Steve Gavatorta Group Blog

The Three Time-Tested Fundamentals of Successful Selling

Throughout the years, there have been many books written, techniques developed, and debates conducted about the art of “closing the sale.”

I have read those books and attended many conferences and have found most of them useless, repetitive, old, unrealistic, and full of platitudes. Most of these programs don’t resonate with me because I’ve discovered that the fundamentals of successful selling skills I learned nearly 25 years ago in my first job out of college have survived the test of time. They are just as relevant now as they were then. 

In my first job as a sales representative selling for a consumer packaged goods company, I was taught the three fundamentals of successful selling: Learn, Penetrate, Sell. 

These three simple and effective steps were instilled in me from day one and on every sales call with my managers, who had successfully sold using this model throughout their careers. The key objective of Learn, Penetrate, Sell is to help differentiate yourself from your competition by earning the reputation in the eyes of your customers as valued partners and trusted business advisers with skin in the game when it comes to their success. This enables sales teams to be considered more than just another vendor selfishly selling a product or service with no benefit to the valued customer. In addition, Learn, Penetrate, Sell will show your customers the value you bring to the table and will minimize your chance of getting beaten up on price. In other words, you’re selling ideas and value vs. simply selling a commodity. Let’s look at these three simple, yet powerful, steps. 

Learn – Simply put, the first step of successfully closing a sale is to learn as much about your customer as possible. Understand everything you can about your customer’s needs and, essentially, what keeps them up at night. Is it internal factors like cash flow, sales, profit, customer or patient loyalty? Is it external factors such as competition, market environment, changing dynamics? Most likely, it will cover several areas, but it is your job to discover the issues that are most important to them. 

Penetrate – Secondly, it is crucial that you reach the key decision-maker within your customer’s organization. Too often, sales personnel are content simply calling on a buyer or someone lower on the totem pole when, in actuality, the key decision-maker is several levels up. Penetrating to the key decision-maker also ensures you will know what truly matters to your customer. Again, clearly understanding what keeps the decision-maker up at night is the key foundation for building your sales plan. And those concerns may be very different for your lower-level contact than they are for the true decision-maker. 

Sell – Obviously the key point is to sell, right? Well, yes, but the question to ask is: “What are you selling?” If what you are selling doesn’t solve the problem of what keeps your customer up at night or isn’t geared to the key decision-maker, then what you are selling is meaningless. Unfortunately, what most sales executives do is sell what they want or what they think their customer needs. The result: a lost sale. The key to the Sell step is to “match up” what your customer’s needs are (based on what is keeping them up at night) with what you have in your arsenal for solving that problem. Once this intersection is identified, met, and solved, the degree of your sales success will grow exponentially. 

This is what makes the previous two steps, Learn and Penetrate, so vital. Your hard work in learning about your customer’s needs and penetrating to the key decision-maker provides you with the input you need to build their tailored and relevant plan. It shows your customer that you not only did your homework, but you heard them, understood, and built a program that meets their needs by solving their problem. Let’s face it – good sales people solve problems for their customers, not create or ignore them. Most sales reps fail because they have not identified the problem and, therefore, don’t supply the solution the customer is seeking. It doesn’t matter if you are selling a consumer good, a car, a pharmaceutical product or a concept, if you can effectively marry your capabilities with your customers most pressing needs, you will close the sale. 

I am a believer that all great truths and successes are built on simple, time-tested principles. In the sales realm, Learn, Penetrate, Sell are those principles.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Selling Skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.