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Six Greatest Ideas for Selling Big Ticket
Items - Business to Business

Introduction

If you sell complex products to business, there is a right and a wrong way of going
about it. Or, rather, there are some processes, evolved over time by professional
salespeople, to help you on your way. These processes form the ideas in this section.
After all you cannot build the business of your dreams without taking orders. So
learn professional selling by following the techniques in Ideas 52 and 53. First let's
check on the definition of 'big ticket selling.'

Idea 48 - Sell a solution to a problem or an opportunity

I once worked with a team who were planning a sales campaign to persuade a major
telecommunications company to buy public exchanges (or switches) from their com-
pany rather than from any of a group of competitors. The planning team was, need-
less to say, very senior in the selling organisation. In order to get a feel for aballpark
figure, I asked the sales director what the initial order would be worth. 'Oh,' he said
cheerfully, 'The first order will be about £280 million, but the total deal over three
years will amount to the thick edge of £1 billion.' Truly this was big ticket selling,
and I was in some awe of a team that would take on such a task. Remember, if they
lost, they would get nothing and the company would almost certainly have to close
the factories geared up to make the products.

On another occasion I sat in on a meeting where a salesman sold a manager a
Web site and the expertise to set it up and keep the site up to date. At its lowest this