creating Trust With Buyers Through Selling With Insights

By engaging customers in outcome-based discussions that build a sense of urgency sales professionals encourage buyers to think about their business needs in new ways.  They help buyers identify their misperceptions and make the best decisions for their business.

Sales professionals must bring relevant insights and ideas to create value in the buying experience itself rather than just in the solution that they deliver.

If sellers themselves do not become a point of differentiation, they will find themselves responding to a set of requirements defined by the customer, which may be right or wrong for what the customer really needs, and which may or may not reflect the seller’s strengths. They will find themselves competing on price and struggling to differentiate.

The insight-selling method is neither a panacea nor a silver bullet. In the quest to outsmart competitors and, in some circles, outsmart customers, many have lost sight of the fundamental truth of selling: customers want value above all else, and value is much more complex than an insight pitched over the course of one or two meetings.

Insights must be strategically included in a comprehensive, customer-focused selling methodology and seen as one tool in the sales toolkit rather than the entire toolkit itself.

Organisations that successfully adopted an Insight-Selling approach did so because they were aware of the risks and were proactive in managing them.

Risks of Selling with Insights and How to Manage Them

The following examples outline the potential risks your team can encounter during the insight-selling process:

Ignoring the rest of the pursuit

To be truly and wholly effective and differentiated in the eyes of today’s buyers, sales professionals need to create value in the buying experience itself. They must help customers better understand the true nature of a business issue and how best to address it.

It’s not about manipulating or controlling the customer. It’s about building credibility, fostering trust, creating value for the customer while creating opportunities for the sales professional.

Falling for insight traps

Insight traps include:

• Taking action based on assumptions without first validating those assumptions with the buyer
• Losing objectivity during the dialogue
• Insight dumping, or sharing too many insights without pausing to get the buyer’s feedback
• Losing credibility by coming across as manipulative or pushy

Focusing on what has changed and forgetting what hasn’t

What hasn’t changed in the buying and selling landscape is just as important as what has changed.

While buyers are savvy, busy, pressured, risk-averse, and more demanding, they still need guidance to make the best business and personal decisions.

Even though customers have unprecedented access to knowledge, they face the difficulty of sorting through what matters most and finding the value among all options. More information doesn’t always translate into a clearer understanding.

Buyers need sales professionals to accurately diagnose their unique situation and identify the best solution to drive the results they need.

Benefits of Selling With Insights

Those who are at the pinnacle of selling draw from both mastery of the fundamentals of great consultative selling while layering on higher-order consultative skills, such as strategically using insights.

Exceptional sales professionals create value in the buying experience by deepening their customers thinking around the true nature of a business issue and helping them reach their goals.