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Six Greatest Ideas for Selling Big Ticket Items - Business to Business • 79

them out early and by so doing neutralise them or come to a swift conclusion that
you cannot do business with them.

At the end of any business-to-business sales campaign some poor person in the
buying company has to implement what was bought. These people, the users, bear
the pain of the change that any new way of doing things causes, and are responsible
for producing the benefits that the supplier's proposal offered. They are not neces-
sarily the technical people, they are necessarily not the top people, but they are very
important to the selling team as they have to agree that what is being proposed is
achievable and that they will happily take on the implementation tasks. So court
them widely in your target company.

Idea 51 - Sell the right benefits to the right person

Make sure the benefits of your solution are relevant to the person to whom you are
proposing them. You will often see examples of irrelevant benefit selling particularly
if the 'establishing need' part of the selling cycle has been poorly carried out.

A frequent investment that companies make is in improving their distribution
systems. They buy automated warehouses, new fleets of vehicles or new computer
systems but the aim in each case is the same - to physically possess their products
for as short a time as possible. The measure of success of all of these improvements
is the resulting change in stock turnover. This is a ratio of stock held to sales turno-
ver. Some people quote it as the number of times stock is turned over in a year,
others by the number of days stock is held either in vehicles or in a warehouse or
factory. How do you sell this benefit?

When selling to the accountants the experienced salesperson will emphasise the
reduction in the amount of stock held, since that is a relatively concrete outcome
that the company can control.

The same argument expressed to sales directors will lead to despairing cries of,
'But we cannot give our customers what they want in the timescale they require it