B2Bridge

A sales person who sells marketing services needs skills such as empathy and he/she must easily adapt to changing circumstances and personalized marketing questions. Skills which are not so easy to detect during a job interview. Solution? Put him under the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scan and see if he is the right person for the job. The fMRI measures brain activity while the person answers certain questions. With the results you can see if the person is good in adaptive selling and has personal skills such as empathy. Sounds like a script of a futuristic movie? No, this is closer to reality than you think.

As a sales person of a medium sized company, I noticed that selling marketing services to large industrial groups is sometimes difficult because giants only want to work with other giants. Even if your offer is from a higher standard and better quality than what big marketing agencies offer. Marketing managers of big companies tend to work with big names in the agency world. Yet, I noticed that a reference of another big company helps to get another big name in your portfolio, but I was wondering what your experiences are to cope with this….

Services are more difficult to sell because they are less tangible than for instance machines that automate a part of your production process. When you are selling a machine to a potential prospect, you can show him what the machine does. He can see the machine working with his own eyes. This is not so easy with services. Years of experience in selling marketing services taught me that the more tangible you can make your service, the easier it gets to sell it. The following things helped me doing that:

Two worlds, one goal

Last week I attended a congress in Rotterdam were sales professionals met purchasing professionals. Especially the session by Professor Jeroen Harink was very interesting for me. He explained the main criteria which purchasers use to evaluate a proposal. The Kraljic matrix is one of their basic instruments. But the marketing services we sell, such as strategic marketing advice, do not fit in that matrix so easily.

It reminded me directly to one of my first encounters with the purchasing department of a big Belgian industrial company. After that meeting it was clear that we did not understand each other and were definitely talking a different language. For the purchaser we had a low impact on profit (low volume) and a low supplier’s risk. Therefore he placed our services in the routine quadrant. The only thing he wanted to talk about was the lowest price while we were negotiating a partnership because we were sure we were contributing to the future profit of his company.