Youvend personal experience: IT product sales guidelines

Dear friends,

As promised, we will share our experience in creating a b2b-service for automation of purchases on the pages of our blog. And today we want to touch on a topic that, in our opinion, is relevant for many young businesses.
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For three months of work, we were able to connect 450 suppliers and more than 300 restaurants to Youvend, including such large chains as Ginza, Mi Piace, Sushishop, Healthy Food. 3 managers and our sales principles, which we actively apply, helped us to do this. What are these principles and how do they work? Just about this will be our today's article.



Youvend has two sets of principles: one for the personal development of the seller, others for the organization of the entire sales department. Today we will talk only about the principles for sellers. Here they are:

1) Speak as simple as possible. Be on the same wavelength with the interlocutor.
2) Make up in your head a psychological portrait of the interlocutor and try to understand him.
3) Create demand: find out from the buyer about his problems and immediately offer their solution using your product.
4) If you are told no, keep up your business - keep selling. Working with objections, along with the refusal, you can hear the problems of the buyer.
5) Think in a "win / win" manner. Try to help the person and do not sell him if you cannot help him.

Let us briefly develop each of the principles.

1) Speak as simple as possible. Be on the same wavelength with the interlocutor.

Everything is obvious in words, but personally we see that there are only a few of those who do this in the field of sales. Recall any incoming call to your phone. Often, even if the service is interesting to you, the operator cannot answer a single question that goes beyond the text that he sees in front of him.
We adhere to the principle that our sellers should become the buyer's mirror. If they communicate with an intelligent person, they are intelligent, if the interlocutor is simple and even boorish - they can afford to communicate in the same way, but in moderation.

2) Make in your head a psychological portrait of the interlocutor and refer to his subconscious.

It is necessary to clearly understand what motives your buyer has and what motivates him in life. In fact, everything is decided by the basic psychological characteristics. For example, when we connected suppliers, we realized that decision makers want to get quick and cheap benefits. More of them in our product was not interested in anything. So it was this time that it was necessary to press, which our salesmen did.
Any purchase is made by a person emotionally. If, subconsciously, a person decided to buy, then he will consciously come up with any rationale for his action.

3) Create demand: find out from the buyer about his problems and immediately offer their solution using your product.

A typical mistake of many sellers is the listing of product properties. Especially when the interlocutor is silent at this time, so it seems that he is listening. In fact, he is waiting for the seller to finish in order to refuse the offer. The seller must devote all his time to finding problems for the buyer, or he must himself intentionally create these problems. So you need to start with questions.
It's one thing when we stand behind the counter and a buyer comes to us for fresh vegetables - they already have a demand to buy vegetables. Another thing is when we go with the proposal to those people who still do not know about their needs. And this is 99% of sales of IT products. Consider what problems a potential buyer may have and ask him about them. If he agrees with the problem - you can certainly sell him your product.

4) If you are told no, keep up your business - keep selling. Working with objections, along with the refusal, you can hear the problems of the buyer.

“No, thank you” - this is the most frequent response of buyers of any product during cold sales. The seller, who is not afraid of the word "no", starts asking questions. When the interlocutor begins to object and prove that your product does not suit him and does not solve his problems, you just have to listen and write down what problems your customers have. This is very valuable information.

5) Think in a "win / win" manner. Try to help the person and do not sell him if you cannot help him.

We emphasized the latter in Stephen Covey in his “seven skills of highly effective people”. Not worth yet to sell people unnecessary things to them. Better to leave your karma clean. Tune your salespeople to their goal is to help people. And if you can not help a person, admit it, write down his real problems and phone number. Believe me, if you come back after a while with a decision, he will be glad to hear you.

And finally, two more points: do not forget to highlight the best aspects of your product and talk primarily about them (for example, you have an excellent interface), and improvise, because 80% of success depends on improvisation. All these principles should be applied simultaneously with each other and in no case separately.

Let us give an example from our experience: initially for Youvend we gathered a very small base of restaurants that were ready to work with us. They told us about their problems and wanted us to solve them.

After that we started to connect suppliers. Using all the sales principles that we talked about, we made up the basic phrase with which we started calling, and this phrase did its job very well:

“Hello, My name is Vasily and I represent Youvend. We have more than 100 restaurants that are now working with us. These restaurants want to find new suppliers and new products for more favorable conditions. Tell me, do you need new clients and contracts? ”

Usually after that, we were switched to leadership. We repeated the same to them, and they became our partners quite simply and quickly.

Look, in one phrase, we see all the skills: We speak simply and in deed. We immediately raised the problem “Do you need new customers?” At the same time, we showed our best side: “100 restaurants”. We immediately prepared a rather capacious phrase so that people simply would not have the opportunity to say “No” to us. If we were told “No”, we asked only one question: “Do you really don’t need new customers?”. Of course, further communication could take what acceptable path and we had to improvise. But the most important thing is that our proposal is beneficial for everyone, so we manage to talk with most of the interlocutors.

Why we believe that our experience will be useful for Habr's readers?

- First, we have seen that the seller (we will use this word, instead of the usual “manager”), who has mastered these skills, starts selling 3-4 times better.
- Secondly, we noticed that these skills give an advantage not only in business, but also in personal life.
- Thirdly, selling products in IT is an intellectual challenge and we hope that our experience will be interesting and we will have something to discuss in the comments.

We want to improve our sales technologies and share our experience, so we will be very grateful for constructive criticism and your achievements in this area.



In the next post we will tell about the command principles that we apply in sales. Successful sales and stay tuned!