PrintStore’s team attended the B2B-Talks Forum, aimed at sales promotion management.

On Saturday, October 12, the Royal Congress Hotel, Kyiv, hosted the B2B-Talks Forum, aimed at sales promotion management. The sales team of Printstore Group could not fail to miss this event and an opportunity to learn about the new approaches in sales. Moreover, the Forum is the best place where one can gain new knowledge in this field, discuss actual cases with colleagues, get to know new techniques and negotiation strategies, in general, and feel what nowadays creates an “aura” of the science of professional sales, being important for many companies.

Many of you might have faced the following situation, when promoting sales: a call to a potential customer – a commercial proposal – and … long silence. Today, this customary approach in sales does not work any longer, because it is absolutely futile. Many of us, who strongly believe that we are cut out to be in sales, ask ourselves – what I actually did to make a client draw his or her attention to my phone call, and not to end up in the conversation with a potential client with a deadlock like “please, send your commercial proposal to us at info… “

In fact, in order to start a meaningful dialogue, it is necessary to learn to explore more about your customer, and be able to ask the relevant questions. First of all, we have to aim at identifying business processes, understanding them, defining their weak points. In order to increase clients’ confidence and talk to them using the same language, we need to understand the range of issues, topical for the client, and how we may help in performing some current or strategic tasks. This topic was perfectly reported at the Forum by the first speaker.

In the course of B2B negotiations, it is crucial to follow three principles: involvement – visualization – energy; let alone, other three little secrets – recommendation, motivation, and positive attitude, which all were kindly presented to the audience by Maria Kotvitskaya, AGV Company.

One non-standard, mind-blowing approach was offered by Valery Glubochenko, a top-class pilot and a leading sales trainer in the CIS. The topic of his speech was “Technique of false presentation,” which stirred up a huge interest in the room. According to this technique, there are the following steps: to turn on a client, help him realize his problem and identify the criteria for decision-making, after that – to present some solution, and finalize the deal. In reply to the customer’s question “Tell me about your company?” you need to make a “false presentation”, i.e. to talk by veiling details about yourself and at the same time learning as much as possible about the needs of the client. Mr. Golubchenko believes that the key to bigger sales is something what we know about the client, but what is unknown to our competitors. This will allow us being much ahead of our rivals in terms of offering some solutions unique for the customer.

In the end of his report, the audience played the game “Smart”, the point of which was to rent a Smart car to the Presenter at the most expensive price of all other competitors. Having rented a Smart car at a higher price than the starting one, the audience demonstrated its obvious potential in mastering new technologies in leading negotiations and their usage in practice. Bravo!!!

The next speaker at the Forum Alexey Svetlichny, the Vice-President in Development of Kyiv Business School and a founder of the project salesman.ua, talked about irrational behavior. This behavior is typical for most people, due to the psycho-emotional component in a decision-making process. There were outlined some mistakes and the difficulty of making a choice, the formula of changes, the function of discounts. By the way, many of those present at the Forum were stunned with the statement that we have to forget about all discounts!!! As since a person buys a product at a discount, he will never appreciate it at 100%. Thus, we would have to deduct the discount price from the level of a consumer’s satisfaction with the purchased goods. Therefore, any discount should be very carefully used. It would be much better to offer to the customer a product at 100% price, and offer some additional services as a gift. In that case, the level of satisfaction with the purchased goods will be much higher.

Another piece of valuable information regarding negotiations was proposed to the audience by Marina Trepova, the Partner in Siegel Ukraine and the CIS. When it comes to procurement, preparation and planning of negotiations ensure 50% success (you need to learn more about the future client, the project, to foresee various scenarios of negotiations). The speaker asserted that a sharp drop in a price during negotiations (again, discount!!) may affect the negotiation outcome. If you mention a small price in your offer, you either are vulnerable to competition, or have something to hide, waive any allowance in price decrease, and thereby find yourself at a deadlock. The golden rule of any negotiation is not to give up easily; you must be able to convince another side to give you something in return (even if it is a small addition to the contract value).

An interesting report at the Forum – Tactics of sales in consulting – was voiced by Alexander Yakovlev, the founder of Yakovlev and Partners. In sales, it is important to establish “chemical contact”, as usually within only 15 seconds a person realizes, if he buys or not. Since there is a psychological component in sales, it is crucial to show self-confidence (if you don’t visualize your goal, you will never get anything at all!), as well as a “vector of victory.” According to the speaker, the key secret of successful sales is creativity. In fact, consulting means the sale of the air. Actually, this is what was demonstrated by the speaker to the participants: many remembered the tin “the air of the Crimea.” As when selling the “air” one can see the result only after a while, you have to give a ride for your client in a time machine.

Those present at the Forum also appreciated much the report of Natalia Romanenko, the President of ESF Ukraine, about the dynamic communicative triangle (by Thomas). According to it, in the negotiation process a person changes his role from a “rescuer” to a “victim”, then to a “pursuer” and so on. Additionally, there were disclosed some psychological types in making decisions, such as: aggressive, repressive, dominant; – inspiring, influential, manipulator; – commanding (sensitiveness, resentfulness, softness); – structural (viscosity, isolation, stepwise).

In the end of the Forum, the head of Private Ryan was about to explode from excessive information about the new techniques and methods of negotiations, so everyone just needed some timeout to digest what was said…

Apropos, the first thing that we came across on the following Monday at work was an outdated, useless commercial proposal. So having seen it, our fingers involuntarily stretched to the keyboard to press CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Armed with the new ideas, learnt in the Forum, the PrintStore’s team is starting the battle for its clientele from scratch!!!

Best wishes of efficient sales to everyone!))